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to understand the And I'm... week we're taking a deep dive into all things sapphic but first marcel i want to talk about our relationship to Labels for sexuality. Like just in general or like? Nope, our own. I want to know how you identify when you came to identify that way and what your relationship is to it. I'm sorry, is your eyeball bleeding?
I knew that I wouldn't have described myself as a chaotic bisexual at the time that I understood my sexuality, but I did know that I was bisexual. But chaotic was subtext. Chaotic was subtext. I didn't yet understand that I could embrace the chaos. And I knew that to be the case when I was in grade eight. And silly me, I thought that it would be okay for me to come out to my family and friends. It wasn't. It was not okay. And because of how poorly that went, both among family.
and friends, I then proceeded to bury my sexuality deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down where it couldn't get me. You said, shh, never mind about that.
Actually, takes these back. Cancel! Undo! Control Z. And then I proceeded to, like... be very very private about my sexuality with a few like tiny exceptions until I was in like my fourth year of my undergrad when a bunch of my queer friends like kept making references to me being straight and I was like You guys, I'm not straight.
And I think also because of this, part of me really feels like I missed out on a lot of opportunities to fuck around and find out in my early 20s because I was afraid of dating anybody who wasn't a man. And, uh, yeah, here I am. How did you encounter the term bisexual? Like, how did you know that that was?
the one for you? That's a really good question. I don't really remember because what I can tell you is that in an effort to out as bisexual I got a lot of like people accusing me of being a lesbian and a dyke so like those terms were hurled back at me so it makes the history there a little bit confusing Did I say it wrong? Did I not say it loudly enough? I don't know. Grade 8 Marcel. I'm sorry, did I stutter? I said bisexual, not lesbian. Can you tell by how I sit in this chair?
Can't you tell by my button-up floral blouse? So I don't know, probably from movies. Honestly, I watched like very grown up movies from a very young age because my mom didn't hide movies from me. And that's why you shouldn't let kids watch. grown-up media. They start tossing around terms like bisexual. Yeah, so that's me. How about you, Hannah? Oh, man. Fraught. Fry.
Yeah, yeah. I think that I started identifying as queer in my master's. I remember having a conversation with my friend Vanessa where I was like, I think I might be queer. And she was like, oh, thank God. Are we finally not pretending that's not true? wow but like i'd had a complicated relationship to it previously i think like a lot of people who were closeted for a lot of their youth right which is that like I definitely knew I wasn't straight, but I wanted to be straight because
I wanted to be normal and to live a happy life. And those were the possibilities that I saw in front of me. Yeah. And I read about this in A Sentimental Education, but my high school best friend, her mother was... a lesbian and in fact was the chair of ottawa pride when we were in high school so i was like spending a lot of time as a teenager in queer community like marching in the pride parade going to the dances hanging out with a lot of queer adults
So both sort of like really feeling at home in that community and also this friend suggested to me at one point that perhaps I should date. women because being fat made me undesirable to men, but women cared less about appearance. What the fuck? Yeah, so that really sort of like tangled up my whole relationship to like attraction to women and gender non-conforming folks
because it was positioned as a hierarchy, right? Like, the best thing to be is straight. The best kind of people to date are straight men. But you're not good enough to date straight men, so... You should go down the ladder a little bit. And that, as you can imagine, sort of messed me up for a while. And then, you know, it wasn't until my postdoc, in fact, all of my great sexual awakenings happened in the city of Edmonton. What does that mean?
Because I came out as queer in Edmonton and I came out as asexual and aromantic in Edmonton. So I don't know, something about the prairies really... really set something aflame within me. It's those wide open skies. But it wasn't until then that I like realize that i could be asexual and queer and could name those things like the relief
of finally finding language that felt like it explained, not even to other people, just to me. Like that I could explain to myself what who i who i was like the relief of having words for it
And I think about this a lot because do you know how much the queer youth love a flag? Like the really young youth, like the tweens and teens. Okay. Like are very into like... identifying like I am a demi boy gray sexual like very specific gender and sexuality language and there's a lot of flags for all of them and it's like this developing vocabulary to, like,
name specific things about yourself and i hear a little bit of like oh you know the kids these days and their obsession with labels um and there's part of me that's just like god but sometimes it's such a relief yeah like it's such a relief to find a word to use for how you feel.
