Feminism and Its Ghosts: The Spectre of The Feminist-As-Lesbian

227
Feminism and its ghosts

The spectre of the feminist-as-lesbian FT
Feminist Theory
Copyright © 2005
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 6(3): 227–250.
1464–7001
DOI: 10.1177/1464700105057361
Victoria Hesford State Unversity of New York at Stony Brook www.sagepublications.com
Abstract This article contends that feminism is haunted by its past, and
that to be haunted means that feminists need to bear witness to the
possibilities, often unrealized, of that past and to actively resist the
policing and defensiveness that have marked feminism’s relationship to
its diverse history in recent years. It engages with the work of Terry
Castle and Avery Gordon in order to make this argument, and to map
out a methodology for looking for the ghosts of the recent feminist past.
In looking for one such ghost – the figure of the feminist-as-lesbian – the
article asks, how does the trope of the apparitional in lesbian cultural
visibility structure cultural memories of the second wave movement? To
that end the article discusses the presence of the ghost in a recent
feminist/queer study of feminist historicity and in the popular press
respectively. The final section looks back to the 1980s in order to trace
the connections between then and now, and, therefore, something of
what the ghost wants us to remember.
keywords feminist-as-lesbian, ghosts, haunting, history, queer, second
wave feminism
[S]o many women I know now standing up new and huge with beginnings then
falling over the next moment. Want to go far then relapse back into the little
woman, the past jiggles underfoot and we capsize continuously. (Millett, 1990
[1974]: 133)
At least in the United States, considerable effort has been put into reassurances
that feminists are ‘normal women’ and that our political aspirations are ‘main-
stream.’ With the best of intentions (which include prominently the wish to be
maximally inclusive) this normalizing strategy cannot conceal its class basis and
attachment to ‘upward mobility’ which depends upon leaving others behind.
Furthermore, it concedes much to the misogyny which permeates the fear of
‘losing one’s femininity,’ ‘making a spectacle of oneself,’ ‘alienating men’
(meaning powerful men) or otherwise making ‘errors.’ Most importantly it leaves
uninterrogated the very terms and processes of normalcy. (Russo, 1994: 11)
As Susan J. Douglas has so eloquently written, ‘we all know what femi-
nists are. They are shrill, overly aggressive, man-hating, ball-busting,
selfish, hairy extremists, deliberately unattractive women with absolutely
Downloaded from fty.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 26, 2015

228 Feminist Theory 6(3)
no sense of humor who see sexism at every turn’. They are, in short, ‘a
band of wild lesbians’ (1994: 7). Douglas, of course, is describing the
cultural figure through which popular cultural conceptions of feminism are
organized. Yet, as Bonnie Zimmerman notes in ‘Confessions of a Lesbian
Feminist’, the lesbian feminist, or the feminist-as-lesbian as I call her in
order to delimit the figure from particular historical feminist groups, has
also tended to be the figure through which perceptions of second wave
feminism have been organized as memory in academic feminism. As the
‘flannel shirt androgyne, close minded, antisex puritan humorless moralist
racist and classist ignoramus essentialist utopian’ (1997: 163), she often
stands as a symbol for the limits of cross-class and cross-race alliances in
second wave feminism. My questions in this essay are: what is this figure?
What is she doing? Why is she here, now? Why do we seem to know her
so well; and do we know her as well as we think we do?
In order to pursue these questions I utilize a methodology I call, borrow-
ing from Avery Gordon, ‘looking for the ghosts’.1 As a metacultural sign, a
sign that transgresses ostensibly discrete discursive realms (such as popular
culture, mass media, subcultural feminist ’zines, academic cultural memory
manifested in concepts and terms like ‘essentialism’, for example), the
figure of the feminist-as-lesbian is evidence, I argue, of a kind of remem-
bering – a collective cultural remembering of the second wave movement
– that is also a haunting. The figure haunts because her signification
exceeds our rational, schematic and orderly accounts of the movement –
she operates beyond, or outside, the ‘official’ histories of the second wave
movement. The figure also haunts because the representability of the
lesbian works through what Terry Castle calls the trope of the ‘apparitional’
(1993: 28). The lesbian is a spectral figure, according to Castle, because her
cultural presence is conjured, paradoxically, through a process of ‘dereal-
ization’; she appears as something incidental, impalpable, fleeting, or
obscured, not as something solidly in the world and enmeshed in its social-
ity (1993: 34). The spectrality of the lesbian figure leads Castle to suggest
that lesbianism is ‘the “repressed idea” at the heart of patriarchal culture’,
the representation of which can only come through negation (1993: 61–2).
Castle’s richly provocative thesis also suggests that lesbian/ism is always
configured, culturally, on the border between the real and the phantas-
matic, between what is (the production of gender through heteronormativ-
ity) and what might be (the non-Woman woman). In this article, I want to
think about how ‘derealization’ is intrinsic to the representativeness of the
feminist-as-lesbian figure within feminism, not just patriarchal culture.
How does the feminist-as-lesbian configure a ‘whiting out’ of possibilities
for feminism that then come back to haunt it (Castle, 1993: 28)? By ‘looking
for the ghost’ of the feminist-as-lesbian, then, I want to think about two
things in relation. First, how does the circulation of collective cultural
memory between different discursive realms – between the subcultural
(specifically academic feminism) and supercultural (specifically the mass
media)2 – tell us something about how feminism becomes meaningful as
public memory or event? And second, how does the trope of the appari-
tional in lesbian visibility structure those meanings and those memories?

Hesford: Feminism and its ghosts 229
The article has a four-part structure. I first map out a theoretical frame-
work for approaching the figure of the feminist-as-lesbian as a ghost of the
recent feminist past. In the second and third sections I ‘look for the ghost’
in a recent feminist/queer study of feminist historicity and in the popular
press respectively. My juxtaposition of the academic and the popular is
meant to draw out the way in which the figure circulates between the two.
In the fourth and final section I look back to the 1980s, a time when a series
of contestations and conflicts within feminism sedimented into a number
of ‘interested stories’ about the second wave (King, 1994: 124). My look
back is a haunted one. It is an attempt to trace the connections between
then and now, and, therefore, something of what the ghost wants us to
remember. To that end I read two essays published in the 1980s, both by
well-known American feminists, which attempt, in their differing ways, to
confront how ‘the lesbian’ and lesbianism became meaningful in the early
second wave movement.
Looking for the ghosts

In her important work on the need to ‘confront’ the constituent presence
of haunting in modern social life, Avery Gordon refers to Horkheimer and
Adorno’s brief appendix to Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘On the Theory of
Ghosts’, in which they argue for a relationship to the past that expresses a
sense of ‘unity’ with the dead (Gordon, 1997: 19–20). Rather than ‘expung-
ing’ the dead from the memory of the living in the remorseless march
towards the future that marks modernity, Horkheimer and Adorno argue
that mourning should be fostered as a means of making present the
‘wounds of civilization’ (1982: 215). Those wounds are the battles,
struggles and confrontations of those killed, disappeared, or forgotten in
the name of the future. For Derrida writing on the ghost of Marx in the post-
communist, late-capitalist era, these wounds are what haunt us in the
present: ‘hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirma-
tion of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony’
(1994: 37). Haunting is intrinsic to every dominant social and political
order because it is a sign of what has been forcibly expunged or evacuated
from that order: the other that threatened to disrupt the emergent
hegemony. As such, haunting is an absence that, as Gordon puts it, is also
a ‘seething presence’; it is the trace, the echo of a potentially different social
or political experience (1997: 8).
For Gordon, the idea of haunting as the trace of a potentially different
reality, as the ‘ghostly’ presence of experiential realities of social and politi-
cal life that are unacknowledged by traditional forms of knowledge
making, also means that haunting offers a promise, what she calls a ‘some-
thing to be done’ (1997: 202). Inherent in every haunting are the as-yet-
to-be-articulated possibilities of a different sociality. Here, Gordon’s
conception of haunting as a relationship to both past and future resembles
Foucault’s genealogical method of historical inquiry. For Foucault, ‘what
is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity
of their origin; it is the dissension of other things, it is disparity’ (1977:

