Teoria Feminismo Radical

Prévia do material em texto

Feminist Theory: Radical Lesbian 
(A Glorious Past and an Ecological Future)
Published, 2015: The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd Edition, Elsevier.
Emerging from mainstream liberal feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical feminists challenge the prevailing view that liberating women consists in reforming social institutions such as marriage, family, or the organization of work. They argued that insofar as a deeper analysis of marriage, family, and work shows the extent to which these institutions continue to privilege some men (white, middle-class, predominantly Christian, and educated) over other men and virtually all women, reform alone cannot achieve the equality liberal feminists envisioned. Radical feminists promote not reform but revolutionary change in the ways we conceive gender, sexual identity, and sexuality. The aim is to end the oppression of women by creating first awareness and then resistance not only to male-dominated or patriarchal institutions, but to the conceptual frameworks that sustain them. 
Radical lesbian feminism, then, represents three vital features of this revolutionary approach: first, the critical evaluation and rejection of compulsory heterosexuality, that is, of a sexuality defined solely in terms of male sexual access to women’s bodies. Second, radical lesbian feminists seek to reclaim women’s experiences, desires, bodies, and lives as meaningful in themselves; third, radical lesbian feminists seek either the subversion or the end of institutions which deny lesbian identity or insist on defining it in terms of male desire and privilege (such as female-on-female pornography). As perhaps the most forceful expression of the feminist slogan “the personal is political,” radical lesbian feminism seeks the emancipation of both women and other oppressed peoples (for example, indigenous peoples) through the realization of lesbian lives free from the constraints imposed by heteropatriarchy.
Perhaps what most obviously differentiates mainstream liberal feminism from its radicalized sister is that while the former continues to hope that the master’s tools can be deployed to dismantle and then rebuild a better version of the master’s house, the latter has largely quit this project and jettisoned its tools in favor of building not merely a house but an entire conceptual “civilization” whose collective mission it is to embody the experiences, values, and desires of women. That is, while the primary focus of mainstream liberal feminist theory has been the critical evaluation of patriarchal or male-dominated institutions such as government, medicine, family, and religion in the interest of retooling these institutions to affect greater equality or inclusion for women within them, radical feminism takes its point of departure to be the position that any thoroughgoing critique of patriarchy must include an analysis of the tools themselves.
How, in other words, do concepts like ‘woman,’ ‘man,’ ‘body,’ and ‘mind’ inform the maintenance of these institutions? How have we defined notions like ‘the rational,’ ‘the desirable,’ ‘the good,’ ‘the moral,’ and ‘the beautiful,’ such that being born male virtually guarantees greater access to opportunities, affirmation, and resources? What are the conceptual and ideological anatomies of patriarchies as we find them across culture and history? How do patriarchal ideologies help to maintain patriarchal institutions?
Perhaps, however, the central issue that gave birth to contemporary radical feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the emerging recognition that it could never be enough to agitate for an equality of inclusion within a conceptual framework that defines the value of women’s labor and even existence only in reference to men’s interests and desires. The liberal feminist project cannot fail to risk the self-defeat that accrues to retaining a conceptual framework—the master’s tools—that systematically inferiorizes women, and diminishes women’s work. The merely cosmetic improvement produced in some women’s lives (mostly Caucasian, middle-class, Christian, and educated like their male counterparts) fails to address the very real life and death issues—the having and rearing of children, for example—which confronts many women locally, nationally, and globally. Equipped with this insight, radical feminists undertook the conceptual, social, and political quest to comprehend how the subordination of women has become institutionalized, and how this varies with respect to class, ethnicity, culture, ability, age, sexual orientation, and institution. As late feminist philosopher Audra Lorde put it, the master’s tools cannot be used to dismantle the master’s house. The revolutionary change necessary to produce lasting improvement in all women’s lives requires women fashion their own tools—no easy task.
