Getting Specific: Postmodern Lesbian Politics

212 Pages·1994·10.951 MB·English

by  Shane Phelan

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Getting Specific
Postmodern Lesbian Politics
Shane Phelan
University of Minnesota Press
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London
cOPYRIGHT 1994 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NNESOTA
KLKKKK
aN EARLIER VERSION OF CHAPTER 1 WAS PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN DIFFERENCES 3, NO.
An earlier version of chapter was 1 previopuusly bliished T
1 (Spring 1991): 128-43. An earlier version of chapter 3 was previously pub-
lished in Signs 18, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 765-90. Copyright 1993 by the
University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phelan, Shane.
Getting specific : postmodern Lesbian politics / Shane Phelan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Lesbianism—Philosophy. 2. Lesbianism—Political aspects.
3. Feminist theory. I. Title.
ISBN 0-8166-2109-8 (he; acid-free paper)
ISBN 0-8166-2110-1 (pbk; acid-free paper)
HQ75.5.P47 1994
305.48'9664—dc20 94-17529
The University of Minnesota is an
equal-opportunity educator and employer.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Introduction xiii
1. Specificity: Beyond Equality and Difference 1
2. Building a Specific Theory 16
Interlude I: Getting Specific 32
3. (Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics 41
4. Lesbians and Mestizas: Appropriation and Equivalence 57
5. Getting Specific about Community 76
6. The Space of Justice: Lesbians and Democratic Interests 98
7. Oppression, Liberation, and Power 114
Interlude II: Lost in the Land of Enchantment 131
8. Alliances and Coalitions: Nonidentity Politics 139
Notes 161
Index 187
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Acknowledgments
Many people contributed to this book. Christine Di Stefano, Ann Fer-
guson, Dennis Fischman, Nancy Love, and Diana Robin read and
commented on the entire manuscript, and their critical effort and sup-
port are more important to me than I can ever say. Dennis read every-
thing, wrote long letters, and nourished me. I would also like to thank
Mark Blasius, Bill Chaloupka, Tom Dumm, Kathy Ferguson, Minrose
Gwin, Kirstie McClure, Bill Norris, Ruth Salvaggio, Jana Sawicki,
Christine Sierra, Vicky Spelman, Carolyn Woodward, and Iris Young
for reading and critiquing chapters. Dorrie Mazzone, John Sharpe,
and Edmundo Urrutia provided excellent research assistance and en-
thusiastic discussion. Sandi Gonzalez and Mary Morell helped me to
think through some of the arguments presented here. Janaki Bakhle,
my editor at the University of Minnesota Press, pushed me to think
and calmed me when I panicked. This book is much better because of
her efforts. Paul Schwankl and Laura Westlund did a fine job of copy-
editing, and I appreciate their help. Kaile Goodman read the manu-
script with great care, saving me from embarrassment and misunder-
standing.
Both the Political Science Department and the Women Studies Pro-
gram at the University of New Mexico have been tremendously sup-
portive over the years. I wish to thank the Women Studies Program
for the semester I spent as research scholar; without that time to think,
this book would be more jumbled than it is.
An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in differences: A Journal
of Feminist Cultural Studies. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared
in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. I would like to
thank these journals for permission to reprint.
I dedicate this book to the lesbians of Albuquerque, New Mexico,
who have shown me the pain and the possibilities of coalition politics.
Without their work the storytelling that is political theory would have
no life. To the extent that I know what I am talking about, it is be-
cause they have given me a chance to learn.
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Preface
My first book, Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of
Community, was written five years ago. In it, I explored the way that
themes of identity and community were developed and deployed
within the loose collection of thinkers known as lesbian feminists. I
concluded that lesbian feminist theorists had been mistaken in their
construction of a too-monolithic, often essentialist "lesbian," and that
lesbian feminist understandings of subjectivity and authenticity pro-
pelled the battles of the 1980s between "sex radicals" and "lesbian
feminists." I concluded that community was a dangerous ideal in
modernity, though one that moderns find inescapable. I thought then
that I had had my say on the topic, and I expected to move on.
Identity Politics was published, as it happened, in the midst of a
wave of critiques of lesbian feminism and of identity politics in gen-
eral. These critiques eventually led me back to the question of lesbian
identity and the politics that might foster different, more resilient, and
potentially coalitional identities. I am a political theorist; as such I am
driven by a love of theory and philosophy simply for their beauty, as
well as by the desire to foster justice in the world. It became clear to
me that my first book honored the first love above the second, and
that more than critique was needed. In short, I needed to attempt an
answer to the classic question of politics: What is to be done?
This awareness grew simultaneously with the conviction that the
problem of global theory was not a problem just for some feminists,
or some theorists, but in fact shadowed all our contemporary efforts
to think through a democratic politics. The thread of specificity
emerged as I sat listening to a debate on whether women should press
legal and political strategies based on equality (understood roughly as
sameness) or on difference from men. I knew then that neither was
sufficient, that progressive strategies have to focus on specifics of dif-
ferences and commonalities. This knowledge and this argument have
been developed over the last several years among legal theorists but
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