Whatever Happened to Feminist Critiques of Monogamy?

A short archive of the Feminist Seventies Conference
Centre for Women's Studies, University of York, England
27th April 2002


Revisiting the best-selling confessional novels of the 1970s
Mary Joannou

The best selling 'classics' of the women's movement including Lisa Alther's Kinflicks, Anja Meulenbelt's The Shame is Over, Kate Millet's Sita, Marilyn French's The Woman's Room, Rita Mae Brown's Ruby Fruit Jungle and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying originate din the United States. But they were read and discussed by countless women in Britain and throughout the world. This workshop will explore a number of questions relating to the feminist sexual confessionals of the 1970s: Why were they read so avidly? What kinds of relationships between cultural analysis, consciousness-raising and political praxis do such novels suggest? Was the feminist best-seller a contradiction at a time when feminists themselves were often pilloried? Was the expression of sexual desire fiction written by women (heterosexual as well as lesbian) liberating per se? and did this have different meanings for men and for women? To what extent were these novels able to politicise women as part of a process of consciousness-raising?

This workshop will be based on ideas developed in my recent book on women's writing, Contemporary Women's Writing from The Golden Notebook to The Color Purple (2001). I hope to circulate extracts from some of the above novels for discussion and that other women will wish to talk about the fiction which influenced them, perhaps bringing their own books or extracts. I want to ask how well the feminist confessionals have survived after they have been cut adrift from their moorings in the women's movement? I am particularly interested in the responses to this fiction of younger women who may not have been born in the 1970s.



Whatever Happened to Feminist Critiques of Monogamy?
Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott

During the 1970s (hetero)sexuality was identified as a key site of women's subordination. Feminists sought to enhance women's sexual autonomy, to secure the right to define our own sexualities, to resist sexual coercion and exploitation, to contest male-defined definitions of sexual pleasures and practices and to explore our own desires. One central feature of these debates, which is now frequently forgotten, was an emergent critique of monogamy that cut across other differences (between lesbians and straight women, between self-defined socialist and radical feminists). Drawing critically on the ideas of the sexual revolution and on older socialist and egalitarian traditions, as well as on more recent analyses of patriarchal relations, monogamy was questioned as a cornerstone of patriarchal privilege, enshrining men's rights over women's bodies, and as central to an ideology of romantic love through which women's compliance was secured. More radically, it was seen as antithetical to egalitarian sexual relations: it reduced human beings to property, promoted destructive emotions such as jealousy and emotional dependency as positive proofs of 'love' and impoverished our wider social relations. In this paper we will chart the rise and fall of feminist critiques of monogamy, question how and why these ideas came to be sidelined in subsequent debates about sexuality, despite the decline of life-long monogamy as a way of life within the general population. In particular we will focus on the ways in which feminists have unwittingly bought into some commonsense ideas about sexuality that were once questioned: in particular the 'specialness' of sexual relationships, the idea that sexual intimacy is somehow superior to all other forms of intimacy, that 'fidelity' in relationships is synonymous with sexual exclusivity. Finally we will suggest ways of reformulating a contemporary critique of monogamy.

Revolution and Assimilation:
The Cultural Work of U.S. 1970s Lesbian Fiction
Yvonne Keller

Teresa de Lauretis argues that pro-lesbian critics and artists must "redefin[e] the conditions of vision" to make lesbians representable, and insists that this is a quite difficult endeavour. This paper takes up and specifies her argument by looking at U.S. (and U.S.-published) lesbian experimental fiction of the 1970s-the blossoming of a radical and prolific fiction of liberation within the context of the women's and gay liberation movements-to unpack the complicated issues of autonomy, resistance, and assimilation by contrasting formally experimental with non-experimental novels on the multiperspectival theme of vision.

I argue that autonomous, inassimilable lesbian representation, that which Bertha Harris calls "great," is both impossible and necessary. In the end, I show how the bold strangeness and disorienting qualities of works such as those by Monique Wittig and Bertha Harris combined with the high sales of "positive" images such as that of Rita Mae Brown and Isabel Miller helped create a cultural politics of difference that allowed the culture and lesbians to "see" lesbians differently. I argue that, while still caught inescapably in dominant ways of representing the Other (invisibility, spectacularization), the work of the 1970s uses, rejects, and improves on the lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s and early sixties that preceded it, specifically in terms of the structures of looking, thereby broadening immeasurably the possible modes of lesbian representation.