Lesbian, gay, and queer criticism
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Adrienne Rich makes use of this idea when she argues for the existence of what she calls a lesbian continuum. A lesbian continuum, Rich explains, “include[s] a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identi‑ fied experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman” (239). Woman-identified expe‑ rience includes, for example, emotional bonding through shared work or play, the giving or receiving of psychological support, and the shared experience of joy in any form. Woman-identification does not preclude sexual desire or sexual activity, but neither does it require them. A woman can thus move in and out of the lesbian continuum throughout her life or remain within it entirely. From this perspective, women’s romantic friendships during the nineteenth century, whether or not they involved sexual activity or desire, are indeed an appropriate subject for lesbian analysis. Of course, to underplay the sexual dimension of lesbian experience is to under‑ play, some theorists argue, that which is most unique and liberating in lesbian life. In bonding with one another sexually and denying men access to their bodies, lesbians deny patriarchy one of its most powerful tools: heterosexuality. For heterosexuality is not a “natural” sexual orientation for “normal” women but a political institution that subordinates women to patriarchy in that women’s subservience to men is built into heterosexual definitions of feminine sexual‑ ity. In other words, from this point of view, patriarchy and heterosexuality are inseparable. To resist the former, one must resist the latter. For this reason, some lesbians are separatists. They disassociate themselves as much as possible from all men, including gay men, and from heterosexual women as well. They may also disassociate themselves from lesbians who don’t share their views. Recalling the sexism of the male-dominated Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s and, as we noted above, the heterosexist tendencies of feminism, lesbian separatists believe that only lesbian organizations will give priority to lesbian issues. For separatists, just as for the majority of lesbian femi‑ nists who are not separatists, lesbianism is a political stance, not merely an issue of personal sexuality. Nevertheless, as Marilyn Frye argues, while separatism is a deliberate, system‑ atic political policy, it is not the only form in which women’s separation from patriarchal domination occurs. In fact, separation is enacted to varying degrees across a range of institutional practices that increase women’s power, including, for example, the provision of shelters for battered women, divorce, the increased availability of day care, women’s studies programs, women’s bars, and the legal‑ ization of abortion. Even such apparently personal behaviors as breaking up a close relationship, excluding someone from one’s house or one’s company, withholding one’s support, withdrawing one’s loyalty, refusing to watch sexist
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