142). The purpose of historical inquiry, according to Foucault, should not

be to determine one, true, portrayal of historical events, but to interrogate
what is quietly assumed to be true, and to expose the manifestations of
power intrinsic to any one representation of an event or moment in history.
From this interrogation ‘other things’ make their presence known to us, and
different ways of being and doing things in the future. As with Foucault’s
genealogical method, to mourn, to express unity with the dead, for both
Horkheimer and Adorno and Gordon, is not simply an act of remembrance,
but also a way of resisting the hegemony in the present: the past becomes
resource for the possibility of a different future.
Gordon’s understanding of haunting as both social phenomenon and
historiographical concept offers us a way of relating to the recent feminist
past that avoids overly schematic or classificatory accounts of that past,
and enables us to bring into question the underlying assumptions about
historical time as progressive or episodic that much of the recent concern
with feminist history rests upon (see Rosen, 2000; DuPlessis and Snitow,
1998; Echols, 1989).3 As the trace or echo in the present of something lost
or repressed, a haunting is felt rather than comprehended; we experience
it rather than know it. As Gordon puts it, to be haunted ‘draws us affec-
tively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the
structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowl-
edge, but as transformative recognition’ (1997: 8). To be haunted is to also
resist a melancholic relationship to the past in which one becomes fixated
on a lost, beloved, past event or era.4 A haunting is an encounter with
something that is initially strange but becomes known: we suddenly appre-
hend (‘to become or be conscious by the senses of’, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary) something we didn’t know before. As a trace or echo
of something lost, repressed, or forgotten, and as the experience of some-
thing strange, haunting produces a defamiliarizing relationship to the past
that simultaneously opens up the present to the possibility of a different
future. For feminists in particular, to have a haunted relationship with the
feminist past is to be able to bear witness to the possibilities, often un-
realized, of that past and to actively resist the policing and defensiveness
that have marked much of feminism’s relationship to its diverse history in
recent years.
Yet how do we know when we are being haunted? For Gordon, the
evidence is found in the presence of ghosts who are the empirical ‘signs’
that a haunting is taking place. Moreover, a ghost is ‘not simply a dead or
missing person, but a social figure’ (1997: 8).5 Ghosts are ‘that special
instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the
living, the past and the present’ who become ‘a crucible for political medi-
ation and historical memory’ (1997: 25 and 18). The ghost signifies to us
the lack of knowledge or comprehension that we feel in its presence. We
know when we are being haunted because a particular figure, a particular
image or representation of a past event keeps making its presence known
to us. A ghost bothers us; it is the nagging reminder of something that is
unsettled and ‘improperly buried’ (1997: 24–5). Ghosts appear and re-
appear and draw us affectively into what Gordon, borrowing from

Raymond Williams, calls a ‘structure of feeling’ – a sensual knowing, or

‘practical consciousness’ in the present of something that, though from the
past, is paradoxically not yet, that has not become ‘cold knowledge’ (1997:
198).
In relation to the recent feminist past one such ghost is the feminist-as-
lesbian, a figure who appeared, as image and representation, at the turn of
the last century when ‘feminism’ (rather than ‘women’s rights’) became a
social and political force,6 and who re-appeared, in a different form, during
the momentous days of the early women’s liberation movement in the late
1960s and early 1970s, when dyke-baiting became a prominent tactic of
anti-feminists and anti-lesbian feminists, and lesbian feminism came into
being partly as a response to that baiting (Rosen, 2000; and see Echols,
1989).7 As the ‘ball-busting, selfish, hairy extremist’ or ‘flannel shirt
androgyne’, we all know, now, what a feminist is. Yet it is precisely through
such over-familiarity, what Gordon calls ‘hypervisibility’, that the figure of
the feminist-as-lesbian operates as a ghost rather than simply as an icon or
symbol of feminism (1997: 17). Gordon’s primary example of hypervisibil-
ity is Ralph Ellison’s ‘invisible man’. In Ellison’s formulation, the visibil-
ity of the African-American male’s blackness blinds the white onlooker to
the complexity of the man’s individual personhood while also maintain-
ing the (empowering) ignorance of the white onlooker’s partial vision. For
Gordon, it is precisely the way in which visibility can become ‘a type of
invisibility’ that ‘apparitions and hysterical blindness[es]’ are produced
(1997: 17). The feminist-as-lesbian, in her hypervisibility, blinds us to the
complex forces that first produced her while also blinding us to our own
interest in her; she is ‘derealized’ in a way that is similar to the vaporiza-
tion of the black man in Ellison’s Invisible Man. The exaggerated terms by
which both Douglas and Zimmerman describe her can be read, symp-
tomatically, as an (hysterical?) affect of her hypervisible presence in both
popular and feminist cultural memory. She’s a monster, she’s ridiculous,
she’s laughable, contemptuous, shameful, or she’s joyful and full of a proud
anger. As a repository for a complex array of affect and emotion, the figure
draws us to a sense of the second wave movement that is unacknowledged,
that is not ‘cold knowledge’.
In the rest of this article I want to follow this ghost in a necessarily
subjective way (‘a ghost must speak to me in some ways similar to, some-
times distinct from how it may be speaking to others’ [Gordon, 1997: 24,
original emphasis]), but in such a way as to grasp something of both what
haunts feminism in the present, and what promise for the future that
haunting may suggest. The ‘feminist-as-lesbian’ neither is the only ghost of
the recent feminist past, nor will she make the same claim on others as she
makes on me. Too young for what Robyn Wiegman calls the ‘revolutionary
time’ of the ‘public political culture of the 1960’s’ (2002: 20), and growing
up on the other side of the Atlantic at that, America in the 1960s is the
enigmatic time of my immediate, tantalizingly familiar yet foreign past.
And as a young feminist/queer scholar in the US academy, ‘second wave
feminism’ is the enigmatic object that academic feminism necessarily, if
often only obliquely, has to place itself in relation to. The ghosts of second

wave feminism, therefore, speak to me in a way that is inevitably shaped

by my generational and geographical difference from those who were part
of that ‘revolutionary time’, to say nothing of the specificities of my sexual,
class and racial identities.
The ghost of the feminist-as-lesbian

In her recent, richly suggestive essay on the problematic, but potentially
productive, relationship between queer performativity and feminist his-
toriography, Elizabeth Freeman tells a story about an offended student who
objected to Freeman’s humorous characterization of lesbians as ‘potluck
givers’ (what in England might be called the earthy-crunchy, earnest do-
gooder lesbian). Freeman calls this a story about ‘anachronism with
“lesbian” as the sign of times gone by’ (2000: 727). Freeman argues that the
student’s identification as a lesbian (who gives potluck dinners) rather than
as a Riot Grrrl or Queer National, for example, disrupts ‘any easy assump-
tions about generations and register[s] the failure of the generational model
to capture political differences’ (2000: 727). The student’s explicit identifi-
cation as a lesbian meant that she exhibited, according to Freeman, a
‘crossing of time’ that was evidence less ‘of postmodern pastiche’ than a
‘stubborn identification with a set of social coordinates that exceeded her
own historical moment’ (2000: 728). That is, for Freeman, the student’s
identification revealed that political cultures and eras do not supplant each
other in a neat linear way, but co-exist or infuse each other, complicating
any simplistic commitment to political ‘progress’ or evolvement.
Freeman’s term for this time crossing is ‘temporal drag’ – with all of ‘the
associations that the word drag has with retrogression, delay, and the pull
of the past upon the present’ (2000: 728). The term is useful for Freeman
because it allows her to complicate the ‘idea of horizontal political gener-
ations succeeding one another’ (2000: 729), and, more specifically, it allows
her to problematize the relationship between queer studies and politics
and feminist history as articulated by a number of queer theorists:
[temporal drag], as opposed to the queenlier kind celebrated in queer cultural

studies, suggests the gravitational pull that ‘lesbian’ sometimes seems to exert
upon ‘queer.’ In many discussions of the relationship between the two, it often
seems as if the lesbian feminist is cast as the big drag, drawing politics inex-
orably back to essentialized bodies, normative visions of women’s sexuality, and
single-issue identity politics. (Freeman, 2000: 728)
Here, Freeman is describing a representation of the relationship between