Some radical feminists argue that the notion “equality” is itself tethered to a view of human nature which so privileges attributes traditionally associated with men such as aggression, hierarchical forms of organization, rugged individualism, competition, and ethical systems that strongly favor impersonal rule-following over relationality, that women are only able to be included within such conceptual frameworks as honorary men. It is little wonder, they argue, that examples offered to young women by liberal feminists as role models and heroines are modeled after male heroes; the accomplishments of women like Harriet Tubman, or Marie Curie (or movie heroines like those found in Terminator II, Aliens, Femme Nikita, The Hunger Games, or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) are valued according to a standard that rewards domination over domesticity, conquest over caring, and militarism over mothering, in short masculinity over femininity. This is not to suggest that these are not examples of very real valor, but that what is rewarded in them goes further to reinforce a male-centered or masculinist vision of the good than it does to foster a vision centered around values identified as feminine such as cooperation, compromise, collective decision-making, or compassion. It is thus simply not enough, argue radical feminists, for women to settle for reformist programs that aim at equality alone. Given the conceptual constraints that determine value, such programs will either fail or, even if they succeed, will do so only at the cost of continuing to devalue qualities associated with femininity, and hence with women.
As radical feminists point out, liberal feminism does not necessarily represent the desires or interests of all women, whether we take these desires to be culturally constructed or endowed by nature. Here, however, we arrive at another important juncture in radical feminist theory, one commonly referred to as the essentialism versus anti-essentialism debate: if what conceptual analysis shows is that the ways in which we conceive of gender, sexual identity, and sexuality operate to privilege men, ought we to consider these a reflection of natural propensity, and then aim to elevate the value of feminine characteristics like nurturing, emotional responsiveness, and the tendency to focus on relationships over abstract autonomy? Or, alternatively, should we eschew traditional femininity as the construction of patriarchal culture, arguing that there are no essential qualities that importantly distinguish men from women? If so, at least two other possibilities present themselves: One meaning of androgyny favors the promotion of the masculine and the feminine in all of us, acknowledging that while gender may be constructed, such qualities may still be salvageable reinterpreted in a nonsexist context. Another meaning of androgyny, however, suggests that we ought to abandon notions of femininity and masculinity altogether as unworkable in favor some other notion of personhood. Here the question that arises concerns what “personhood” would look like, and whether it is possible to envision a “humanbeing” that can comprehend biological differences without merely reproducing an atomistic individual so divorced from the bodily that it becomes subject to the same criticism radical feminists level at liberal feminism. Can we, in other words, envision a concept of “embodied person” which, irreducible to the determinations of either biology or culture, is also rich enough to account for differences relevant to and affected by both?
Whatever the answers to these questions, the primary critique of radical feminism with respect to liberal feminism remains unaffected, namely, that what the history of patriarchy demonstrates is that the oppression of women is sanctioned through the denigration of whatever qualities are identified with femininity. Whether we seek liberation through the elevation or the abolition of femininity what remains clear is that reformist programs for inclusion can never by themselves be adequate. We have not, however, exhausted other possible avenues of critique, namely, that offered by Marxist/socialist feminists whose primary aim it is to show how, given the marriage of patriarchy to capitalism, it is illuminating to conceive of women not merely as a group but as a class whose oppression is maintained first and foremost through economic means. Combined with a radical feminist analysis of patriarchal concepts of motherhood and domestic labor, a Marxist/socialist account shows how divisions of labor are themselves sexed in at least two ways: first, because women’s labor qua procreation (the reproduction of human life itself) is assigned to the ‘natural’ and hence is not counted as labor at all, and second, because the domestic labor performed almost exclusively by women, (the reproduction of the conditions of life) has itself become naturalized in a capitalist economy that identifies all labor as paid or wage labor; that is, if it is not paid, it is not labor. Cast as the vehicle for the reproduction of both life and the means to life, “woman” becomes a paradox. ‘She’ is unexploitable in the sense that her labor is not counted as labor within a capitalist conceptual framework at all, yet ‘she’ also epitomizes the very prototype of exploitability in that ‘her’ labors are systematically and maximally undervalues which, in a capitalist economic system means un/undercompensated.