It never ceases to amaze me how helpful it is to, like, learn the language to describe what you want, who you are, what you like, how you do, you know? Or, as has often been the case in queer community, to invent a language for how you are. Yes, precisely. Yeah, so have fun. Speaking of inventing terms for who we are, let's talk about sapphic.
It's time for Why This, Why Now? The segment that asks the materialist question, what are, or were, the historical, ideological, and material conditions for our object of study to become zeitgeisty? And today we are asking a straightforward but also delightfully complex question. What's up with the rising use of the word?
sapphic. Now, this is definitely a trend I've noticed in my day-to-day life, but I encounter it almost entirely through the subgenre of sapphic fantasy. Oh, interesting. And before I talk more about sapphic literary genres. Marcel, have you encountered? in your own day-to-day life, the rising use of the word sapphic? Yes, yes, but largely as an observer of internet.
discourse. So I have seen lots of people who I assume are younger than me using the term sapphic to describe femme femme sexual desire or femme femme relationships of sorts so so do you mean femme as in the sort of sub-identity of lesbianism or do you mean like largely women identifying people, but maybe not women. So as a geriatric millennial, when I first started encountering the term sapphic,
it seemed to me that the folks who were using it were using it to replace what I would have used the word lesbian to mean. And because I... want to be the kind of open-minded geriatric millennial, I then... made further assumptions that I couldn't know what the sexuality of the people using the term sapphic mean, but it definitely did not involve 6 men Yeah, from what I can tell.
One thing we can say about the sapphic, for all of its complexity, cis men don't belong here. I think also trans men don't belong there either. That one, I think there's a little bit more debate on, but we will get into it, because it is. Part of the ongoing conversation about what sapphic means. Okay. The conversations that I've had with some non-binary friends has also been like, oh, I do not feel included in sapphic. which is interesting because the reading I have done
complicates that. Which isn't to say that those people are wrong, but it's to say that it's an actively evolving term. What's interesting about sapphic is it's certainly not a new term. It's as old as the word lesbian is.
and has a sort of parallel history so according to the oxford english dictionary the word sapphic has been around since the 16th century though originally it just meant quote, designating a poetic meter and a related poetic verse form associated with the ancient Greek poet Sappho circa 610 to
570 BC, end quote. Okay. So sapphic literally meant, like, the poetry of sappho. I mean, obviously. Of course. I didn't take on the association with, like... female same-sex desire okay until the 18th century which is also when lesbian took on the connotation of female same-sex desire. Because previously, lesbian just meant from lesbos, the island that Sappho was from. Right. Okay, what happened in the 18th century?
that linked Sappho and the island of Lesbos to ladies smoochin' ladies. In short, the discovery of some new fragments of Sappho's poetry that seemed gay. Was Sappho a gay lady?
I mean, we don't know historically, right, that all we have of the history of Sappho is like some fragments of her poetry and some ways other like contemporaries but also like people sort of shortly after her discussed her work Historians of sexuality generally say that it's like profoundly anachronistic to assign the label of homosexuality to people like 2000-ish years before homosexuality became a...
category right this is like Foucault on the sort of the history of like the invention of homosexuality as a category is linked to its becoming illegal essentially yeah You can't criminalize something unless you have a label for it. You can't criminalize something unless you have a label for it. And it was also, you know, associated with... Like mental degeneracy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And looking back at ancient Greece, like a lot of people were doing stuff.
that in the 21st century we would call gay. Sure. But it is anachronistic to call it gay then. But what we can say about Sappho is that she was a woman poet and she was writing poetry that was about... loving women okay there's been various forms of historical nonsense attempting to make sense of it but she wrote some poems that were pretty gay and she became this like major touch point especially for other women interested in women and the term sapphic and lesbian
Both came to mean women being erotically attracted to other women. That happens in the 18th century. They weren't erotically attracted to one another before the 18th century? No, they just didn't use that term. Oh, okay. Okay. Good. It's just not what lesbian or sapphic meant. Okay. I think ladies have been doing ladies since ladies existed.
i mean you're probably right i'm probably right anyway lesbian was the term that stuck but we looked at the google ngram to see how like sapphic has this like major uptick in the last five years or so lesbian has a much larger uptick in the late 20th century. And if you look at the two of them next to each other, it's like the uptick in sapphic is nothing on the rise of the term lesbian.
