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-

self. Adrienne Rich argues2 that when we stop lying about our love (sexual or not) for other women, when we stop mutilating ourselves simply to survive our subjection, we can begin to resist our mutilation by values and laws based primarily on male needs. She posits our resistance as a Lesbian continuum or network for action, which women might move in and out of all the time. This must not be cut. As there have not been many Lesbian filmmakers, we study our lives to show the following generations. “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”3 There is no aspect of the dominant culture that does not contribute to the enforcement of heterosexuality in some way, whether it is the withholding of technical knowledge, the burning of documents and archives, the burning of witches (“witches” meaning quite literally those who have wits, who know).

Who was that haggard twin of hers staring through the screen? The night was chilly. She summoned her in, and helped her unfreeze. They resembled each other.

Being a Lesbian is not in itself political. However, the conditions in which we live as women are available to political change because they can be seen to be socially caused and not naturally destined. This is about actively politicising areas of our lives that are assumed to be unchangeable.

Sex between women opens more channels of communication and strengthens the network through which every issue is being fought. One may ask, are our identities really so bound up with sexual choice? The human essence is the assembly of social relations, and sexuality is social relations.

If our work were ambiguous, it would pull us back to a false, not Lesbian, continuum. When our work is forthright we illumine for each other territories that we can no longer allow to be obscured.

Lesbians should strive to minimise the chances that radical content will be perceived in terms of style alone, “Lesbianism”.

Operating on the premise that the culture of resistance uses all the media at its disposal, Lesbian culture  —  if not censored, stifled, or invisible  —  is “tolerated” or imitated in a colonising way for commercial or high art purposes. As a former anorexic, I am sensitive to all forms of subtle manipulation of women.

2 Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honour: Some Notes on

Lying”, 1977. 3 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian

Existence”, 1980.

Our fight grows out of our women’s circle of discourse. This must spread wide to make interference in the millennia of talking men. We are not abstractions in male psychoanalytical debate. Laughing, working, touching, we are putting our own psychic health first. I am hoping that our voices may derange those who support the leadership of this police-state.

What a relief to feel solid against that alienating stare of ownership to which women may be subjected at any time of day or night.

Far from being a riddle to ourselves (as we seem to be held out to men) we are restrained by double bindings in a male language that is as cramping as Grace Poole’s attic. Catatonia would be the end result, the gesture of a lunatic having to separate herself from her language and eventually killing herself off: “Words dry and riderless/The indefatigable hoof-taps.”4

What was the price of subjection to the Law of the Father? A violent denial of my mother’s body and bonds of feeling by which we clarified each other’s images. A mother is a woman, not the easy target for our repressed anger; and, childless, I am a woman.

Is “mother” or “language” primary? Or “phallus as signifier”? The female body is complete, not a negative to the phallus. Ultimately the Lacanian debate is redundant to the Lesbian, both because it is class-based and because the influence of the mother is as primary as a hieroglyph. Now we are thinking of two women imaging together, lips speaking together, maybe in conflict but so making a discourse in and of and for itself, not embedded in one certain psychoanalytic schema of construction of femininity, e.g. mother/daughter roles.

Because it forced itself upon me I told the absence-of-signifier theory of women to get knotted. It was.

Even now there is little material support for Lesbian couples apart from within the Lesbian community. Any public display of a relationship problem is seen as having to do with its being Lesbian. No one ever thinks that the ownership politics of heterosexual culture may have eaten holes in the Lesbian relationship. Or maybe the trouble is one-to-one relationships. Or that women ever have relationships together whilst at art school. Women students consolidating each other’s meaning are an asset that had better be liquidated, in the interests of the management and a culture that would rather fragment the body, and make lucrative fetishes out of those fragments.

4 Sylvia Plath, “Words”, 1963.

One aspect of our practice has tried to operate on the very terrain of stereotype itself, trying to undermine and change the readings of certain stereotypes, by showing up the contradictions between them and the doublethink that is necessary to believe in them. Those who control stereotypes are never exposing themselves. This is also true for straight “experimental” practice.

For women filming women, what we need now is to restore the integrity of the whole body, which is what Chantal Akerman and Helke Sander have chosen to do.5 “Narcissism” was adopted by Freud in his libido theory to describe a condition in which the ego turns its energy back on itself. And without the shared experience of being female, some spectators are unable to see the revelations of Lesbian work as anything but narcissistic, in a sense of being trapped in herself, or indulging her ego. How can women committed to producing socially engaged work confront this narrow view of narcissism encouraged by the art world and promoted by the video apparatus? Turning the camera to the world, yes, and if it is oppressive, turning the monitor to the wall, or manipulating the Barbie-doll imagery sold to us. In the case of the woman dealing with autobiographical material and self-perception, turning the camera on herself is necessary, not because she is reinforcing the male fetishising of parts of her body. She opposes externally imposed images of her sexuality by building up a dialogue with aspects of herself, with doubles or twins or alter-egos, as Sylvia Plath does by her writing of The Bell Jar. The mirror is a common-sense method of crystallising a twin through inward dialogue. Far from mimicking the isolated self-obsession of the male narcissist, a woman working with herself and devoting her love to herself in another woman, instead of gaining access to power via men, is working with the self-reflection essential for self-determination and political change. Men who feel “left out” of this woman’s work blame the Lesbian element, this completely autonomous self through which women address social issues such as work and nukes and pit closures.

