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3 “There Are No Lesbians Here”: Lesbianisms, Feminisms, and Global Gay Formations
- NYU Press
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3 “There Are No Lesbians Here” Lesbianisms, Feminisms, and Global Gay Formations Katie King “There are no lesbians here.” Who might make such a statement and for what intellectual and political purposes? What counts as a lesbian? Where is “here”? Struggles with the meanings of this statement and its corollary questions today signal an intersection of feminism, lesbian and gay studies, and globalization processes. Can the term “lesbian” (or can other wordings) be used at this historic moment as a meta-term, a structural category laboriously produced as a new universal , plucked from its local particularisms and strategically deployed as the sign under which divergent local sexualities and specific alternative social arrangements can be displayed? Is this possible in an anti-essentialist feminist politics? How would various politics of naming produce responses to the statement “There are no lesbians here”? Productive Instabilities and Contests for Universals Some feminists, lesbians, human rights activists, and others have worked hard to produce just such a “global” category, in at least two meanings of the word “global.” Activists from a variety of global regions came together in preparation for the UN’s Beijing Conference (the Fourth World Conference on Women, 4–15 33 September 1995, Beijing, China), drafting regional versions of the projected Platform for Action precisely to construct this new global category. With its moral dimensions drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a multination response to the genocide and other war crimes of World War II, the document and the project to include lesbianism as a human rights issue are shadowed by Enlightenment humanism and politically mobilized within globalization processes activating individualism in neoliberal economic relationships of power and labor. Evidence of human rights abuses was provided by testimonies gathered by activists ; for example, the report Unspoken Rules: Sexual Orientation and Women’s Human Rights was compiled by the U.S.-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), in partnership with other groups, such as ABIGALE in South Africa, Chadra Kirana in Indonesia, NVIH COC in the Netherlands , El Closet de Sor Juana in Mexico, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights in the United States. (Rosenbloom 1995). At the eleventh hour (actually 4:30 A.M. on the last day of the conference) the phrase “sexual orientation,” the phrase around which all this planning and preparation had finally coalesced, was stricken from the closing version of the Platform for Action (see discussion in Reinfelder 1996, 20ff). Constructing universals, stabilizing contested categories, is labor-intensive political work, sometimes only too ephemeral or situational, other times only too compromised within the materialities both constraining and enabling their construction. So actually in this particular context it was the phrase “sexual orientation” that was offered as the new universal, not the word “lesbian.” What would count as this universal term is differently inflected by the various human rights groups, strategically and in relation to particular constituencies. In its report intended for presentation at Beijing, the IGLHRC uses the term “lesbian” unproblematically, since its concern in Unspoken Rules is to focus on abuses, extensively documented for legitimate challenge within a particular legal and moral framework, rather than on the issues of “local variation” among sexual practices and political identities . Elsewhere, the draft Platform for Action for Beijing from the European and North American region used phrases such as “single women” and “women who are not attached to men” as alternative paraphrases, in response to arguments that Eastern European women would not identify themselves as “lesbians” (Reinfelder 1996, 10). Both “lesbian” and “feminist” have local and global meanings for particular nationalisms and challenges to nationalism by women. Using them as global terms is a political act. Refusing them as global terms is also a political act. No uses KATIE KING 34 [44.202.90.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:24 GMT) are neutral and purely descriptive, although some users intend them to be and long for such possible categories. Contests over metalanguage and object languages here, that is, over the languages talked about (object languages) and the languages used to do that talking about (metalanguages), over etic and emic categories , are material and activist, not only theoretical and abstract. Etic categories are broad, structural, analytic categories, which present themselves as descriptive rather than prescriptive. They facilitate abstract comparison by structure and function, but also produce new subjects and subjectivities within particular epistemic regimes, that is, within institutionalized powers of regulation and control. Emic categories are the ones used by “the people themselves...