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The Feminism-Lesbianism Relationship in Latin America: A Necessary Link Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso Translated by Joan Flores A Personal Journey of Feminism and Lesbianism W  to my colleagues who have always tried to deny the relationship between feminism and lesbianism, I must confess a real inability to subscribe to any political concept of feminism that dispenses with this link. This is [. . .] perhaps [. . .] personal [. . .] because [. . .] the politics of feminism to which I have subscribed since the beginning, and in which I still believe today, even at this point in the dissolution of the movement, cannot be thought of without the existence of lesbians; in the same way, the lesbian politics that interest me [. . .] cannot be thought of outside of feminist theory and practice. To deny or hide the link between these would be to deny my own history, my own foundation. The feminist theory and practice that I encountered in the late s [. . .] created a series of unexpected cataclysmic consequences in me. A familiarization with the theory, coupled with deep reflection about my own attachments [. . .] sparked an inquisitiveness [. . .] that led me to question my own desire. From there, dissident love was only a step away. In that moment, and still today, I felt that the path I had chosen could not have been another. For me, the reinscribing of desire itself was the biggest challenge, the ultimate liberation. 401 Mitilene [. . .] was the most radically feminist group that existed in the Dominican Republic in the s. It was thanks to its existence that I nourished myself with that idea of feminism that I call an “experience of subjectivation” () [. . .] And it was thanks to this feminism that I found and developed a lesbian desire as a sexual politics , and took pleasure in resistance. I sincerely believe that radical feminist politics and practice unavoidably lead you to “a choice for women,” which tends to have as one of its consequences the development of a not at all insignificant lesbian erotic, and therein lies one of the problems faced by feminists who oppose the lesbianization of the movement. I have the sense that this experience of feminism as a journey to another place, as a resubjectivation, is an experience through which many of us have recovered our love for other women, once lost in our first infancy. In the early s, we began to perceive a change. [. . .] Feminism was not the same, and now there was no space for the countercultural politics in which lesbians [. . .] became a standard, though marginal, of discourse and practice. A new agenda of human and sexual rights began to appear on the international stage, heralding a space of articulation for the so-called sexual minorities. It was called the lesbian, gay, transvestite, transgender, and bisexual movement. In a time when lesbians ceased to be embraced by an increasingly heterocentric feminism, which, in a search for legitimization,kept pointing out the difference between being a feminist and being a lesbian, the  movement was the new site of affiliation for many lesbians. Though the first groups of homosexuals began to mobilize throughout the continent starting in the late s,it wasn’t until the s and late s that the movement began to have an international outlook. This movement, which aggregated different sexual identities and focused on the demand for recognition raised by Nancy Fraser (), had formalized as such in the U.S. and began to gestate in Latin America. [. . .] With a strong push from financing agents, a new agenda was defined for lesbians, homogenized and diluted into that of other groups of dissident sexuality. Lesbians, driven by and contained in an increasingly fragmented discourse that considered di- fferent oppressions separately, particularly patriarchal oppression and heterosexist sexual oppression, were placed in the common fight for the right to inclusion through access to health and health care ( the fight against /), antidiscriminatory legislation , and the right to marry and to maternity and paternity. Encounters, congresses, and seminars kept calling [. . .] the movement a “community .” My ever-increasing closeness to theory and my subscription to feminist lesbian politics led me to venture into these spaces, as well as into the new institutionalized feminist space, where I have always been a type of dissonant voice, a kind of “problem .” [. . .] Along with the pain at what is practically the disappearance of the lesbian figure from the feminist ambit, it has been a dagger to the heart to observe the evolution of the  movement,through which,once again,the lesbian,become woman...

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