queer and lesbian that has been used as an argument for the theoretical and
political validity of queer studies (as opposed, if only implicitly, to
women’s studies) and, in conjunction, as an account of recent feminist
history (the transition from ‘second wave’ to ‘third wave’ or the ‘post-
feminist’ era). The lesbian feminist, she notes, is often ‘cast as the big drag’,
the antiquated monster, of essentialist identity politics. ‘Queer’, in contrast,
is cast as a performance, and is concerned with the ‘doing’ of the new and
different. In this conception of the relationship between queer and

feminist, the lesbian stands as a representational figure of past feminist

errors and ‘wrong-directions’ within a broadly conceived contemporary
queer present.
Yet, for Freeman, the conceptualization of queer as the performance of
the new brings with it the problematic tendency to actively forget or negate
what has happened in the past. As a way of counteracting this tendency,
Freeman argues that the notion of temporal drag offers us a way of articu-
lating a ‘temporal transitivity’ that doesn’t leave behind ‘anachronisms’
like feminism, and which allows us to both explore the ‘pastness of the
past’ and ‘put pressure on the present’ (as her acute and rich reading of
Elisabeth Subrin’s film about Shulamith Firestone, Shulie, reveals), while
at the same time, it conjoins, conceptually, queer and feminist theoretical
concerns with the performative and historicity respectively (2000: 728).
The issue, it seems to me, is less that we perform this drag than how to
bear witness to it, how ‘we’ feminists and queers who don’t disavow the
relationship between the two bear witness to ‘our’ history.
Temporal drag also invokes, as Freeman makes clear, the ‘camp effect’ of
drag as the performance of a melancholic ‘resuscitation’ of a beloved, lost
object (2000: 732). For Freeman, this camp effect has to be understood
within the terms of a ‘narrative, historicist model of “allegorization”’ in
which the lost object is longingly brought to life through a transformative
(allegorical) reanimation (2000: 732). Indeed, Freeman reads Subrin’s 1997
film, Shulie, a shot-by-shot remake of a 1967 documentary of the same
name, as a camp reanimation of the young, not-yet-identified-with-radical-
feminism, Shulamith Firestone. As the beloved lost object, Firestone isn’t
resuscitated as she was (an impossibility), but transformed into ‘Shulie’, a
character that literally, but imperfectly (the actress playing Shulie wears
an obvious wig and ill-fitting glasses, and the ephemera of 1990s living is
present on film, including the omnipresent Starbucks coffee cup), re-enacts
the Shulie of the 1967 documentary. Here, the pre-women’s movement,
pre-representative figure of radical feminism, Shulamith Firestone, is
reanimated in the ‘queer’ present, disrupting the temporal order through
which we read queer as ‘post’ second wave feminism. The temporal disori-
entation goes a step further in that what has passed (the ‘second wave’) is
now, in the film’s re-enactment of a ‘pre-history’ of the second wave, what
hasn’t even begun. For Freeman, therefore, Subrin’s reanimation of Fire-
stone not only makes apparent the ‘pastness of the past’, it also produces
– reanimates – the ‘social coordinates’ of Firestone’s pre-feminist moment
(the contingencies of her present-time as captured in the 1967 documen-
tary) in such a way as to make those coordinates ‘available’ to us ‘in a
different way’: what is now queer is the pre-history of second wave
feminism (2000: 735).
I like the concept of temporal drag precisely because of its ability to
disorientate and to make apparent the ‘out-of-jointness’ of the feminist
present. Yet, the notion of temporal drag as a camp reanimation, or
performance, of past events or ‘objects’ depends upon a relationship to the
past that is structured through love or, more precisely, longing. In
Freeman’s formulation, we must identify with someone or something, we

must recognize it in some way for us to want to bring it back to life. Indeed,
as Freeman suggests in her reading of Shulie, Subrin’s identification with
the young Firestone as a ‘very smart, middle-class, Jewish female artist’ is
a motivating factor in her desire to re-make the 1967 documentary (2000:
731). In contrast, to have a haunted relationship to the past is precisely to
engage with what has been resisted, feared, or actively forgotten about that
past. While the resuscitation of lost beloved objects from the collective
feminist past may produce a different way of thinking and relating to that
past, it would not, it seems to me, produce the analytical space necessary
for asking what has been banished or purposefully forgotten about that
past. As Freeman correctly asserts, we need to trouble the neat linearity of
the idea that one ‘horizontal’ generation hands over, intact and complete,
its feminist legacy to another, but we also need to confront the acts of burial
and silencing – the agencies of repression – that are an inevitable part of
the history of any social movement.
We see the presence of a ghost, revealingly, in Freeman’s essay. While
she begins with an account of how the figure of the lesbian often acts as a
drag on contemporary queer theory and politics, as the figure representa-
tive of the ‘bad’ old days of essentialist identity politics (the ‘bad’ old days
of second wave feminism), by the end of her essay, the lesbian has dis-
appeared altogether. As an ‘angelface’ (2000: 732) of second wave feminist
history, neither the character, Shulie, in the film Shulie, nor the real histori-
cal subject, Shulamith Firestone, performs, I would argue, as a sign of the
‘not yet’ lesbian feminist. Rather, as Freeman points out, the film performs
a temporal drag that opens up the ‘pre-history’ of radical feminism to the
now of ‘postfeminism’. The moment of ‘political possibility’ for Freeman
lies precisely in the time before the battle-lines between liberal, radical and
lesbian feminism were drawn and political identities calcified. Yet the
missing present of that history, the time of lesbian feminism as well as
radical feminism (two distinct and sometimes mutually hostile forms of
second wave feminism), as well as the time of the second wave’s most
visible, and controversial, cultural presence in American society, acts not
so much as a drag on Freeman’s questioning of the temporal order of
feminist history, but as a haunting absence. As a founding member of the
Redstockings and the New York Radical Feminists, both radical feminist
groups, Firestone was never identified with lesbian feminism, nor, to my
knowledge, did she ever come out as a lesbian during her time in the
women’s movement.8 The absence of this part of Firestone’s history allows
Freeman to elide the distinction between lesbian feminism and radical
feminism in her reading of Shulie. The effect of this elision, ironically, is
the absence of any reckoning with the figure of the lesbian as a sign of
second wave feminism, the very sign Freeman invoked at the beginning of
her essay. As such, the figure of the lesbian feminist is present yet else-
where in Freeman’s exploration of the recent feminist past: too late for 1967
pre-history and too early for 1997 post-history, she becomes the necessary
sign for a feminist moment that is absent from Freeman’s search for the
political possibilities of a relationship between queer performativity and
feminist historiography.

The ‘return’ of Kate Millett

If the figure of the feminist-as-lesbian remains an unexplored but necess-
ary sign in Freeman’s ‘temporal drag’ on second wave history, we can read
a flurry of articles about Kate Millett in the mainstream press in the late
1990s as evidence of the figure’s ‘return’ as a ghost of that history. The
articles appeared in 1998 and 1999, on both sides of the Atlantic, and were
concerned with the forgotten state of the second wave women’s movement
and of Kate Millett in particular. The articles were inspired by a long and
angry essay by Millett that appeared in the summer of 1998 for the
progressive women’s magazine, On the Issues,9 in which, using the
example of her own experiences after the demise of the organized women’s
movement, Millett draws attention to the economic and emotional plight
of former second wave activists.
In the essay Millett frames her discussion in terms of the problems facing
ageing feminist women who live alone or have lived unconventional lives
and who, as a result, are financially and socially vulnerable. Describing her
futile attempts to secure a teaching position in a women’s studies depart-
ment – the only possibility an adjunct position that would pay her by the
course – Millett wonders, ‘what is wrong with me? Am I “too far out” or
too old? Is it age? I’m 63. Or am I “old hat” in the view of the “new feminist
scholarship”?’ Her future, she tells us, holds only ‘bag-lady horrors’. Her
books are all out of print and anything she writes now ‘has no prospect of
seeing print’ – her only source of income coming from her ability to work
her Christmas tree farm in upstate New York (1998: 38).10 Yet her own diffi-
culties, she tells us, pale in comparison to those of other women from the
beginnings of the second wave movement:
Recently a book inquired Who Stole Feminism? I sure didn’t. Nor did Ti-Grace
Atkinson. Nor Jill Johnston. We’re all out of print. We haven’t helped each other
much, haven’t been able to build solidly enough to have created community or
safety. Some women in this generation disappeared to struggle alone in
makeshift oblivion. Or vanished into asylums and have yet to return to tell the
tale, as has Shula Firestone. There were despairs that could only end in death:
Maria del Drago chose suicide. So did Ellen Frankfurt. And Elizabeth Fischer,
founder of Aphra, the first feminist literary journal. (Millett, 1998: 38)
Millett’s portrait is of a ‘generation’ of women who, having risked the

