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Feminist Heretics: Ti-Grace Atkinson | Political Lesbianism, Transcript

10 august 2020 Video Series Episode by Radical Feminist Philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith

Ti-Grace Atkinson says in a 1973 interview with Beatrice Reynolds, "I invented the whole concept of 'political lesbianism' which is now popular." If it was popular in 1973, it's certainly not popular now. In a recent interview for Feminist Current about her book In Defense of Separatism, Susan Hawthorne describes a way of life that is exactly political lesbianism. But when the host, Meghan Murphy asks her if what she's describing is political lesbianism, Hawthorne says no. Why? In her own words, "So, for me I find it a bit difficult to talk about, because the meaning has changed so much, and these days a political lesbian is looked down upon by purists, purist lesbians." So, much of the disagreement today comes down to the fact that there are two meanings on play.

There is lesbianism as a sexual orientation, which for many people comes with the feeling of being "born this way" and then there is lesbianism as a political position. The latter, lesbianism as a political position, doesn't mean pretending to be the former for political reasons. But those who oppose it generally assume that it does, and then they are understandably angry, because pretending to have a marginalized status you don't actually have for political reasons is an annoying thing to do. But that's not what the political lesbians of the second wave were doing, and as the inventor of the concept, Ti-Grace is a good person to turn to to figure out what they were doing.

The relevant essays are all in Amazon Odyssey, and the most relevant are: "Lesbianism and Feminism," which is a short essay presented as one of a series of talks at juniarda college in 1970; the second relevant essay is "Lesbianism and Feminism, Justice for Women as Unnatural," which was prepared as an invited op-ed for the new york times late in 1970, but then rejected; and then most importantly and most developed, the essay "Strategy and Tactics: A Presentation of Political Lesbianism," which was presented in 1971 at the dedication of the first lesbian centre in america, the daughters of bilitis.

So in the first of these essays, Ti-Grace starts by trying to figure out why men so often call feminists, lesbians. And she suggests that men view lesbianism as the ultimate political position [of feminists] because men see women as being for sex, for sex with them, and so if women should rebel from male society and choose to be with women, then they must be fucking each other. She writes, "...a 'woman' is something to be screwed. Therefore, women together – feminists – must be women who screw each other." (Atkinson [1970] 1974, p. 84) I mean, what else could they be doing, right?

Still, there's no reason for feminists to see things that way, the way that men see them. So as part of the further discussion about whether they should, Ti-Grace makes the point that oppressed groups in general face the problem of members engaging in self-hatred. So to feel like individuals rather than members of a despised group, they must turn to the oppressor. She writes, "...to turn to other women for ego support is like trying to catch a reflection of herself in a darkened mirror." (Atkinson [1970] 1974, p. 87) I think she means women have internalized men's view of themselves as inferior, so we cannot expect support and validation from each other. She notes that lesbians seem to have more self love than feminists, but says that this comes from adopting the role of the oppressor and this means that lesbians, in that one paradoxical sense become their own oppressors.

So the thought seems to be that to gain a measure of self-respect, lesbians identify out of the oppressed class to some degree and that means identifying into or with the oppressor class to some degree. But because they can't fully escape, and I'll talk more soon about how Ti-Grace thinks lesbians form a "buffer zone" at the front of the oppressed and between the two classes, there's a sense in which they're oppressing themselves, thinking badly of women, when they themselves are women. We might note the resonance of this criticism for transmen and transmasculine people today.

In the second essay, Ti-Grace says that lesbianism is about association. Women associating with each other. When members of an oppressed group associate together they can amass power and commit to common goals. She says it is this commitment by choice fulltime of one women to others of her class that is called lesbianism. And then she makes a distinction which shows absolutely clearly the difference between political lesbianism and lesbianism understood as a sexual orientation. She says there are women in the movement who have sex with other women but who are married to men. So because these women are not in associations with women only, they are not lesbians. And then there are women who have never had sex with other women, but who have and I quote "made and live a total commitment to this movement. These women are lesbians in the political sense." So the women married to men might have had a lesbian sexual orientation in the sense of being exclusively sexually and romantically attracted to women, and only married for convenience because of the times. And the women in committed association with other women might have had a heterosexual orientation that they simply refused to act on. They might not, they might have had a bisexual orientation, or they might have had a homosexual orientation, but they need not on this picture. So the distinction Ti-Grace is making between who someone sleeps with and who they are in exclusive political association with is what we would now think of as the distinction between sexual orientation and separatism. So separatism is women in association separate from men. But Ti-Grace called the latter lesbianism rather than separatism, or she called it being a lesbian in the political sense.

So a woman could be both, by sleeping with women and also being in exclusive association with women. But in the hierarchy of good things a feminist could be, according to the feminism advocated by Ti-Grace and others at the time, it was more important to be a political lesbian than it was to be a lesbian. As she would go on to say in the third essay, "I'm enormously less interested in whom you sleep with than I am in with whom you're prepared to die." (Atkinson [1970] 1974, p. 138)

In the third essay, Ti-Grace advances the idea that lesbians are a "buffer zone" between the oppressor and the oppressed. They are members of the oppressed, but they are criminals, which I think can be understood as non-conformists, people who live outside the law of the sex system, which puts them somewhat apart from the rest of the oppressed, and the front lines when it comes to the battle of the sexes. So this essay is literally a discussion of battle strategy. It contains ten strategy charts and twenty-two tactical strategy charts aimed at explaining how to make progress towards women's liberation. And she's very clear that it is men's behaviour, not men who are the enemy, and that women can perform some of these same behaviours against other women. So let me just sketch a couple of the most interesting suggestions that Ti-Grace makes throughout the presentation of the battle strategy.

She separated the sort of square diagrams separated in half with oppressor at the top and oppressed at the bottom, and then she further separates the oppressed into four categories: those who are anti the rebellion, the feminist rebellion; those who are neutral towards it; and those who are pro-rebellion or the rebels; and then there's the buffer zone between the oppressed and the oppressors, which for her was lesbians. And throughout the strategy and tactics charts, these groups enlarge and change, including absorbing actually parts of the oppressor category as the strategies and tactics advance. So one suggestion she makes is that the buffer is in a sort of "no man's land" which means there's a question about whether they're going to absorbed by the oppressor, or by the oppressed. If the oppressor absorbs them, then his ranks are strengthened. And this seems to imply that it is in the interests of the oppressed to stand by their non-conformists rather than cast them out. This is being applied at the time to lesbians in the sexual orientation sense, and it might be argued to apply now to female people who identify as trans, non binary, or otherwise gender non-conforming.

So her suggestion for how to do this at the time was for all feminists to wear "I am a lesbian" badges, like the – and I'm square bracketing a small modification to her text here – like the swedish newspaper cartoon which depicted the danish king inspiring his subjects to wear the sar of david so that the nazis' efforts to identify jews in the area would be frustrated. She also suggests that "the rebels" among the oppressed, which is to say the feminists, could work to repeal all the criminal laws against homosexuality, again as a strategy of bringing the buffer, the lesbians understood as a sexual orientation, into the rebel camp, unifying the buffer and the feminists.

And the last interesting suggestion I wanted to mention that she talked about is that we look for some within the oppressor class who are being denied rights. So we look for those who are being denied rights that coincide with those that are denied to the oppressed within the sex class system. And then the thought is that there might be similar solutions that could solve the problems of these people together, and these could be a grounds for coalition between the relevant part of the oppressor and the rebels of the oppressed. And if these two groups work well together the first time this might form the basis of a productive working relationship, and they might be able to consolidate down to a single issue over the time, for example, fighting for a basic income.