Lesbians in Media Education by Sandra Lahire
This is written in a building called the Darwin building at the Royal College of Art, London.1 Darwin, whose revolution in science legitimated the socially created differences between men and women and gave them an apparent biological justification. Lesbians were excluded as “unnatural” or an impossibility (see the monument of Queen Victoria over the road). This is what many women artists in education have said to me: Women sit on the TV production line. Men take the fruits of this labour to use them against us. The tools of government, the means of evaluation in media education, the core disciplines to be learned, are dictated by the latest technological acquisition, by an establishment of design and media education that does not share its power. Let us take it. I kept it silent, even in a group of women working with performance and media, because I feared it was disruptive of some more important struggle, which was predesigned for me to carry out. Now I know that it is my body, my room, our daughters’ employment that is at stake, and my filmmaking with other dykes — that could be all other women. Our tongues and eyes meet in our words, in the tastes, smells, sinking and biting that we enjoy together. In its growth, our media work does not coerce people, it is how we make ourselves selfresponsible. Wherever I am and come from, my tongue is Lesbian. I do not feel I should have to support the debate of middle-class intellectuals with it. I and others I have
1
Sandra Lahire was a student in the Environmental Media department of the Royal College of Art. She makes reference to this at other points in the article. This was the only department in the college with a strong feminist presence and a tradition of students engaging with oppositional politics in their work. It was closed down by the new, Thatcherite Rector, Jocelyn Stevens. The last students left in 1986. [note added by the editor of Visibly Female, Hilary Robinson]
worked with have accepted my Lesbian identity. My Jewish identity is my work now in terms of “where is my homeland?” If you have enough money and privilege you can separate yourselves from heterosexist oppression. Let us not forget, though white middle-class feminism would like us to, that Lesbians are constantly threatened. “Passing” — staying invisible and presumed to be heterosexual — is a central issue in Lesbian culture. Often, the less privileged you are, the more necessary is passing for survival in a harsh urban environment. In the frightened mood of the 1980s, there is a kneejerk reaction to the economic recession that warns Blacks not to be too Black, Jews not to be Jewish, and the unemployed and Lesbians not to be too visible. The more we let ourselves be pushed out now, the less room we will have for manoeuvre and formulating our own imaginative tactics of resistance. The time to manoeuvre is now, with our work, whilst we still have a foothold. Unless we are affirmed, the feeling that we often get is that Lesbians must stop being selfish and giving joy to each other when the birth of a nation is at stake. But precisely by eschewing the family and marriage structures of white society, free Black women negotiated their own forms of autonomy. This contrasts with the framework of the USA and its satellites in which the family has been defined as a closed nuclear unit, the foundation of capitalism. Instead of being bound up behind veils and distortion, let us establish the forms that we need and begin to manipulate them for ourselves. As a teacher I see this works best in an atmosphere of warmth amongst women. You read flashes of body-language, some of self-dismissal and at the same time stubborn affirmation. And it is not necessarily that women would find out that they were Lesbian, but even to take that route and look at things from that angle is turning the world inside out. Turning negation back on it-
the films and words of Sandra Lahire
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