Certain cycles of thought around gender and sexuality seem to recur across history, and different themes sometimes recur in conjunction. Binhammer's study of early feminist thought of the 1790s -- the era of Wolstonecraft's A VIndication of the Rights of Women among other texts -- addressed the question of women's sexuality, and how it seemed to parallel some of the feminist "sex wars" of the later 20th century in fascinating ways. But the most fascinating conclusion (at least, as I synthesize it) is that the main thrust of these radical English proto-feminists boils down to "women can only achieve equality if we can erase gender from human interactions, but the gender we need to erase is 'female'." Much like attitudes toward masculine and feminine under the earlier "one sex" approach to gender, these 18th century feminists coded undesirable traits as feminine and desirable ones as masculine. Thus for a woman to be self-actualized and admirable, she must "become a man" in everything but her sexuality.
It would be easy to deride such views as unenlightened. To note that true gender equality comes from ceasing to assign essential gender to specific personality traits or behaviors. And yet, it's a trap that feminism has fallen into again and again. Another trap we se recurring across centuries of feminist movements is a capitulation to respectability politics. The 1790s feminists dove into the rising tide of bourgeois domestic respectability, either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that "domestic respectability" was the enemy of gender equality. (Nor did embracing domestic virtue as a beacon save them from being derided as sexually undesirable or sexually deviant, even as they joined the mobs attacking non-normative sexuality.)
How does this engage with lesbian history? For one, it's part of the creation of the myth of "sexless" romantic friendship. It points out that there are multiple "lesbian histories" at work in parallel, being assigned to different streams of society and shifting in how they are judged. When creating historic characters, one shouldn't assume that a woman who rejects feminine norms and restrictions will inherently embrace homoerotic desire. At the same time, the character who "isn't like other girls," who rejects traditional femininity as a sign of her rebellion against social norms, and who adopts performative masculinity as a path to personal achivement is very much a part of the fabric of history, even though she sometimes feels anti-feminist to a modern reader. (I'm suddenly getting a character sketch in my head of a wild-eyed radical 1790s feminist being chided by an older woman, "It sounds like you don't actually like women very much, my dear!")
Comments