promised (if not always actual) safety of conventional life for a feminism
they believed would transform society, have been left to ‘struggle alone in
makeshift oblivion’, their dreams of a new society lost while a younger
generation of feminists occupy tenured positions in women’s studies
departments and further their careers by rewriting the feminist past for
their own professional benefit (1998: 41).
Millett’s account of her generation’s plight is an ‘interested’ story, one
that exaggerates and simplifies.11 The six people she mentions besides
herself do not make up a ‘generation’, nor can their experiences stand as
exemplary for all the women who were active in the second wave
movement in all its different array of groups and political alignments. Nor
can the conversation Millett’s article engendered in the press stand as an

accurate, nor adequate, commentary on the current state of feminism in the

late 20th and early 21st centuries in America and Britain. And yet, the
media’s reading of Millett’s appearance in On the Issues as a sudden,
surprising, resurfacing into the public realm, that is, as a ghost of the
feminist past suddenly returning to haunt her old stomping ground, does,
I think, tell us something of the way in which the second wave movement
has been remembered and forgotten since it first exploded into public view
more than 30 years ago. What becomes clear as one reads the press
responses to Millett’s ‘return’ is that a direct confrontation with the
feminist work and theories of the second wave is avoided. If Millett is a
ghost from the feminist past then it is precisely because she signifies that
which cannot be remembered but still haunts our conceptions of who and
what feminism is.
We see the hauntingness of Millett’s resurfacing, and the refusal to
confront what that hauntingness signifies, most clearly in Maureen Freely’s
article, ‘What Kate Did Next’, for the Observer newspaper in Britain
(Millett’s On the Issues article had appeared in abbreviated form in the
Guardian, the Observer’s sister-paper, under the title, ‘The Feminist Time
Forgot’). Although the question Freely asks her readers – ‘why have these
early activists become so desperately unfashionable, so tainted, that even
women’s studies programmes don’t want to preserve them, if only as
museum pieces?’ – seems to invite comment on the kind of feminism the
early activists practised and articulated, the women she interviews all
‘insist’ that the fate of Millett and her cohort has little to do with their
feminism (Freely, 1999: 2).
Freely’s interviews with the former activist, Anita Bennett, and the
academic feminist and activist, Cora Kaplan, effectively disperse the
particularity of second wave feminism into a general, unitary, historical
account of the ‘Sixties’. This generalizing move leads Freely to argue that
the problem of the forgotten activists of the second wave lies not so much
in the effects of government repression as Bennett is quoted as arguing, nor
in the out-of-fashion state of Sixties radicalism (rather than their ‘views on
women, lesbianism and patriarchy’) as Kaplan is quoted as arguing, but in
the general vicissitudes of ‘History’ itself (1999: 2). Like the feminist gener-
ations before her own, Freely writes, Millett’s generation was always going
to suffer ‘the temporary oblivion’ suffered by one generation of political
activists as the next emerges eager to claim the rightfulness of their particu-
lar creed. It is ‘a strange little pattern’, Freely concludes, that tells us more
about ‘human nature or the way history gets written than it tells you about
feminism’ (1999: 2).
Freely’s rather easy and, ultimately, uninteresting conclusion that it is
simply the patterns of History that have condemned Millett and her peers
to oblivion (a conclusion that evacuates history of any meaning or speci-
ficity) leaves unanswered the implicit question of why Millett (and those
she mentions in her article) have been forgotten while others have not.
After all, as Leslie Crawford in Salon.com, the online politics and arts
magazine, writes in her response to Millett’s article, other ‘star’ feminists
from the second wave still have their place in the ‘zeitgeist’ (1999: 2).

People like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer, all one-
time peers of Millett, continue to have a public visibility. As Crawford
states, all three have had books published by mainstream publishers in
recent years. Biographies of Friedan and Greer appeared in 1998 and 1999
respectively and Carolyn Heilbrun’s biography of Steinem in 1995. And all
three feminist ‘leaders’ remain occasional contributors to public
discussions on the state and value of feminism (Germaine Greer more so
in England than the United States).
Rather than locate the reasons for Millett’s present-day obscurity in the
general vicissitudes of ‘History’, Crawford finds them in the particularity
of Millett’s ‘ambivalent’ persona. While Friedan was the ‘stately matriarch’
and Steinem the ‘brassy babe’, Millett was the ‘manic-depressive, married,
bisexual, women’s reformer, gay liberationist, reclusive sculptor, in-your-
face activist, retiring Midwesterner, brassy New Yorker’. She was, as
Crawford summarizes, ‘far too conflicted and complicated a figure’ to stay
present in the zeitgeist (1999: 4). Crawford goes on to argue that Millett’s
stature as movement figurehead was laced with controversy from the very
beginning. As ‘intensely as she was lionized’, Crawford writes, ‘she was
demonized’. From Norman Mailer’s description of her in his excoriating
review of Sexual Politics for Harper’s in 1970 as ‘“the Battling Annie of
some new prudery”’, to those in the movement who accused her of not
being ‘gay enough’, Kate Millett was always the site of conflicting
messages, about who she was and about what the movement stood for
(1999: 4). Yet, while Crawford locates Millett’s ‘ambivalent’ persona and
subsequent obscurity in the controversies surrounding her at the height of
the second wave movement’s cultural and social visibility, this does not
lead to a contemplation of the contested politics of the movement itself as
a possible reason for Millett’s forgotten state. Rather, the conflicts and
ambivalences of Millett’s persona are seen as merely personal character-
istics, the ‘flaws’ of a troubled psyche.12 Indeed, the particularity of the
controversy surrounding Millett in 1970, in which she was accused by
Time magazine of being the ‘bisexual betrayer’ of the women’s liberation
movement,13 and the connection between it and the feminism Millett was
seen to represent and advocate, is precisely what is left unexplored in both
Crawford’s and Freely’s articles.
Millett’s difference from Friedan and Steinem does not lie, simply, in the
comparative simplicity and singularity of their public personas in contrast
to that of Millett, but in what that simplicity and singularity signifies. The
‘stately matriarch’ and the ‘brassy babe’ are both stereotypical caricatures
of accepted female roles – the mother and the alluring, seductive, single
young woman. Both stereotypes are intrinsically heterosexual, and neither
threaten, nor disturb, the hegemony of sex and gender norms in American
society. And so, despite the relative radicalism of their political activism,
Friedan and Steinem both represent, in the zeitgeist, an image of feminism
that does not bring into question the heteronormativity of American
society. In contrast, the ‘ambivalence’ of Millett’s public persona comes
precisely from the fact that she exhibited and represented political and
cultural values that went beyond, and brought into question, that