Returning yet again to the Lesbian Body, I remember Focii by Jeanette Iljon6 centring on a relationship of self to self and self to other. And some work by Chantal Akerman in which she uses a fixed camera that disrupts the Hitchcockian pleasure in looking associated with traditional or “experimental” techniques such as close-ups, quick cuts, zooming, panning, tracking (see ads, promos and male “experimental” film discourse). For every reason hinted at so far, I find Stephen Dwoskin’s, and much of Godard’s work, offensive when it plays around with pictures of women ostensibly alone, yet who are penetrated by the male camera with as much inherent violence as the Psycho shower scene.

Women filming women and our own sexuality

Through this very negation I feel this work pressing on me to make a positive imprint. Such work could relate the emotional freedom of women to the freedom of society itself. This is a great pleasure to any woman viewer, and it makes a change and revolution in the material world irresistible.

I thought that it was a lethargy that dulled me, a repressive force; but I’ve begun to understand it as an energy that strikes icy-bright. I’m paralysed, caught for a while in its bright focus. My response seems so ingrained, its line marked out over so many political scenarios. Paralysed, I become flustered. It must be obvious to all who look. Tattooed at mouth and eyes. I’m not sure what happens next. No matter. Too long I’ve gone back over those old tracks. Where? The thing is to get off, pushing into that light. This feeling, all such feelings, are not transgressions.

No more time for that limited “romance” which feeds off being forbidden. My positive Lesbian feelings have come out simultaneously with my work. You learn about yourself as you make the work with the materials around you in installations and film and performance, and that learning process becomes part of the meaning of the work.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticised sensation. For this reason we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.7

We are making images for our sexuality, and there are more responses like touch and hands holding.

Not as public spectacles like hanging, violence, murder, Not making a public spectacle of ourself, But the visibility and touch of our works to each other, So that we crystallize each other’s thoughts.

5 See Jump Cut no. 22 for Helke Sander. 6 Distributed by Circles. [now Cinenova] 7 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, 1979.

She needs warm compresses for her eyes if nowhere else, due to the dearth of Lesbian films and the need to do a salvage job on Supergirl. Shut-away Lesbians, without the particulars of wider social encounters, become abstractions in any current debate on sexuality in media work.

Our media work is not just about positive images of Lesbians, but an impact suggesting a positive guide to action. Being that obtuse and cussed we are already not such a welcome choice for design-orientated education, and perhaps being thrown out on the streets from our brief intervention at the Royal College of Art is the beginning of becoming visible and fighters. We are already listening to each other and weaving a picture-poem patchwork of protest.

Within Environmental Media which moves out from the walls, I am taking space for a Lesbian voice. Where to for all the undergraduate women I chatted to for this issue? Lesbians are not an exclusive club or ghetto but all women’s desire for each other’s full expression of our bodies and language. We oppose the predefined category of woman in male theory and its derivatives, in which woman is a lack, of power, of penis, and who bears a very heavy negative relation to the jolly pageant of male art and design history. Through my very negation in a system of feudal chivalry, that does not use our discourse of body and loving/being in love, I use strong  —  sometimes angry  —  images to tell the stories of our lives. It is essential that we be a mirror to each other. Hearing, feeling. Many images of feeling boxed in, and bound. Together exploring each other’s solitary confines, and together weaving a very large space.

Rooms within rooms, with doors opening in different directions. Men have always wanted to identify a hierarchy and an “ism”, and women at the peace camps and in Women Challenge Film and TV Education have none. Drawing breath from each other, we say the same thing in different ways. At any one point along the timescale, there is always a woman who is guiding herself past her male assessors as if by a thread.

I was alone and I wanted to express my Lesbian feelings in the Darwin Building so intensely that I even resented the ingrained and casual male-female habits of chivalry... and the “blondes” and “redheads” lights. It was a chasm inside of me. Now that chasm is space out of which I spin my images. The darkness of this well inside contains all colours. I never want to hear you say that blackness is the colour of despair and negativity.

The position of Black Lesbians, when working with/for white people is fundamentally different from that of white Lesbians. I am a white woman, I think that any feminist work at the Royal College of Art is bound to be limited when there are not many Black women and women of colour.

