By aurora linnea
According to The New York Times, “a cavalcade of lesbian and Sapphically inclined stars…dominated pop culture this year.” Apparently, a “celebration of lesbianism and Sapphic queerness” was “flourishing” in 2024. I do not claim to understand exactly how the Times differentiates “lesbian” from “Sapphic,” and I will not feign familiarity with the majority of the celebrities named as constituting the alleged cavalcade. Having elected to live beneath a rock, I am generally well insulated from pop cultural incursions. Yet even I was unable to remain oblivious to the rise of Chappell Roan. Roan is the United States’ latest pet LGBTQ+ ambassador, and although she would seem to address herself primarily to the perennially nebulous “queer” audience, and despite referring to herself as a drag queen, the singer has publicly announced herself a lesbian – not gay, not queer – so I will throw her that bone. For extra points, her hit single “Good Luck, Babe” is a surprisingly poignant reflection on young lesbians’ self-denying retreat into compulsory heterosexuality. Roan sings, “When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night / with your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife.” The word “wife” here is loaded with all the nasty connotations owed to it, signalling women’s reduction to secondary servile status within the heterosexual dyad. Bound to a husband, the woman is His Wife, nothing more. The contempt that Roan voices for resignation to capture within heterosexuality’s traps marks a definite improvement over the puerile “I Kissed a Girl” pandering that passed for sapphic during the era of my own adolescence.
Not that such offerings are entirely off the table. The past year also served up Billie Eilish’s “Lunch,” released to accompany the singer’s revelation that she “wanted [her] face in a vagina,” as she told Rolling Stone in April. (I’m assuming she means vulva, or, for any sexual partners’ sakes, I’ll hope so. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but female anatomy is very much relevant to Eilish’s newfound calling.) As a second contribution by Rolling Stone’s to 2024’s flourishing lesbian celebration, the actress Kristen Stewart appeared on the magazine’s March issue outfitted in a black leather vest and a jock strap. By all accounts, this is the gayest thing ever. The New York Times informs us that it is a bold statement of lesbian pride, though sartorially insinuating that one is packing – or aspires to pack – a penis does not scream “proud lesbian” to me. Instead, it looks suspiciously like a concession to the phallocentric (hetero)sexual imaginary, wherein penile penetration is assumed as the natural imperative of an attraction to women.
In any case, it is difficult to deny that 2024 was a boom year for lesbian visibility. I’ve been relieved to see the word “lesbian” itself begin to creep cautiously back into circulation after several years on the unspeakable list, its unfair sex exclusivity resulting in its replacement by the more palatably abstract, inclusive, male-friendly “queer.” Never one for undue optimism, however, I cannot help but wonder if these new Sapphic Stars are merely the latest crop of spokesmodels in the patriarchal co-optation and depoliticization of women’s sexuality.
As Susan Hawthorne argues across the decades-spanning 25 essays and poems collected in her new book Lesbian: Politics, Culture, Existence, out from Spinifex in September, the question of lesbian visibility is not merely, are we seeing lesbians or aren’t we? Making lesbianism disappear need not be so blunt as omitting lesbians from culture outright, although this technique has been popular historically. It is true that lesbians have been written out of history; lesbian writers and artists and geniuses of all stripes either go unacknowledged, or they are afforded recognition at the expense of their lesbianism being carefully expunged from the record.
But lesbians can be just as effectively erased by a curated visibility that spotlights the pornified version of lesbianism favored by male voyeurs, with its leading ladies loudly insistent upon their yen for heterosexist sexual aesthetics and practices. Hence the relatively high visibility of leatherclad lesbian BDSM enthusiasts, women whom Hawthorne terms “lesbian antifeminists.” It is obvious that this variant of lesbianism is shaped by, and caters to, the male-supremacist status quo, and therefore offers no authentically woman-centered, liberatory alternative to heterosexual relations.
Hawthorne argues that lesbians are also disappeared by neutralizing NGO-style terminology. “Same-sex attracted” has lately emerged as the decorous euphemism of choice for “lesbian,” but as Hawthorne laments, the label has no verve to it; it is bland, sterile—and homogenizing, for how it nullifies the power of lesbianism as love between women by lumping women into the same boat with men. But to be a lesbian woman is not analogous with being a gay man. Though there is some overlap, with regards to discrimination and religious condemnation, for example, the politics of the two conditions diverge substantially, in ways conveniently glossed over by generalizing verbiage.