institution. Millett was not only the married, bisexual, lesbian of Time
fame, she was also the author of the best selling Sexual Politics, a book
which revolutionized literary criticism by conceptualizing sexuality as a
domain of social and cultural power, called for an end to monogamous
heterosexual marriage, and proposed a sexual revolution that would, in
effect, bring about the end of heteronormativity. In fact, Millett’s contro-
versial, ambivalent persona was precisely an effect of her views ‘on
women, lesbianism and patriarchy’. And it is for this reason, rather than a
troubled psyche or the vicissitudes of History, I would argue, that she has
been ‘forgotten’, while Friedan and Steinem have not.
On the one hand, then, as both Freely and Millett reveal through the
stories they tell, the second wave movement has been remembered, not as
a contested historical phenomenon with effects in the present, but as an
‘object’ constructed by interested parties attempting to situate themselves
in an historical narrative that will explain the meaning of their particular
form or interpretation of feminism. The second wave becomes either the
‘real’ feminism that ‘johnny-come-latelies’ (Freely, 1999: 2) deny or deni-
grate in their eagerness to assert their own brand of feminism (the story
told in Millett’s article), or it becomes the vanquished other of a feminism
that has ‘moved on’ with the swells and eddies of time (the story told in
Freely’s article). In both accounts, the second wave is awarded an originary
significance that simultaneously prevents any real historical exploration of
what that significance might be; it becomes a purposefully opaque ‘object’
wielded by ‘interested’ parties in their constructions of a singular feminist
past.
On the other hand, Crawford’s article suggests something of what is being
forgotten in popular and feminist cultural memories of the second wave
movement. Rather than understand Millett’s ambivalent persona to be an
effect of personal ‘turmoil’, as Crawford does, we should read it more as
an effect of the ambiguousness of the second wave movement itself. The
second wave haunts us today precisely because of its lack of singularity
and unity, and because of the challenges it made (among other things) to
the socio-cultural institution of heterosexuality – challenges that are not
yet over. If the second wave was about social justice for women – the fight
for legislative, political, and economic rights – it was also about changing
the idea of who women are, and about women variously taking the risk of
becoming strange in relation to gender and sex norms. Millett’s ‘return’ to
the public realm has been read as such precisely because her public
persona operates as a sign of the unsettling and unsettled threat the
movement posed – for feminists as well as non-feminists – to the hetero-
normative social imaginary.
If the lesbian, or feminist-as-lesbian, often acts, as Freeman suggests, as
the ‘big drag’ on contemporary feminist and queer politics, as a sign of the
bad old days of essentialism and identity politics, it is because she
operates, I would argue, as a screen memory (a ‘whiting out’) of the more
complex and contingent politics of early second wave feminism. The
ambivalence of Millett’s public persona suggests a lack of fixity in early
second wave explorations of sexuality and gender, and a refusal of any

absolute or singular sexual or political identity. Indeed, rather than

augmenting the emergence of identity politics, and of ‘lesbian feminism’
as a discrete political position within second wave feminism, the contro-
versies surrounding Millett in 1970 and the contradictoriness of her
(various and shifting) identities signalled both a transgression and poten-
tial disassemblement of gender and sexual identities in mid 20th century
America. Neither gay nor straight, married yet not, Bohemian artist,
scholar, and theorist, Millett, in 1970, was one of the more public examples
of the risk-taking inventiveness and active changeability of many of the
women in the early years of the second wave women’s movement. It is this
risk-taking inventiveness, which challenged the image of ‘Woman’ as an
anchoring sign for the socio-cultural production of heterosexuality, that
has been ‘derealized’ through the hypervisibility of the feminist-as-lesbian
figure. Lesbianism, for Millett, and for others in the early years of the
movement, was not an identity to be celebrated as a thing in itself, nor,
simply, an ‘issue’ among others within the larger political project of
feminism (an idea that reasserts the centrality of ‘Woman’ for feminism as
well as for patriarchy). Rather, it was something closer to what we now call
‘queer’ – a practice of subverting and living against, or across, social iden-
tities.14
‘The something to be done’

In this, the final section of my paper, I return to two essays, both by well-
known American feminist thinkers, in order to trace the beginnings of ‘the
something to be done’ inherent in the flickering and continuing presence
of the feminist-as-lesbian figure in popular and feminist public cultures.
Both essays attempt, in their different ways, to confront elisions or repres-
sions in feminist theoretical and cultural work. And both essays are
concerned with the ways in which the lesbian, and lesbianism, figure in
those elisions or repressions. Teresa de Lauretis’s ‘The Essence of the
Triangle’ (1989), and Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence’ (1980) bookend the 1980s. The 1980s was the decade
that saw a series of conflicts and disagreements in American feminism,
primarily within the academy though not exclusively, sediment into what
Katie King calls, ‘interested stories’ – the stories we tell ourselves in order
to make coherent and discrete events that were neither (1994: 124). Within
the context of the 1980s, these stories also tended to manufacture a break
with the second wave movement. That break happened in myriad ways:
through the ‘sex wars’, through the ‘essentialism versus post-structuralism’
debate, through the so-called emergence of minority feminisms, both racial
and postcolonial (so-called because it is a highly dubious, and contested,
though widespread chronology that situates minority feminisms as having
happened after the second wave), and through the ‘academicization’ of
feminism. By returning to Rich’s and de Lauretis’s essays, I want to
confront something of what was being buried, silenced, or ‘tidied up’ in
the production of these stories, and what, as a result, we might conjure up
or re-remember about the second wave movement.

In ‘The Essence of the Triangle’ Teresa de Lauretis takes a ‘more discern-

ing look’ at the ‘essentialism versus post-structuralist’ debate in Anglo-
American feminist theory in the late 1980s.15 For de Lauretis, ‘essentialism’
is present in Anglo-American feminist theory, not for its analytic useful-
ness, but because it operates as sign for a feminist ‘Other’ that cannot be
directly or openly addressed. In order to make this argument de Lauretis
reads two feminist texts and traces the way each conjures up the spectre
of ‘essentialism’ in order to dismiss it from the ranks of ‘good’ feminist
theory. Essentialism is used in both texts, de Lauretis argues, as a simplis-
tic and reductive representation of ‘cultural feminism’ (a term most often
used to designate radical or/and lesbian feminist theory of which Adrienne
Rich, Mary Daly and Susan Griffin are the primary representatives), and
serves as the ‘straw woman’ against which a more ‘sophisticated’ theoreti-
cal practice is promoted. Although de Lauretis argues against the hierarchy
this move invokes, her primary concern is with what is elided in the act
of dismissal. Her question is: what ‘motivates’ these theorists to typologize
and ‘brand’ different feminisms ‘along an ascending scale of theoretico-
political sophistication where essentialism weighs heavy at the lower end?’
(1989: 4). In other words, what is being unacknowledged or avoided in the
act of setting up and then dismissing a constructed feminist other?
In order to answer this question, de Lauretis switches her perspective by
looking at the work of an Italian feminist group, Libreria delle Donne di
Milano. By looking to another feminist practice of thought, de Lauretis
hopes to offer a defamiliarizing perspective, one in which the texts of
cultural feminism and post-structuralism have been read genealogically
rather than taxonomically, and one in which the history and particular
location of the feminists involved was understood as constitutive of the
group’s particular practice of feminist theorizing. For de Lauretis, the
particularity of Libreria delle Donne di Milano’s feminist theorizing lies in
the group’s ‘practice of sexual difference’ which had emerged, not out of
an ahistorical, metaphysical, understanding of sexual difference as an
innate or natural difference between men and women, but out of the
‘particular location, the social and political situatedness’ of the group as
Italian feminists in a sex segregated society (1989: 13). Much like Irigaray’s
work on sexual difference, the Italian group understood this difference, not
in the binaristic terms of Beauvoir’s ‘Self/Other’ dichotomy (in which both
terms are defined through the ‘standard’ of one) but in terms of an irre-
ducible, yet-to-be-articulated difference.
By analysing the group’s own historicization of their emergence, de
Lauretis traces the way in which the group produced a ‘female genealogy
or female symbolic’ through the creation of a conceptual and discursive
space that was distinct from masculine discursive space (1989: 23). With
the creation of a ‘symbolic community’ and the production of particular
figures (notably the ‘symbolic mother’) who act as ‘symbolic mediation’
between the virtual world of women not defined in relation to ‘Woman’,
and the symbolic order of patriarchal society, the group created a ‘differ-
ent production of reference and meaning’ between and for women, rather
than in relation to men (1989: 27). This ‘symbolic community’ of women,