Good for her. Yeah, right? But lesbian didn't become particularly widespread, right? Until like the 1960s with the rise of lesbian feminism as part of the radical feminist movement. Okay. Which gave the word like... much more widespread visibility as a term for female same-sex desire. Okay, so to sort of recap, sapphic and lesbian have a very clear shared origin, but... Suffic up until recently was like left in the dust because lesbian was such a cool word to use.
the best people can do is theorize about why one took off and the other didn't. One person I read suggested that it was because Lesbians suggested a sort of community identity. Oh, because you're from the island of Lesbo. where a sapphic was like associated with one particular person right so it's like the slightly more collective term is the one that took root but that's you know hypothetical
To be clear, lesbian is still significantly more widely used than sapphic. It's just that sapphic has seen... uptick in the past like five five-ish years okay and you know google ngram which like can be a useful way to track language it is tracking language across books oh yeah google ngram is based on the google book
archive. Oh, that's so interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. So it's always going to be delayed trend over actual language use okay yeah so like lesbian sort of takes hold in the 60s but it doesn't show the uptick in the google engram until the 1980s okay which is like when people start reading books about lesbians
There were probably censors that wouldn't let them before, though, is the thing. Yeah, or it just wasn't the language that they were using, right? Like, because it's associated with this particular... political movement like the surge of lesbianism right associated with this like radical feminist movement but we will get into that more we will talk about that that history more the uptick in the use of the word sapphic
you know, beyond having the n-gram evidence, my other best evidence, you know, other than the anecdotal, like we've all observed it, is how many other queer people have also observed it. So I found a 2021 auto straddle explainer, a 2022 them explainer, a 2023 article in the Mary Sue.
about the rise of sapphic fantasy specifically and then like so many reddit threads okay where people are talking about like hey has anybody else noticed that people are using sapphic now what's up with that okay okay So you mentioned the rise of sapphic fantasy. And so are we going to focus on sapphic fantasy? We're going to come back to that?
We're not going to focus on it, but I do want to talk about it briefly because that's... where my exposure to the sapphic surge has happened and so that's where my research began I sort of was like oh is this a term that comes out of fandom so actually the very first thing I did when preparing for this episode was to email Laura Fitzgerald, Senior Marketing and Publicity Manager at DABA.
And they had sent me a publicity email that referred to a new novel as sapphic cozy horror. And I was like, I emailed back. I've never responded to an email from this person before. I emailed back and was like, Hey, sorry if this is weird, but can we talk about the rise of the use of the word sapphic as a sort of descriptor for genre fiction? Did they reply? Yeah, they sure did. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, very generously.
So in their response, they pointed me to that piece I mentioned in the Mary Sue about something called the sapphic trifecta. Oh, I love that. That sounds gay. Tell me about that. The sapphic trifecta refers to three fantasy novels, all with lesbian main characters. that came out over four months in 2021. There was The Unbroken by C.L. Clark, She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan, and The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri. And as Laura explained in their email, these three books, quote,
created this perfect moment in BookTok and Bookstagram communities that had a really participatory quality to it. BookTok. BookTok, right? So there's like these three books. They all have like really similar... palette covers like they all had sort of like gold, ochre, orangey covers.
So it became this thing like you want to get the three books. You want to like display them on BookTok. You want to like recommend other books that are similar to it, right? They get marketed together all the time. They become this sort of... trend there's such a hit that they spawn this like new trend in sapphic fantasy and sapphic genre fiction in general with this enthusiastic online following particularly of like
queer people in their 20s okay so the way that you're describing it sapphic is like a kind of genre category but why sapphic instead of lesbian or queer, more generally. Yeah, and that's the question, isn't it? And when I went looking for an answer... I realized that sapphic fantasy, while it was my entry point into the whole conversation, is actually more symptom than cause. Say more about that. What's the cause? Okay, don't rush me. Next, I went to auto straddle to see what they had to say.