I remember very clearly when I was nine and she was twelve, and we kissed and caressed each other and played tricks on the boys and grownups.

Lesbians aren’t oppressed by the Law...?

Anti-Lesbian practice ranges from a verbal omission to actual physical violence. In media education Lesbian images represent the ultimate threat to the patriarchal order: independence from their whole art-historical debate based on ownership of the female body and exploitation of her work.

At work particularly, teachers are permanently forced to conceal our Lesbian identity. This means living in constant strain, whilst still being subject to anti-Lesbian attitudes and behaviour from colleagues, employers, male technicians (which is most technicians), and critics parasitical to the art establishment.

Here is one Staff Group’s proposals for inclusion in a school statement on sexism, adapted to higher and art education:

Lesbian students must see their sexuality positively reflected in the society of the school, and all students must be actively encouraged to see that their sexuality can be a matter of positive choice. This can best be achieved by Lesbian and gay teachers being visible within the school. This means that teachers who are Lesbian or gay should not be pressurised into hiding this fact from students or into allowing students to make a wrong assumption about their sexuality. Their decision to come out must be actively supported by all members of staff right to the rector.

In no way should being Lesbian be made to feel like a sinister activity (“sinister” in the McCarthy sense, not in the sense of subversive and transforming). The homophobia that faces young Lesbians in colleges does not exist in a vacuum. It is all part of a learned response and attitude that everyone in our society assimilates through subtle means in the dominant media.

Lesbian teachers, whether they are out or closeted, are helpful as role models, implicit support etc.8

8 Woman, 17.

The Gay Teachers Group put forward the following motion at the 1984 NUT National Conference:

This conference rejects all discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and instructs the Executive to support vigorously all teachers discriminated against on these grounds… Conference also instructs the Executive to promote constructive and positive attitudes to homosexuality in school curricula. Furthermore… to press the TUC to include sexual orientation in its model Equal Opportunities Clause.

So far, none of the teaching unions has a policy on the rights of Lesbian teachers and students. Some teachers and some LEA’s  —  notably the ILEA (if it remains intact)  —  are tackling this issue. Get a clear statement of support from a local branch.9

Nothing contributes to anti-Lesbian attitudes and Lesbian self-loathing and neglect of her sexuality so much as a feeling of insecurity with regard to the world of work, the law, and union activity. Yes, a Lesbian working to encourage women’s strength in an art college has, even now, been nicknamed “he” (strange that this appears unusual, as the generic term “he” usually embraces “she”). Often we feel like staying at home, or are frightened when returning late from our shows and meetings, because we are not accompanied by the chivalry of a man. At the same time, men seem afraid of the strong woman and her autonomous sexuality.

Lesbian mothers must tailor work around bringing up children, who are not an abstraction during “working hours”. Men have been conducting a debate in colleges into which we may step when we are not at home. This is the social condition which work made by women must oppose, or this work will tend to be seen either as “evidence” of some essential (essentially inferior) femininity, or else as some special kind of “achievement” like that of circus animals.

Being Lesbian is not a soft option. Surprisingly, we also have housework to do, bills to pay, children to get to school, ill people to care for. Anti-Lesbianism occurs every time our childrearing is scrutinised in an unsupportive way and every time it is assumed that what we ought to want is to raise “normal” children... the argument for denying Lesbians custody of our children. Mothers do not have to be mothers only. Our access to jobs ought not to be limited by access to childcare and by male-engendered expectations of what a “good” mother is.

My hope is that every woman teacher and student choosing to remain with a man will require of him that he treat her as a person who has the very needs Lesbians have been asserting. This is the only way we can gain our full heretical strength.

Pulling out the magical cliché of male thought  —  “it’s not men who oppress women, it’s the capitalist system”  —  is a long-standing cop-out and denial of men’s responsibility. Of course it is the system of capitalism which oppresses us. But this “system” is a collection of people’s actions and attitudes.

There is a subversive perception of the order of things developing. Men always want to identify and recuperate a hierarchy and “ism”, but we are all spokeswomen. Conversely, we are free to see men as people who can change rather than as fixed tormentors, providers, lovers and, worst of all, judges of our validity. To fear a knowledge of our own Lesbian love is to fear a knowledge of our work in performance art and media.

Sexuality between women opens more channels of communication and strengthens the network through which we will bring about material changes. Our Lesbian continuum:

Paradigms, folding mirrors, multiple and serial loves, coming and going through out rooms within rooms

… an ongoing collation, not a preset line of argument. The only line is a Lesbian Line.

This is the version of the text included in the volume Visibly Female: Feminism and Art (1987) edited by Hilary Robinson. An edited version had previously appeared in Undercut, Summer 1985.

9 NUT: National Union of Teachers; TUC: Trade Union

Congress; LEA: Local Education Authority; ILEA: Inner

London Education Authority.