as de Lauretis writes, is ‘at once discovered, invented, and constructed’,

rather than revealed or uncovered (1989: 13).
For de Lauretis, the example of the Italian group shows us how feminist
theories emerge out of the particular socio-historical contexts of the women
who produce them, or what, borrowing from Walter Benjamin, de Lauretis
calls the particular ‘“state of emergency” we find ourselves in’ as women
in a world made by and for men (1989: 27). De Lauretis also sees, in the
genealogical work of the Italian group, a more active and productive
relationship to history, one that does not categorize the history of Italian
feminism, but looks to the past as a generative force in the constitution of
a specific time and space bound conception of sexual difference which
then becomes the basis for articulating a particular way of being feminists
in the world. The post-structuralism versus essentialism debate in Anglo-
American feminist theory, and the construction of a ‘phantom’ essential-
ism in particular, in contrast, reveal a refusal on the part of the feminist
theorists involved to confront the contingencies of their socio-historical
situation as women, and as feminists, in a world that has named them as
such. This refusal leads de Lauretis to suggest at the end of her essay ‘that
what motivates the suspicion, on the part of Anglo-American feminists, of
a feminist essentialism, may be less the risk of essentialism itself than the
further risk which that entails: the risk of challenging directly, the social
symbolic institution of heterosexuality’ (1989: 32). Taking the risk of essen-
tialism seriously, therefore, becomes, on the one hand, a challenge to femi-
nists to be aware of the limitations and experiential realities of the hand
that history has (differently) dealt them, and on the other, to remember the
(second wave) feminist claim of an ‘essential difference’ of women to be
less an assertion of some natural ‘innate’ being-ness of women, and more
a project of a radical re-imagining of the social and cultural domains – a
re-imagining that is part of the process of constituting ‘new social spaces’
and new ‘forms of community’ through which women will form them-
selves as feminists. I would also add that, in her challenge to take ‘the risk
of essentialism seriously’, that is, to take the risk of challenging the ‘social
symbolic institution of heterosexuality’, de Lauretis is also arguing for the
need to confront the possibilities, realized and unrealized, of the re-
imaginings of lesbianism in the early years of the second wave.
‘The something to be done’ in de Lauretis’s confrontation with a fantom
essentialism is evident in the way she reads feminist theory genealogically
as performative, as doing feminism rather than as simply a conceptual
mapping out of feminism. Whereas in Elizabeth Freeman’s essay the figure
of the lesbian operates as a sign of a feminist past that could not be
‘dragged’ into the present, in de Lauretis’s essay the notion of essentialism
can be read symptomatically in Anglo-American feminist theory as a sign,
as another manifestation of the ghostly presence of the feminist-as-lesbian,
that conjures up a screen memory of a particular form of feminism that is
then condemned or dismissed as ‘wrong’. In both cases feminist theory is
doing something other than, or in addition to, what it states it is doing.
Feminist theory doesn’t just present or ‘voice’ a body of intellectual work,
it also produces silences, repressions, and fears that re-appear as signs or

‘ghosts’ in other feminist texts. As something to be done in our looking for

the ghosts of second wave feminism, then, we might need to read the
feminist-as-lesbian as a figure through which a virtual world of non-
heterosexuality was glimpsed and, paradoxically, as a figure through which
the ‘stakes, indeed the investments that feminism may have in the hetero-
sexual institution’ are also glimpsed (de Lauretis, 1989: 33).
Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’
has been the subject of controversy and contest in Anglo-American
feminist theory since it was first published in 1980 – surely a sign of its
affective power, as well as simply intellectual influence on Anglo-
American feminist theory. In response to her critics, Rich published the
essay in her collection Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985,
along with a Foreword in which she explained her reasons for writing the
essay, and an Afterword in which she printed correspondence between
herself and the editors of the Powers of Desire anthology (Ann Snitow,
Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson), who had communicated to her
certain misgivings about the essay. An analysis of the Foreword and After-
word, in conjunction with an analysis of the essay itself, reveals not only
the terms of the debate between Rich and her critics to be ones in which
‘heterosexuality’ and ‘lesbianism’ play a central part, but also the stakes
involved for a feminism that would confront its own project and history.
Responding to her critics, Rich writes that she ‘wanted [“Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”] to suggest new kinds of criticism,
to incite new questions in classrooms and academic journals, and to
sketch, at least, some bridge over the gap between lesbian and feminist’.
She goes on to state that ‘at the very least’, she wanted ‘feminists to find it
less possible to read, write, or teach from a perspective of unexamined
heterocentricity’ (1986: 24). Rich’s formulation of her motives for writing
the essay reveal neither an ‘essentialist’ nor a ‘separatist’ perspective, but
rather a questioning of the ‘object and field of analysis’ of feminist theory,
as de Lauretis would say (1989: 2). More particularly, Rich poses the
problem of an ‘unexamined heterocentricity’ in relation to a larger
question: how can feminist theory ask new questions of the world and the
experiences of women? In asserting the need for a critique of ‘heterocen-
tricity’, Rich isn’t arguing so much for a right way to be feminist or against
‘bad’ feminists, but is, rather, arguing for ‘new kinds of questions’, ques-
tions that will lead to a critical appraisal of those aspects of our existence
as women that have remained, so far, ‘unexamined’.
Rich’s explanation of her reasons for writing ‘Compulsory Heterosexual-
ity and Lesbian Existence’ is consistent with her published responses to
the questions posed by the editors of Powers of Desire. As the questions
from Snitow, Stansell and Thompson make clear, their primary concern
with the essay was Rich’s conception of a ‘lesbian continuum’, and her use
of the notion of ‘false consciousness’. The lesbian continuum, they wrote,
implies the reduction of different experiences to ‘sameness’ (female friend-
ship = lesbianism, penetration = rape), while ‘false consciousness’ implies
that straight women suffer from ‘wrong’ thinking when they sleep with
men (as quoted in Rich, 1986: 69). For Snitow, Stansell and Thompson, the

explanatory power of Rich’s essay is weakened by her assumption of a

simplistic dichotomy between ‘good feminism’ (lesbian feminism) and
‘bad feminism’ (straight feminism). Yet, for Rich, the criticisms put forward
by the three editors miss (purposefully?) the larger point of her essay. In
their eagerness to address the problematic nature of notions like ‘false
consciousness’, they evade rather than confront Rich’s central argument:
that feminists need to find ways to theorize and explain the ways in which
women are coerced into their dominated state, what Rich terms the ‘real,
identifiable system of heterosexual propaganda’ (1986: 71). Notions such
as ‘lesbian continuum’ and ‘false consciousness’, while problematic,
should, Rich claims, first of all be recognized as attempts to theorize what
has ‘glided so silently into the foundations of our thought’: the unexam-
ined ‘assumption of female heterosexuality’ (1983: 182).
Like de Lauretis, Rich understands her essay, and by implication all
works of feminist theory, to be performative rather than descriptive.
Concepts like the ‘lesbian continuum’, therefore, should be read, not as an
attempt to describe the historicity of the experiential reality of women, or
indeed, of lesbians, but as an attempt to produce that historicity. As
feminist interlocutors conducting a genealogy of ‘our’ feminist past
(whereby ‘our’ is in the process of being constructed rather than assumed),
our questions of Rich’s text should be, not ‘is this lesbianism?’ or ‘is this
feminism?’, but what are the forms of relationship and community being
articulated in Rich’s conception of lesbianism, and how do they help us to
think differently about feminism, women, and their place in the world?
Reading ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ as performa-
tive transforms the meaning and usefulness of the essay despite its some-
times problematic content. While Rich’s evaluation of ‘good’ sex as full of
‘mutuality and integrity’, and ‘bad’ sex as lacking emotion (1983: 185–6),
for example, can be read as ahistorical and/or anti-materialist assumptions
in the essay, her notions of ‘lesbian existence’ and ‘lesbian continuum’
nevertheless provide us with a means to conceptualize a ‘female symbolic
space’ that is both temporally bound and historically constituted.
Rich defines lesbian existence as the ‘fact of the historical presence of
lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence’, and
the lesbian continuum as the presence of ‘woman-identified experiences’
throughout history that may or may not include sexual relations (1983:
186). As Rich herself writes, to assert the existence of lesbians and to
promote a ‘lesbian continuum’ is ‘to take the step of questioning hetero-
sexuality’ as a natural or given phenomenon. This questioning, while
requiring great ‘intellectual and emotional work’ not to mention ‘courage’,
will result in ‘a freeing-up of thinking, the exploring of new paths, the shat-
tering of another great silence’ (1983: 186). That is to say, Rich does not
assert lesbian existence and a lesbian continuum as a known phenomenon
or premeditated path of idealized relationships between women, but as a
‘leap’ into the unknown. Yet, as Rich also writes, that leap should not take
place over the ‘tasks and struggles of here and now’, over the ‘actualities
within which women have experienced sexuality’, but through a careful
‘intellectual and emotional’ working through of them (1983: 182), and