So the author of their explainer, Chandra, did something really fascinating. This is 2021, right? Like it's early on the trend. So they pulled their own community to better understand how queer people were using and understanding the use of.
the word sapphic and they came up with a couple of really interesting findings so they found that sapphic was much more likely to be used by people in their 20s and more likely to be used to describe events or behaviors or things rather than people okay Because lesbianism is such a shitty word. Sorry. We're going to come back to that. We're going to come back to that. So like in that context, right?
sapphic fantasy being popular among book talkers makes sense. It's describing a thing rather than people. It's a community that skews younger, etc. But Chandra also points out that in 2021, the implications were still actively being worked out. So like one respondent said,
that they thought being used in relationships where one partner is bisexual and the couple didn't want to erase that person's bisexuality by calling the relationship lesbian. Oh, interesting. Okay. So they would call the relationship sapphic. Okay. Others, I think a few others, suggested that it was more inclusive of non-binary people than lesbian was. Okay. Marcel, will you read this conclusion from the Autostraddle article for us? Quote, Suffolk
clearly isn't yet free of all ambiguity itself. But as someone who gets a thrill out of learning how words evolve, I'm rather excited to see what happens to it over the next 10 years. It's not every day that you get to witness this particular kind of linguistic phenomenon occurring. An established, even antiquated word gaining new versatility in a different context. On a personal note, I like the idea of sapphic as a non-binary friendly umbrella term.
It fits my own nebulous identities well, so I'm rooting for that particular definition to continue its upward trajectory. End quote. Okay, so in 2021... what sapphic means to queer people was still being actively worked out.
absolutely but people like it i mean some people like it like people that they surveyed in their 40s were like no thanks we already have a word for this it's lesbian right There was also a tendency for younger people to more strongly associate it with being inclusive of non-binary identities, whereas... older queer people were more likely to see it as less gender inclusive.
So... intriguingly as the term continues to get worked out the trends gender identified in 2021 continue so on the one hand it continues to be a label associated more with things than with people and on the other hand continues to be deployed as a term that's seen as more expansive and inclusive than lesbian. That's definitely the argument that Yasmin Hamu makes in their explainer. in Them magazine, published in 2022. Could you read this quote from that piece for us, Marcel? Quote.
Sapphic is an umbrella term that includes lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual, trans-femmes, mass- non-binary folks, and cis women. Yet, unlike these sexualities, sapphic strives to conjure an experience more akin to an intention toward attraction. one oriented less to any specific gender identity and more to the fullness of a potential lover's humanity, end quote. Okay, so in this sense, sapphic is like a vibe.
Yeah, that's literally what they call it in the piece, quote, a vibe of queer love. I understand vibe. Yeah, same. And when you turn to another valuable source of emergent cultural meaning making, memes, you can get a clearer sense of the vibe of the sapphic. Okay. Marcel, I've pasted two memes in here that I would like you to describe for the listeners. Okay. So meme number one, what I'm going to say appears to be a driver. I think it's a Jeep. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
So the driver of the Jeep with the top down is decked out in like a little bit of pleather. So there's like knee-high leather boots maybe or pleather boots. a corset and some gloves. The driver also has long pink hair and a lot of bronzer. Yeah, like super femme, super made up. Definitely. Kind of bondage-y. Yeah, very much a dominatrix style appearance. I would she-her this person on sight. She-her it on sight? I would she-her this dominatrix.
And it says, the caption at the top says, the sapphic urge to drive eight hours for a four-hour date. And then there's tiny, tiny little words. Oh, no way at the very bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. it says, which might turn into a four day date. So like, that's the most lesbian thing I've ever seen. Yeah. Yeah, drive eight hours for a four-hour date that might turn into a four-day date. Yeah, definitely. Okay, so that's meme number one. Meme number two is a black and white photograph of...
It looks like a scene out of a courtroom. I think it's a still from 12 Angry Men. Okay, some kind of a bunch of white he-hims. who would never identify as a he-him because they think it's too obvious that they are a he-him. Men in a room wearing uncomfortable trousers, belts, and ties. They are looking angry. So I think you're right, Hannah. 12 Angry Men is a good guess. So that's the image. The captioning of the image is it's not easy to stand alone against the ridicule of others. And then...
The descriptor of the meme, so the context for the meme, is me, a sapphic, refusing to use astrology to feign a pseudo-closeness to someone whose complexities I don't yet know. While still thinking it's cute when someone gets excited about pseudo-compatibility. Okay, great job. Marcel, based on these memes, how would you describe the vibe of sapphic? Non-binary lesbian, but young. Great.
