I’ve been thinking a lot this week, for obvious reasons, about that genre of tweet you used to see a lot that went something like, People think all lesbians are terfs because non-lesbians could never begin to understand our unique relationship with gender etc etc etc. Though perhaps interesting, at least the first time round, this got stale pretty fast, and as I saw them more I came to the conclusion this was mostly just transmisogyny-exempt lesbians exempting themselves from thinking about it too much - which, in their defense, is about the same response of all transmisogyny-exempt people. I see these tweets less nowadays. I’m still unsure if this is because people are learning or because I’m curating my timeline better.
That this response was so heavily based in a transmisogynistic defensiveness around the position of lesbianism was a shame, because I have actually gained a lot from lesbian conversations about gender. Like many others, I also read Monique Wittig and found myself stunned by the potential against patriarchy she found through lesbianism. Womanhood is marked as a gender in its relationship with men via heterosexuality; lesbianism unmarks womanhood; this unmarking is an unmaking - and an unmaking of the world made by patriarchy.
But what is this unmaking? Is it mine, an identity? Is it possible to individualise the dialectic of sex? To transform the social relationship between gender, sexuality, and power in my own life alone? What does an attempt to think this way do?
I can’t remember if Wittig uses the formula “alienation from womanhood” or not, but it’s one I’ve seen used online a lot, and it’s one I can even relate to. Womanhood as we know it is not separable from patriarchal relations; I feel alienated from this. (This was Sandy Stone’s essential point in The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.)* Yet one gets the sense when you see it used online, that for most people, the “from” in “alienation from womanhood” indicates a movement in time, their present alienation in contrast with a womanhood that has been left behind. The utopian promise here is the dialectical abolition of gender, but it is a promise only held out to those who can narrate their lives ‘from’ within its constraints to begin with.
Which is to say, this individualisation of the dialectic is also a move to claim the dialectic as property; it is in this sense that Wittig describes the lesbian as a ‘runaway slave’ from womanhood. Much like feminist writers in other places, Wittig is tapping into circuits of theory made possible by the movements of the 1960s; the inspiration of anti-colonial struggles quickly becomes parasitic and resentful. Despite attempts at analogy, gender is not chattel slavery, and if the lesbian is ‘outside’ heterosexuality, they are not outside that which heterosexuality erotically manifests, a division of labour in which some lesbian/women are slaves, some are wage labourers, some are housewives, and some are profiting.
Once again, what is the unmaking of gender? Is it an identity that “I” can call “mine”? Or is it more a kin to the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. Although in the 90s writers like Kate Bornstein start to talk about ‘gender’ as a way towards an individualism beyond the narrow prescriptions of sex, in the same time period, feminists in Tanzania were adopting the term as a way to describe how patriarchy operates across the divides of race and class, a social relation, a movement of power.
I was a lesbian before I was a woman; but my identification as A Woman was informed, crucially, by my experience of paid work as a man. As a ‘man-at-work’, the alienation of my gender is something I sell for someone else’s profit. What are the means by which I can resist this alienation? Can I pretend that resistance can be named in an identity or a pronoun? For me, ‘nonbinary’ felt increasingly inadequate to these pressures; but despite my greater personal comfort, can I pretend ‘woman’ is much better?
The question is: why are these our only alternatives and what kind of struggle will move us beyond them?
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The phrase ‘real movement that abolishes the present state of things’ is from Marx’s The German Ideology. My use of ‘a kin’ in this sentence is written with half an ear to this interview with Petero Kalulé.
The final sentence is from Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework.