Defining the lesbian continuum

1) To challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from scholarly feminist literature

* anti-lesbian and anti-feminist
* distorts the whole of female experience

2) To encourage heterosexual feminists to examine heterosexuality as a political institution which disempowers women
3) To encourage women to change it to help correct bias in feminist theory and thought

Main argument:
Compulsory heterosexuality:

* primary means of perpetuating male dominance
* heterosexuality
o a social institution
o cultural ideology
o devalues all forms of female friendship and community
o perpetuates women’s subordination to men
o "a beach head of male dominance" (man-made institution)

feminist critique of it: long overdue

a political institution

* Problems: Bias of compulsory heterosexuality
* lesbian existence - stifled theme in feminist research
o invalidated, forced into hiding in feminist research
o seen through bias of compulsory heterosexuality (from deviant to abhorrent)

Reality - lesbians choose other women as life partners and lovers

Would Women Freely Choose Heterosexuality?

* some would
* some would not
* Rossi - women are "innately" sexually oriented only toward men
* Lessing - lesbian is "simply acting out of her bitterness towards men"
* Biological view:
o men have only one innate orientation:
o a sexual one drawing them to women
o women have two innate orientations:
o a sexual one drawing them to men
o a reproductive one toward their young

Real theme in study of women’s lives:

* resistance a major theme
* woman bonding and woman identification as essential for female survival:

1) its politically activating purpose
2) validation of personal lives
Rich’s purpose:

* to incite new kinds of feminist criticism
* to bridge the gap between lesbian and feminist (idea of lesbian continuum)
* to ask all feminist researchers to heed women of color’s analyses (double bias of sexism and racism)
* to learn from female separatism in lesbian existence (women- connected existence)
* to ask all feminists to examine their heterocentricity (unexamined assumption in heterosexual feminist research)
* Conservatism in American Politics (at time of writing article)
* New Right’s Message (today: Christian Coalition)

1) women are emotional and sexual property of men
2) women’s autonomy and equality threaten family, religion, and state

What are WOMEN-CONTROLLING INSTITUTIONS:

1) patriarchal motherhood
2) economic exploitation (lower pay)
3) nuclear family
4) compulsory heterosexuality also in a bad economy feminization of poverty
Rich firmly believes:

* heterosexual feminists will draw political strength for change by taking a critical stance toward the ideology that demands heterosexuality
* to examine female sexuality one cannot erase lesbian existence
* lesbian existence could be used as a course of power and knowledge for all women

Rich demonstrates lack of examination of compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence in feminist scholarship

* Ehrenrich and English
* Katz
* Baker Miller
* Dinnerstein

Chodorow

Gough’s useful framework from "Origin of the Family"

* (Gough does not perceive these power characteristics as enforcing heterosexuality, only as producing sexual inequality)

Gough’s Characteristics of Male Power:
1) to deny women their own sexuality
2) to force male sexuality on women through rape
3) to command or exploit female labor to control their production
4) to control or rob them of their children (lesbian mothers)
5) to confine them physically and prevent their movement
6) to use them as objects in male transactions
7) to cramp their creativeness
8) to withhold from them large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments (sex-role teaching in profession)

Male Power

* maintained and manifested
* controls women’s lives through physical brutality
* controls women’s consciousness (gives impression that women are an "enormous potential counterforce" to be constrained

Examples of bias and forms of violence against women:

* Africa and Arab World - clitorectomy
* pornography - sex as power
* women as sexual prey
* rape
* women as objects
* sex and violence connected
* sexual harassment of women in workplace

Men’s greatest fear

* women could be indifferent to them altogether
* women’s exclusion of men from their lives

Feminist scholars who correct bias:
Barry
Sundae
MacKinnon
Daly
Cavin
Lesbian - not a clinical genital definition

Central to lesbian existence - the physical passion of women for women

Courage in scholarship needed by heterosexual feminists to examine:

* historical perspectives
* creation of meaning in lesbian existence

Lesbian continuum - to include a range - through each women’s life and through history - of WOMEN-IDENTIFIED experience

Definition of lesbian existence

* breaking of TABOO
* rejection of a compulsory lifestyle

living without access to knowledge of traditions

* deprived of our political existence

(included as part of male homosexuality)
unlike homosexual men

* lesbians as women lack economic and cultural privilege relative to men

- anonymous sex not favored in lesbian existence

* male preference to whichprostitutes cater to earn quick money (much risk involved)
* female bonding not exclusively erotic discover erotic in female terms
* all women exist on a LESBIAN CONTINUUM whether we identify as lesbians or not (Sappho 7th Century B.C.)

MARRIAGE RESISTERS

Heterosexual preference imposed on all women

* History of Women’s Resistance in History
* women have always resisted male tyranny

continuum-something absolutely (Webster’s) continuous and homogenous of which no distinction of content can be affirmed except by reference to something else (as duration)

* something in which a fundamental common character is discernible amid a series of insensible or indefinite variations
* an uninterrupted ordered sequence
* an identity of substance uniting discrete parts

a set with the same transfinite cardinal number as the set of real numbers