An essential point can thus be made without entering the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate: regardless what qualities we assign to nature or nurture, that women’s oppression is intimately linked to the relationship between her economic status and her status as provider of hearth, home, and progeny for men well supports the radical feminist claim that there exist no social institutions in which men do not have a controlling interest, including economy and family. What recommends this approach over liberal feminism, then, is the emphasis on the role of economic class. Whereas the best that liberal feminists can hope for is an equality of competition between men and women within capitalism, the radical Marxist/socialist feminists are free to imagine a world within which neither sex nor class oppression are operative—much less determinative—of social status. Radical feminist theory is thus utopian in a way that liberal feminism cannot be since, in its Marxist/sicialist guise, it demands not reform but revolution. 
While a radicalized Marxist/socialist feminism goes further than liberal feminism or than radical feminism alone to both evaluate capitalist patriarchy and offer an alternative, even it ultimately fails the project of genuine emancipation. For while such a critique of capitalism shows something important about the specifically sexed parameters of economic oppression, there remains considerable work to be done to show the relationship between economic and other forms of oppression such as sex, sexual orientation, race, age, ability, and so on.
Given the need for this work, many radical feminists distinguish themselves from both mainstream liberal feminism and Marxist/socialist feminism by taking a more skeptical, self-reflective approach to theorizing, arguing that it is at least an open question whether any patriarchal institution is salvageable in any form. There is little more revolutionary a declaration than that capitalism must be overthrown, but if this is not accompanied by the overthrow of other patriarchal institutions, the status of women could remain unchanged or worsened as men’s conditions improve. What revolutionary changes would institutions like the family need to undergo to achieve equality not only with respect to gender, but with respect to any number of other axes of oppression, including race, ability, economic class, indigenous culture status, age, sexual identity, and sexuality?
Some radical feminists such as the late Mary Daly argue that patriarchy must be overthrown or abandoned in favor of separatist or women-only cultures and societies. In her “radical elemental feminist manifesto,” Quintessence, Daly describes the fundamental ideology of patriarchal institutions as rapist, ‘characterized by invasion, violation, degradation, objectification, and destruction of women and nature; the fundamental paradigm of sexism, racism, classism, speciesism, and all other oppressive-isms (1998, p. 8). Not unlike the radical Marxist/socialist feminist’s view that the sexed division of labor lies at the root of economic exploitation, Daly argues that at the root of all forms of oppression lies that sexual domination—the male prerogative to rape—on the basis of which degradation and objectification, in short, enslavement, becomes the naturalized condition of virtually all nonmale, nonwhite, nonheterosexual, non-Western, nonhuman, nonaffluent, persons.
If Daly is correct, (a) all forms of oppression and exploitation take sex as their essential archetype. Hence, (b) feminism’s emancipatory objectives cannot be achieved without serious attention paid to the ways in which sexism informs the other ‘isms’ which sustain a patriarchy that (c) is oppressive as well as violent in all of its past and present forms, and in which its primarily male beneficiaries continue to have a stake. Finally, (d) to whatever extent sex oppression is archetypal of all oppression so too must heterosexuality become compulsory, that is, a characteristic of the heteropatriarchal way we define sex and hence sexuality such that other sexualities are either completely occluded or, when acknowledged at all, identified with the perverse and unnatural. 