I actually fucking love that. It's pretty apt for a lot of how it's used. Thank you. Vibe does seem to be really crucial in most of the writing I found about sapphic. It's not like sapphic and lesbian are two different sexualities. It's like we're getting that vibe here. Okay. Here's how historian of lesbianism Julia Golda Harris describes that vibe in their newsletter.
dyke domesticity, quote, Something about it feels a bit twee, a bit tenderqueer, a bit overly invested in creating identification through media and cultural signifiers rather than through desire and the messy business of living. If an event is billed as sapphic, I by and large feel that it is probably not for me. For one thing, there is a strong chance that everyone there will be significantly younger than me. End quote.
I feel that. I feel that so hard. You look at a thing and you go, that's going to be full of my students. Yeah, exactly. So nah. Not for me. So nah. Okay, but there are those themes again, right? We've got demographic, association with things rather than people. Does inclusivity also come up for Harris? Yeah, it sure does. So their piece is called A Theory of the Sapphic, and from my reading... I think it does the best job of accounting for the terms rise. They do some lovely historical work.
Because they are a historian of lesbianism, particularly of lesbian feminism in the 20th century. Okay. And the piece does some really lovely historical work tracing how... Sappho and the language of the sapphic sort of appeared throughout the rise of lesbian writing and organizing through the 60s through the 90s. Oh, interesting. And they come up with this theory that, quote,
Sapphic offers an escape hatch from whatever the perceived main problem with lesbian appears to be in a given historical moment, end quote. That's vicious. So it's a term that arises from within queer and specifically lesbian communities when there's a problem with how lesbian is signifying. Yeah. Okay. And does Harris have a theory about what the problem with lesbian is right now? Yeah, they sure do. And I'm going to make you read it.
I would argue that the main problem with lesbian today, and I use quotes here to demarcate that I'm discussing this problem, not in its material reality, but in its existence as a widespread perception. is a problem of inclusivity. Lesbian is poised as a subject of critique by and large for who it does or does not include, for who claims it or is claimed by it and who is not.
Sapphic, which historically has been used synonymously with lesbian, now offers an escape hatch from this inclusivity problem. even though there's no inherent reason why sapphic romance novel, sapphic space, or sapphic tendencies would translate to greater inclusion than lesbian romance novel, lesbian space, or lesbian tendency.
with the 1980s and 90s anxieties about lesbian eroticism or lack thereof and contemporary anxieties about lesbian inclusion or lack thereof have in common is a concern with the baggage of lesbian history and its consequences. Have decades of feminist critique made us sexless? Does a history of trans exclusion make us irredeemably backwards?
What both of these questions miss is that the counter history has been there all along. Slutty and smutty lesbians, trans lesbians, and their cis lovers, friends and allies, and so on. End quote.
To understand exactly what Harris means about the baggage of lesbian history and its consequences, we probably need to know a little bit more about the rise of lesbian feminism in the 60s and 70s and like sort of what's going on with lesbianism that then is you know perceived as needing an escape hatch from so i've somewhat arbitrarily decided that that piece of history is actually theory so now we're going to do the theory segment You know what? You're the boss. Hey listeners, Marcel here.
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Продолжение следует... so this segment is called the theory we need and today what we need is to talk about the history of radical feminism And to do that, I'm going to draw on the 30th anniversary edition of Alice Eccles' book, Daring to be Bad, Radical Feminism in America, 1967 to 1975. which was published in 2019. I love a retrospective. We love an updated edition. Tell me more about this book.
So when Daring to be Bad was first published in 1989, it was the first historical study of the radical feminist movement in the U.S. And from the 30th anniversary introduction that Eccles has added, it's clear that it was both an extremely influential and a widely critiqued book. I want to add that because like, chances are there's somebody listening right now who's like a historian of feminism who's like, oh, Eccles. So I just want to say like,
I get it. I get it. I know that there has been like pushback. You know, I had some of my own critiques. She talks about Margaret Atwood way too much. That bitch has got like a vice grip on our imaginations. God. She also claims that calling someone a second-wave feminist is now, quote, tantamount to a slur in the revised introduction. I actually don't just think white people should say that. But...