Recent decades have also seen lesbianism subject to novel forms of erasure under the reign of queerness. Like “same-sex attracted,” the blanket term “queer” obscures the specificity of lesbianism, once again drawing women into a compromising and spurious solidarity with men. “Queer” is a male-identified descriptor, and “queers” a male-defined, male-dominated group, within which women are relegated – as women always are – to the role of cheerleaders and cheeky decor. Lesbians earn visibility and approval through their loyalty to queer men, whether these men be gay, genderqueer, or trans-identified. And, as many radical feminists have protested, transgenderism itself flagrantly erases lesbianism. It converts lesbian girls and women into ersatz straight males, in effect converting these women’s lesbian relationships into ersatz heterosexual ones. Transgenderism also frames women’s exclusive sexual and romantic interest in other women as a cruelty to those men who declare themselves women and feel entitled to a swim through the lesbian dating pool. As a result, lesbians who do not bend to service male egos and appetites are pathologized as “genital fetishists,” apparently the lone kink that queers consider it appropriate to shame. Yet a queer redefinition of lesbianism, now expanded to incorporate coerced sex with men, is no longer lesbianism at all, and holds none of the liberatory potentials integral to lesbianism as classically (i.e., correctly) understood.
And indeed it is precisely these potentials that spur the various initiatives to minimize, obscure, pornify, co-opt, commodify, contain and suppress lesbianism. It is these potentials that make the male master class anxious. Because, as Hawthorne explains, for women to prioritize relationships with other women, for women to make women central in their lives and their hearts, threatens to undermine the structures of male dominance. Throughout Lesbian, Hawthorne regularly returns to the French theorist and novelist Monique Wittig’s assertion that “lesbians are not women,” since to be a woman is to be defined by “a specific social relation to man, a relation that we have previously called servitude…a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual.” Male dominion is built on women’s enforced dependency on men, by means of which our psychic and sexual subordination is extorted. Men want women centering men, orienting ourselves towards men, identifying with men, thirsting after men’s attention and approval, all so that women will serve men—and no woman is supposed to escape. As an escape hatch from the patriarchal microcosm of the conventional heterosexual bond, lesbianism is political by default, a hazard to men’s power over women. “When lesbians exist openly,” Hawthorne observes, “it is a challenge to the lie that women can have no autonomous existence apart from men.” Intrinsic to lesbianism is the astonishing revelation that women do not need men. Not for our material survival, not to be loved. The visible lesbian is a “model of freedom,” as Hawthorne writes, whose very being symbolizes a life for women outside of “the parameters of power that form the heterosexual view of the world, a view that not only endorses women’s marginal status but ensures its continuance.”
Naturally, this tends to make men a bit nervous. Lesbianism puts male dominion on the defensive. In one sense this is helpful, since to see how acutely men fear lesbians is to have it confirmed that we’re on to something here. If men were unfazed, we’d know from their nonchalance that lesbianism is irrelevant to the liberation of women, just as we can deduce from manmade culture’s acceptance of prostitution, pornography, gender identity, and “kink” that none of these are ever going to liberate women. At the same time, unfortunately, men’s dread of lesbianism puts lesbians in danger. It is axiomatic of patriarchal society that men give vent to their terrors as violence: violence to overpower, violence as mastery’s proof, violence to neutralize the threat. Among the harshest expressions of men’s fear in this case is the torture of lesbians. Lesbianism is a crime against patriarchy, whether or not it is officially illegal – which it is, in many countries, in Nigeria and Indonesia, Iran and Senegal – and women are punished severely for their defiance.
Susan Hawthorne is the only writer I have encountered who highlights the torture of lesbians as a feminist and human rights issue. She writes of lesbians imprisoned and raped in Uganda and Romania, of Russian lesbians forcibly institutionalized in psychiatric facilities; she writes of lesbians who have become refugees fleeing persecution by their families and the state. So-called “corrective rape” is, unsurprisingly, a primary method in the torture of lesbians, intended to brutalize them back into compliance with heterosexuality’s mandate of female submission to male dominance. What is surprising is how explicit the torturers are in articulating the purpose of their violence. “Every day I am told…that they are going to rape me, and after they rape me, I’ll become a girl,” reports one young South African lesbian. Another describes how her rapist told her, “I’m going to show you, you are a woman.” Through rape, these men enforce their victim’s “womanhood,” in Monique Wittig’s sense of the word. They are patriarchy’s foot soldiers, defending male rule against the contagion of lesbian insubordination.
Horrifically clear though these cases of violence against lesbians may be, campaigns focused on lesbian human rights are, to use Hawthorne’s phrase, “as rare as hen’s teeth.” Never mind the generic human rights NGOs or alphabet-soup LGBTQ+ groups, feminists and even lesbians themselves rarely mobilize around the issue. When the torture of lesbians is brought to light, as in the Amnesty International reports Hawthorne cites in her work, it is in the context of condemnations of “anti-LGBTQ+” violence. The political specificity of a male-dominated society’s persecution of lesbians goes unremarked. As usual, lesbian women merit attention only if pooled together with gay men; the harms done to them only demand a response if they can be labeled “anti-gay.” Because violence and oppression only become real and significant and insupportable when men are the victims, if women want any hope of relief, they’d better assimilate into some male-identified group. And as usual, the underlying motivations for men’s violence against lesbians, its instrumentalization in the maintenance of patriarchy, are rendered invisible—and lesbianism’s liberatory potential right along with them.