Within compulsory heterosexuality, an action only counts as sex if (a) it involves a penis-penetrating-a-vagina, (b) it is compulsory in the sense that no other option counts as an acceptable choice, and (c) it negatively associates abstinence with frigidity, mental illness, or homosexuality. On this view, then, the domination of sex cannot be accomplished without the domination of sexual identity and sexuality. Given the combined compulsion of (a)–(c), moreover, it is little wonder that Daly characterizes heteropatriarchy as rapist urging the view that resistance to patriarchy must be accompanied by resistance to heterosexuality. Radical feminism thus becomes radical lesbian feminism as both the rejection of male sexual access and as the radical embrace of the value, lives, and bodies of women. Such is the meaning of dismantling the master’s house with new tools. That is, radical lesbian feminists (or radical feminist lesbians) argue for two distinct but intimately related claims: first that compulsory heterosexuality must be repudiated, and second, that lesbianism must itself be theorized as a positive, life-affirming, morally responsible choice, (itself a rejection of essentialism).
One potentially compelling objection to this view is that it is surely possible to embrace the political goals of lesbian feminism without jettisoning sexual relationships with sympathetic men. However, because even the best of men are still disproportionately empowered in heterosexualrelationships such intercourse cannot fail to remain compulsory, argues Daly (among others), and hence self-defeating. This is not to say that heterosexual sex either is or is not inherently harmful to women, but rather that because male sexual access can be identified as one of the primary sources of women’s oppression, cauterizing this source of harm is instrumental to ending heteropatriarchal power. Indeed, whether heterosexual sex is inherently harmful or not is largely beside the point given that from a radical lesbian feminist point of view it is hard to imagine conditions under which the potential for harm could be sufficiently ameliorated, and thus the risk of a heterosexual relationship worth taking. Nothing, moreover, requires us to theorize men’s “essential” natures as aggressive or women’s as passive; it is enough to simply recognize that history and culture are so saturated with the glorification of male sexual conquest and violence, that the prospects for change and the likelihood of that change being initiated by men is less than compelling. Not unlike Marx’s conception of the permanent revolution of the working class, radical lesbian sexual separatism constitutes much more than a political strategy; it constitutes part of the bedrock of a growing lesbian culture in the sense that what propels this revolution is a positive choice to live one’s life among women, not to live among women until men learn to behave better. Indeed, to opt merely for the latter is tantamount to abandoning in advance the worth of having chosen the former.
Feminists such as Sarah Hoagland argue that a constitutive feature of a coherent lesbian ethic includes the repudiation of all forms of domination and subordination. To the extent, then, that heterosexuality is entrenched in and defined by these values, it can find few comfortable bedfellows—literally or figuratively—among radical lesbian feminists. Is a nonoppressive, nondominating heterosexuality possible? In theory, no doubt it is. But, as feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye points out, the practical likelihood of this given the stakes men have and are likely to continue to have in heteropatriarchy seems illusive at best. Lesbians, she argues, are simply impossible within the heteropatriarchal conceptual framework; indeed, they are like ‘arm wrestling ducks.’ That is, no arms, no wrestling, no penis, no sex. Hence while gay men can be condemned for having perverse sex, lesbians cannot have sex at all, and without the possibility of sex, there can be no lesbians. 
As a clever male college student was once heard to put the point: ‘There can be no arm-wrestling ducks, but a good arm-wrestling fuck, now that’s sex.’ Frye goes on to argue that given the biological facts of reproduction as well as the social and political expectations attached to child-rearing, it is hardly a wonder that exercising control over the conditions under which pregnancy, birth, and lactation take place becomes imperative for men who are likely to experience the termination of privilege as the unjust withdrawal of something owed. As Frederick Engels had shown more than a century earlier, men’s investment in sexual domination is rooted first and foremost in men’s investment in the products of their own (hetero)sexuality, namely, the offspring who represent a paradigmatic form of property, a reflection of self-interest, and the potential for future inheritance. To deny men sexual access, then, is effectively to deny them the opportunity to control the conditions of women’s reproductive lives, and hence of women’s lives in general, particularly in nations or regions where access to contraceptives and abortion is heavily regulated or banned by heteropatriarchal laws, mores, and religion. Note that here too, an element of Marxist/socialist critique helps to forge the tools of radical feminist critique, especially, concepts like “property,” “product,” and “inheritance.”