through an investigation of, and drawing upon, the history of women,

specifically the history of ‘women who – as witches, femme seules,
marriage resisters, spinsters, autonomous widows, and/or lesbians – have
managed on varying levels not to collaborate’ (1983: 180).
Rich’s conception of lesbian existence and a lesbian continuum, then,
has more to do with a ‘community’ of women that is ‘at once discovered,
invented, and constructed’, to use de Lauretis’s words, than it has to do
with the claiming of the innate being-ness, and sameness, of women. As
Rich writes, the idea of a lesbian continuum allows us to ‘connect’
instances of ‘woman-identification’ that are ‘diverse’ and ‘disparate’. The
key word here is ‘connect’. Rich does not argue for an equivalence between
different episodes, places and times of woman-identified experience, but
for the production of a relationship between them; the fact of lesbian exist-
ence is always bound to ‘our continuing creation of the meaning of that
existence’ (1983: 195). It is up to us as feminists to articulate and make
connections between different women in different times and places. And
it is through such work that feminists will create a ‘female symbolic space’
that is articulated in resistance to the dominant symbolic space – the space
of heteronormativity.
In her conception of lesbianism, Rich works with, and elaborates upon,
the re-articulations of lesbianism that formed a part of the feminist
project(s) of the early second wave. She articulates lesbianism as a practice
of transformation in which the invention and creation of new relation-
ships, new communities, and new social/cultural and political bonds
between women are produced as potential means to a future difference for
women. Moreover, she understands that that future difference will come
from resisting the trap of heterosexuality as a socio-symbolic institution,
and from women becoming strange in relation to the norms of sex and
gender roles in their particular, historically bound, socio-cultural contexts.
Witches, femme seules, spinsters, the mythic mannish lesbian, the
butch-femme couple, and, I would add, the feminist-as-lesbian figure, are
all spectres of a feminist resistance in Rich’s construction of a feminist
‘symbolic space’. The genealogical relationship to the feminist past
promoted by de Lauretis and exemplified in the work of Rich also allows
us to look for the figure of the feminist-as-lesbian, as exemplified in the
‘return’ of Kate Millett for example, within the context of a history of
feminist resistance to, and challenge of, the socio-symbolic space of hetero-
normativity. By re-incorporating her into the ongoing elaboration of a
feminist symbolic space, the figure of the feminist-as-lesbian becomes a
sign of the possibilities – unrealized as well as realized – of second wave
feminism. She becomes a sign, for example, of that movement’s challenge
to heterosexuality as a socio-cultural institution, and a sign of that
movement’s resistance to the claims of the normal, the mainstream, and
the legitimate. She becomes a sign of how, in the early years of the second
wave women’s movement, a significant collectivity of women became
consciously, actively, and visibly strange in relation to the socio-cultural
norms of their particular, historically bound moment.

Conclusion
The first quote offered at the beginning of this essay comes from Flying
(1990), Kate Millett’s autobiography of her participation in the women’s
liberation movement. I use it to begin the article because it captures the
present tense of a feminism keenly anticipating a future difference while
simultaneously fearing the aliveness of an ever present past. The image of
women ‘standing up new and huge with beginnings’ while the past ‘jiggles
underfoot’ evokes the precariousness of the feminist project at any one
moment or place in time: the sense of hope and possibility for something
new that is always vulnerable to being ‘capsized’ by the power of what is
already known and thought. The second wave women’s movement was an
attempt, by many different women, to stand up ‘new and huge with begin-
nings’. That the movement’s various ambitions for the future did not
always survive the undercurrents of established ways of being and
knowing cannot be debated. What haunts feminism today are the unreal-
ized possibilities inherent to those failed ambitions. It is important for us
to remember, therefore, that, among other things, part of the ‘standing up
new and huge with beginnings’ in the second wave movement entailed
taking the risk, as Mary Russo writes in the second of my quotes chosen to
begin this essay, of ‘losing one’s femininity’, of ‘alienating men’, and of
making ‘a spectacle of oneself’. The feminist-as-lesbian figure, as a ghost
of the recent feminist past, grew out of that risk-taking.
To have a haunted relationship to the feminist past is to know that ‘the
second wave’ is still present in contemporary US feminism, not as a neatly
packaged legacy handed down from one generation to the other, nor as the
clearly defined ‘origin’ for present feminist concerns, but as a ‘thing’ – a
not entirely comprehensible or articulable presence in contemporary US
feminist discourse that is both unsettled and unsettling, and which,
because of that unsettledness, produces ghosts or spectres that are the signs
of what has remained repressed, forgotten, yet still alive about ‘second
wave feminism’. The feminist-as-lesbian is not the only ghost of the recent
feminist past, nor have I, in this essay, done more than begin to uncover
what she wants us to remember. Yet, we need, in our differing ways, to
read her as one sign of the contested and contingent unsettledness of
second wave feminism in the present. In other words, I would argue that
in our attempts to trace the historicity of feminism, or what Drucilla
Cornell calls, ‘the historical meaning given to the category feminism’ (1995:
148), we need to look for and confront the ghosts. And in the case of the
second wave in particular, we need to return to the emergent moments of
the second wave and trace their effects and affects in the present. The
feminist-as-lesbian is one such affect; we need to ask who she is and what
she may be telling us.
Notes
1. Gordon’s phrase is slightly different resulting in a different political, if
not methodological, emphasis: she ‘follows the ghosts’ (1997: 22). To look
for the ghosts (of the feminist past), rather than to follow them, suggests

the need to argue for their existence as a form of historical memory –

something which, for many complicated reasons including, most
prominently, the desire by feminist historians to make manifest a history
that is often forgotten, might be resisted by many feminists. After all, part
of the long struggle of feminism has been to demand not just a political,
but also a cultural and historical presence that is as ‘real’ as any other
social movement or political event. My argument here is that in order to
make manifest the presence of feminism historically, culturally, and
socially, we have to confront the ways it has been made to disappear –
even when, and perhaps especially when, feminists have participated in
the disappearing.
2. See Christopher Castiglia’s work on counternostalgia and
countermemories of the gay male past in ‘Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex
Memories’, for a discussion of the circulation between subcultural and
supercultural realms of counternostalgic memories of a pre-Aids gay past.
Castiglia (2000) argues quite persuasively that it is in the circulation of
representations and stories between the subcultural and supercultural
that amnesias about ‘our’ (in Castiglia’s case the gay American male) past
are produced.
3. I’m also thinking here of ‘the waves’ theory of feminist history, and the
idea that feminism has developed from the naïveté of essentialist identity
politics in the 1970s to the complexity of ‘difference’ in the 1980s. For
schematic presentations of second wave feminist history see Echols
(1989). And for a schematic presentation of second wave feminist theory
see Nicholson (1997). A useful and illuminating analysis of recent
feminist formations of time can be found in Kavka (2002) and Wiegman
(2000).
4. See Brown (1999), and Robyn Wiegman’s (2000) analysis of Brown’s
essay, for a discussion of the way in which melancholia often structures
Left and feminist relationships to their respective ‘activist’ pasts.
5. For Gordon one such ghost is Sabina Spielrein, a young woman from
Russia who became a patient of Jung’s. Spielrein was the first person to
write on the death drive, and is now a forgotten figure in the history of
psychoanalysis. According to Gordon, the forgetting of Spielrein is an
effect of Jung’s and Freud’s patriarchal elision of her contribution to
psychoanalysis, and also a sign of the refusal of psychoanalysis, and
especially Freud, to engage with the social (see Gordon, 1997: 33–60).
6. Unlike the later reincarnation of the feminist-as-lesbian figure, during the
early 20th century the representative power of the lesbian was limited,
especially in relation to feminism. As Laura Doan argues very
persuasively in Fashioning Sapphism, knowledge of lesbianism was
‘never common’ before the 1928 obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness
in England (2001: xiv). And even after the trial, representations of
lesbianism rarely invoked feminism (certainly not through the figure of
Hall herself). See also Smith-Rosenberg (1989) for the representative
power of the female invert in scientific and medical discourse on
feminism in the early 20th century. See Cott (1987) for an analysis of the
emergence of feminism and its relation to changing conceptions of female
sexuality in the US in the early 20th century.
7. Dyke-baiting was an insistent part of the coverage of the women’s