Like the men who torture lesbians in the name of male dominion, lesbian feminists recognize the threat that lesbianism poses to men’s power over women. Indeed, in lesbian feminism, that threat is the crux. Female independence from men, women’s refusal of conditioned collusion in our oppression through the daily reenactment of hetersexuality’s thousand ritualized submissions, women’s freedom from relationships that bind us, drained and demeaned, to our oppressors: these are the ambitions of lesbian feminism.
While “Free to Be You and Me” liberalism likes to posit homosexuality as a biological quirk, some relatively rare coincidence of birth, lesbian feminism politicizes women’s loving devotion to other women as a form of resistance. Political lesbianism is not “fake” lesbianism, as espousers of the biologizing view are keen to object in their eagerness to elevate their own Born This Way identity. Political lesbianism is a practice of feminist decolonization at the deepest, most intimate level. As Hawthorne writes, “Deciding on a life defined by a political decision – that of committing oneself to living out a passion for women – is a momentous decision.” Yes, women can choose to be lesbians. Yes, loving women can be a political act. Lesbian is political, and it should be, the more brazenly the better. If this bothers you, I’m afraid you might just be missing the point.
Because if one thing is clear from this year’s alleged lesbian celebration, it is that, without a feminist analysis and a political foundation, lesbianism can and will, in the context of a neoliberal culture, be co-opted and leached of its liberatory potential. Diluted to suit men’s tastes, it is re-introduced to the pop-cultural marketplace as a harmless interlude of girl-on-girl action for the delectation of master-class voyeurs. This defanging depoliticization of lesbianism is why we find ourselves with a lesbian culture characterized by Joan of Arc burlesque, actresses posed in jock straps on magazine covers, BDSM, strap-on fellatio porn, cosmetic mastectomies, and vague but sexy “Sapphic inclinations.” It is a lesbian culture that panders to men both gay and straight. A lesbian culture that sells itself out with a wink and a smirk while selling women down the river.
By contrast, lesbian feminism draws on the potentials of women loving women to develop new paradigms for female existence, new ways of living and relating, released from the stultifying pressure of patriarchal power dynamics. Hawthorne alludes often to lesbian feminism’s capacity to generate new possibilities for women and society. She describes feminist circus’s purpose as creating “the art of the possible”; of lesbian literature, she writes that it “invent[s] new mythologies for an unknown future.” Lesbian feminist culture has consistently been the front line of the women’s liberation movement, a zone for vision and innovation, experiment, the sharpening of political clarity and resolve. Freedom can be modeled here, autonomous existence practiced. In lesbian feminist culture, women are able to see for ourselves that women do not need men; we can unlearn the lesson of our helpless hopeless dependency, ingrained and enforced since girlhood. What lesbian feminism has to offer, above all, is a cultural space in which female survival does not rely on men’s validation, men’s protection, men’s resources. Look, see: these women don’t need men! What possible liberation for women can we imagine, much less realize, if we cannot bring ourselves to believe this, if we do not dare change our lives to make it true?
Susan Hawthorne is a one-woman powerhouse of lesbian feminist culture, as a novelist, poet, scholar, aerialist, activist, and the co-founder of Spinifex Press. She becomes an increasingly imposing figure as one makes one’s way through Lesbian, learning from essay to essay that she reads Greek, studies Sanskrit, can do a handstand, has presented at countless conferences around the world, and can pack a bibliography with a four-page listing of her own books and articles. One feels rather lackluster and milquetoast by comparison, as well as woefully unproductive. But, alas, we cannot all be Susan Hawthrone. What everyone can do, however, is learn from her writings the authentic value and liberatory force of lesbian feminism, lesbian culture, and lesbian creativity. Perhaps someone could send Lesbian: Politics, Culture, Existence to Chappell Roan? Then 2025 might have a chance of giving us a pop culture lesbianism worth celebrating, with some real potential and far, far fewer red leather bodysuits.
Thank you to Spinifex for kindly providing a copy of Lesbian: Politics, Culture, Existence for this review.
aurora linnea is a radical ecofeminist writer committed to poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to male dominion. In the past, she has served women as a shelter worker and rape crisis advocate. She is the author of Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life (Spinifex Press, 2024). aurora lives at the ocean’s edge in the North American bioregion colonially known as Maine.