The affirmation of women’s lives, bodies, values, and choices forms the second critical axis of any radical lesbian feminist theory. Yet, while this affirmation has often been theorized as necessitating some variety of separation from men—separatism—it unclear what exactly this might mean, for whom it is realistically practicable, and to what extent it requires physical and material independence from both men and patriarchal institutions. This much, however, seems clear: the choice to no longer engage with men sexually constitutes a minimal criterion of separatism whereas the choice to embrace a life composed primarily or even exclusively of “women-loving-women” goes much further—and is also far more difficult to realize in practice. There are several reasons why this is the case: first, because we live in a capitalist economy, regionally, nationally, and globally, wherewithal is economic wherewithal. Hence, the creation of any women-only space, permanently (a communal farm, for instance) or temporarily (such as women’s music festivals) is an economic undertaking which, in virtue of this, is always at risk of excluding some in favor of those who can afford the price of separatism. As some lesbian feminist women-of-color point out, separatism continues to be a luxury of whiteness to whatever extent economic affluence does. Second, because every institution, economic, social, cultural, medical, to which we have access is imbued with heteropatriarchal values, it remains somewhat obscure what separatism could mean short of wholesale abandonment. Third, short of the invention of parthenogenesis, a contribution of male-produced sperm is still a requisite of human reproduction.
Such a characterization of separatism may, however, be guilty of a straw fallacy: maybe it appears impracticable only because its parameters have been defined too narrowly or too simplistically. Whether this is so, however, depends precisely on what kind of conceptual work such a notion is supposed to be able to do, for whom, and for what duration. The range of other potentially separatist choices is very wide and includes at least the following: the formation of one’s primary affective relationships, sexual or otherwise, with women and girls only, choosing a woman-centered spirituality, adopting and rearing girls within a lesbian culture, creating woman-centered works of art, dance, music, poetry, comedy, film, philosophy, and literature, rejecting other male-centered practices such as nonhuman animal flesh consumption, hunting, or other hierarchical forms of organization, choosing political affiliations and activities that are consistent with a woman-centered life. The difficulty here, of course, is twofold: first, how ought what counts as woman-centered or lesbian (and do these mean the same thing?) be defined? How ought the reproduction of the same forms of oppression which so disable us within heteropatriarchy be avoided within lesbian culture? (Should preoperative transsexual men-to-women be allowed into women-only spaces? Can a woman-centered life include rearing sons? Should radical lesbian feminists form political alliances with gay men? If so, should we sign on to their political causes such as the promotion of legalized marriage for gays and lesbians?).
Second, if ‘separatist’ is itself subject to evolving cultural, ethnic, and historical interpretation, surely it is as dangerous to treat it ahistorically as it is to treat “woman,” “man,” and so on. What, then, does separatism require beyond the refusal of sexual access to men? Does anyone’s refusal matter more than others? Can lifelong lesbians who do not identify as feminists be separatists? Can women who have left long-standing heterosexual relationships and now identify as lesbian qualify as separatists in mid-life? How separate is separate? The point, of course, is that many questions attend the endeavor to create new tools, and much more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which oppressions related not only to sex, but to race, ability, age, gender expression, and class intersectwith compulsory heterosexuality. I’d also argue that, like the feminist movement more broadly, radical lesbian feminism needs to provide far more critical analyses to the ways in which women are identified with nonhuman animals, especially with respect to sexuality, and that radical lesbian feminists need to think more about the practical consequences of meat-eating, the use of plastics, and their own global footprints as human actors in a world of limited and inequitably accessible resources. There is much to worry and much to celebrate. Nonetheless, if the radical lesbian feminist critique of what has grown well-beyond capitalist heteropatriarchy, AKA, corporatist and globalist heteropatriarchy, is correct, this endeavor is more than just important; it is necessary to the emancipation of women.
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