liberation movement, especially in 1970, the year the movement became a

dominant media story in the US. In May of 1970 the Radicalesbians
issued their now famous position paper, ‘Woman Identified Woman’,
which defined the lesbian as, among other things, ‘the rage of all women
condensed to the point of explosion’. And in December of 1970, Time
maliciously ‘outed’ Kate Millett as bisexual and set in motion a series of
responses in the media and the movement that sought to clarify the
relationship between lesbianism and feminism. The figure of the feminist
as angry, man-hating dyke was born of these events. (See Radicalesbians,
1970, and Time, 1970b: 50.)
8. Alice Echols’ detailed analysis of the rise of radical feminism from 1967
until 1975 includes coverage of Firestone’s activities as a founder of the
Redstockings and the New York Radical Feminists (NYRF). Echols never
identifies Firestone as a lesbian or lesbian feminist. Indeed, both the
Redstockings and NYRF had, according to Echols, a ‘strong “presumption
of heterosexuality”’ running through their politics – at least during
Firestone’s time. Moreover, Firestone dropped out of the women’s
movement entirely in the fall of 1970, before lesbian feminism became a
coherent political standpoint (Echols, 1989: 147). Yet, Freeman suggests
that Firestone did eventually become a lesbian: ‘Finally, Shulie’s status as
not-yet-identified (as “adult woman,” as “feminist,” as “lesbian,” as the
representative or symbol of a complete movement) allows Subrin a point
of entry into the contemporary moment in terms other than “post”’
(Freeman, 2000: 742).
9. On the Issues is no longer published – a further testament, perhaps, to the
fragility of the feminist archive and feminism’s socio-cultural presence.
10. Although at the time of writing the article this may have been true, in
2001 Millett’s book on her mother, Mother Millett, was published by
Verso, and in 2000 the University of Illinois Press re-issued a number of
Millett’s books including Sexual Politics, The Loony-Bin Trip and Sita.
11. I am heavily indebted to King’s conceptualization of feminist history as a
constantly constructed ‘object’, and to her related idea that certain events
and ‘moments’ during the second wave’s early years were the sites of
‘contests for meaning’ in the articulation of US feminisms. One such
moment for King was the contest over the meaning of ‘lesbianism’ in
early second wave feminism (see King, 1994).
12. This personalization can be seen most revealingly in Crawford’s inclusion
of ‘manic-depressive’ in her description of Millett’s contradictoriness,
even though Millett was not diagnosed with manic-depression till the late
1970s, long after the moment Millett first became famous and
controversial.
13. In August of 1970, following the publication of her bestseller, Sexual
Politics, Millett had appeared on the front cover of Time and was
heralded by the magazine in its analysis of the women’s liberation
movement as the ‘Mao Tse-Tung’ of the movement. By December of that
year, however, Millett was accused, by the same magazine, of being the
‘bisexual betrayer’ of the entire movement, an accusation that became a
public spectacle in late 1970/early 1971 as the movement reacted
vociferously to Time’s tactics (see Time, 1970a, 1970b).
14. See the Radicalesbians 1970 position paper, ‘Woman Identified Woman’

(Radicalesbians, 1970). See also Millett’s 1974 autobiography, Flying, for

articulations of lesbianism as a practice of living beyond identities
(Millett, 1990). Other essays and position papers in the early years of the
movement also suggested this notion. See, for example, the collections,
Koedt et al. (1973) and Myron and Bunch (1975). This conceptualization
of lesbianism is not dissimilar to Monique Wittig’s (see Wittig, 1992).
15. See Weedon (1987) and Alcoff (1988). While de Lauretis is impatient with
Weedon’s understanding of essentialism as the unsophisticated precursor
to post-structuralism, her critique of Alcoff’s exploration of the
differences between the two is much more positive and partial. For de
Lauretis, the main problem with Alcoff’s essay lies in her ‘agonistic frame
of argumentation’ which unnecessarily distorts her examination of
different conceptions of feminism by forcing them into two coherent
camps which, in turn, depend upon the provision of a ‘missing premise’
(in the case of cultural feminism, an ‘innate female essence’) that then
provides the reason for their coherency as distinct feminist camps (de
Lauretis, 1989: 12).
References
Alcoff, L. (1988) ‘Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity
Crisis in Feminist Theory’, Signs 13(3): 405–36.
Brown, W. (1999) ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, Boundary 2 26(3): 19–27.
Castiglia, C. (2000) ‘Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories’, Boundary 2
27(2): 149–75.
Castle, T. (1993) The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and
Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cornell, D. (1995) ‘Rethinking the Time of Feminism’, pp. 145–56 in
S. Benhabib, J. Butler, D. Cornell and N. Fraser (eds) Feminist Contentions:
A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge.
Cott, N. (1987) The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press.
Crawford, L. (1999) ‘Kate Millett, the Ambivalent Feminist’, Salon 5 June.
URL: http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/06/05/millet.
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Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain’,
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History 31(4): 727–44.
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pp. 177–205 in A. Snitow, C. Stansell and S. Thompson (eds) Powers of
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Rich, A. (1986) ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’,
pp. 23–75 in A. Rich Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985.
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New Woman, 1870–1936’, pp. 264–80 in M. Duberman, M. Vicinus and
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31(4): 805–25.
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Studies Association Journal 14(2): 18–37.
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D. Heller (ed.) Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of

Alliance. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Victoria Hesford is a Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook. Her fields of interest include cultural memories of
the second wave movement, queer and feminist historiography, and media
studies. This article is part of a larger book project in which she analyses how
the conjuncture of media and feminist representations of feminism during the
emergent moments of the second wave movement produced some of the
cultural figures through which the movement has since become part of
collective cultural memory. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming Feminist
Time Against Nation Time, a collection of essays that explores the tensions
between feminism and nationalism in historical as well as contemporary
times of war, and has also written on the intersections of gender, sexuality,
and conceptions of citizenship and nationness during the Cold War era,
particularly in relation to the work of Patricia Highsmith.
Address: Women’s Studies Program, SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY
11794–3456, USA. Email: vhesford@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

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227

Feminism and its ghosts

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Looking for the ghosts

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142). The purpose of historical inquiry, according to Foucault, should not

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Raymond Williams, calls a ‘structure of feeling’ – a sensual knowing, or

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wave feminism, therefore, speak to me in a way that is inevitably shaped

The ghost of the feminist-as-lesbian

[temporal drag], as opposed to the queenlier kind celebrated in queer cultural

Here, Freeman is describing a representation of the relationship between

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feminist, the lesbian stands as a representational figure of past feminist

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The ‘return’ of Kate Millett

Millett’s portrait is of a ‘generation’ of women who, having risked the

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accurate, nor adequate, commentary on the current state of feminism in the

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absolute or singular sexual or political identity. Indeed, rather than

‘The something to be done’

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In ‘The Essence of the Triangle’ Teresa de Lauretis takes a ‘more discern-

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as de Lauretis writes, is ‘at once discovered, invented, and constructed’,

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‘ghosts’ in other feminist texts. As something to be done in our looking for

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explanatory power of Rich’s essay is weakened by her assumption of a

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through an investigation of, and drawing upon, the history of women,

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the need to argue for their existence as a form of historical memory –

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liberation movement, especially in 1970, the year the movement became a

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(Radicalesbians, 1970). See also Millett’s 1974 autobiography, Flying, for

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Freeman, E. (2000) ‘Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations’, New Literary

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D. Heller (ed.) Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of

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