Is ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ a lesbian plot?

Despite Virginia Woolf's lesbian vision of love and friendship between Chloe and Olivia in A Room of One's Own, the literary and critical text often serves to shut lesbians into a closet of prose. Among the debilitating myths used by writers are the ‘Phaon myth’ (that authentic lesbian experience must be terminated by an inauthentic heterosexual rescue), the vampire myth, and the myth of masculinity. The latter in particular has served to divide heterosexual women from their lesbian sisters, so that much feminist literary criticism displays a pervasive heterosexual bias by ignoring or distorting lesbian texts and subtexts. This paper suggests ways in which the word and concept ‘lesbian’ is being reclaimed by lesbian writers and critics. It calls for all women to destroy patriarchal myths about lesbians; reread literary texts for their lesbian subtexts; recover the works of lesbians, particularly lesbians of color; and, finally, proclaim the word ‘lesbian’ forcefully despite the threats posed by a misogynistic academy and society.     

From heterosexual feminist to political lesbian: The painful transition

This paper is about the inseparability of the personal from the political from feminist research. It's personal because it comes from my own experience and it's political because it concerns the exercise of power. It is also a piece of research because I would argue that the social production of contradictions involved in living as a feminist is no less available as research when these contradictions come from our own personal experience. In other words my personal relationship with a man is, for me, just as valid a piece of research as going out into the ‘field’ armed with a tape recorder and interview schedule might be—indeed, were we as feminist social scientists to concentrate our energies more on the personal, we might go some way towards bridging the gap between feminist theory and feminist practice.     

Beyond hagiography: new books on gay and lesbian life writing

Abstract

The records of women's rights organisations active in Birmingham during the 1870s and 1880s indicate that these societies were dominated by women and men from families connected with the city's leading Unitarian chapel, the Church of the Messiah. In this article, I explore this phenomenon as a way of illuminating the relationship between religious belief and feminist activism. The shared social, economic and political values and progressive outlook of the Unitarian elite underpinned their emergence as a feminist network. This collective reformist consciousness was channelled into concern to improve the position of women by the ‘feminist gospel’ preached by Henry Crosskey, the minister of the chapel from 1869 to 1893. Furthermore, Crosskey's influential role, along with the substantial presence of other Unitarian men in local women's rights associations, reveals how denominational affiliation could operate to stimulate male support for feminism.     

Compulsory heterosexuality and psych/atrophy: Some thoughts on lesbian feminist theory

The patriarchal features of psychiatric practice have received scant attention by feminists today. This paper presents a critique of psychiatry and places this critique within lesbian feminist theory. Drawing on Mary Daly's ideas as elaborated in her ‘ovular’ work Gyn/Ecology (1979), the methodology I use is an unearthing of feminist meanings and an exposition of feminist practices which are necessary to understand the role of Psych/Atrophy vis à vis lesbianism today. I argue that for lesbians, as for all women, self-healing is a feminist process which exists in opposition to psychiatry's functioning as the primary male, social injunction to heal souls. With a view to challenging this psychiatric conception of healing souls, we are able to create five specific strategies which direct Lesbian energy to a more creative view of ourselves as women. Discarding the sexual label (1); resisting ‘reversal’ (2); erasing the Victim Role (3); working towards social change and not individual solutions (4) and delivering themselves through the ‘Amazonian Asylum’ (5), lesbians will help to work for lesbian liberation. These strategies will help them/us not only to create new images of themselves/ourselves as women, but also to challenge the heterosexist structure of society upon which psychiatric practice is based.