I did find the history she traces of radical feminism, lesbian feminism, and cultural feminism really useful to understand a bit more about the baggage of lesbian history. Okay, okay. Could you perhaps start by explaining what the differences are between those? three different kinds of feminisms. Yeah. Okay. So first up, we've got radical feminism. It's second wave feminism in its earliest manifestation. So it's a sort of massive feminist movement emerging in the 60s and 70s.
that is sort of emerging alongside major civil rights movements, major queer movements, major leftist movements, but that is particularly... critiquing or taking issue with all of those movements around the degree to which they are disinterested in gender right like
Marxist leftists of the time are like we only talk about class right you know like for example so class affects us all equally yeah exactly so Radical feminists were doing things like critiquing patriarchal institutions like the family, marriage, normative heterosexuality and rape. They were organizing around access to contraception and abortion. They were creating child care centers that were low cost or free.
They were protesting women's objectification in media, right? We're talking like bra-burning feminism. Yeah. So really, radical feminism of the 60s and 70s is characterized by active political organizing. Right? Like it is an organizing movement that is trying to make change. Okay.
And, you know, like a lot of other organizing movements, there's a lot of internal debates about like how we're going to go about it and what kind of change we need to be pushing for. So could you read this quote from Eccles about what some of those? divisive questions were in this moment. Absolutely. Quote,
Was women's behavior the result of conditioning or material necessity? Was heterosexuality a crucial bargaining chip in women's struggle for liberation, as in a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo? or a source of women's oppression. Should women's sexual pleasure be enhanced or men's sexuality be curbed?
If the personal was political, was the political personal? Did men oppress women because of the material benefits they reaped or because they found it intrinsically pleasurable to do so? There was even some disagreement on the question of whether radical feminism implied the minimization or maximization of gender differences. Okay, so that's radical feminism. Let's talk about lesbian feminism. so lesbian feminism emerges out of and alongside radical feminism.
And it's particularly about characterizing lesbianism as a feminist practice. Okay. Sometimes referred to as political lesbianism. So it's like... Not like, I'm attracted to women. It's like, we do not fuck men, right? It's maybe best summarized in radical feminist leader T. Grace Atkinson's famous line. Feminism is the theory, lesbianism the practice. I just still think is really funny. Lesbian feminism.
I was particularly interested via the work of thinkers like Adrienne Rich in the concept of compulsory heterosexuality. So, like, what are the forces that... force women to be heterosexual. Thinking about compulsory heterosexuality as one of the most violent manifestations of patriarchal power. But some organizers, by extension, argued that being a lesbian made you more feminist. Because if you were fucking men, you were a traitor to the movement.
So lesbian feminism also became this major point of struggle within radical feminism because a lot of those radical feminists were homophobic. and more generally because there was a sense within the radical feminist movement that any emphasis on differences beyond gender was inherently divisive and undermined the movement. So there's also a lot of critique of radical feminism failing to talk about race.
right because it's like we don't talk about race we're only interested in gender right because gender affects us all equally exactly so like that's where you get like responses to this movement from like audrey lord and the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house like she's writing back to radical feminists of the time being like hey yeah hey you have to have Black and working class lesbians.
seriously involved in this movement, right? So there's this sense that, like, we don't talk about difference, we only talk about gender. So, as Eccles writes, quote, Ultimately, what was most problematic about lesbian feminism was that it solidified feminism's tendency to make one's personal life a litmus test of one's politics."
Right? So you're more feminist if you're fucking women. Right. Than if you're fucking men. Okay. And that, according to Eccles, is what led to cultural feminism. And what's that? Yeah. Why don't we read another quote about it? With the rise of cultural feminism, the movement turned its attention away from opposing male supremacy to creating a female counterculture, what Mary Daly termed New Space.
where male values would be exercised and female values nurtured. Although this woman-only space was envisioned as a kind of culture of active resistance, it often became, instead, as Adrienne Rich has recently pointed out, quote within a quote, a place of emigration and end in itself, end quote within a quote, where patriarchy was evaded rather than engaged.
Concomitantly, the focus became one of personal rather than social transformation. Once radical feminism was superseded by cultural feminism, activism became largely the province of liberal feminism. End quote. This is so complicated, and I disagree with so much of this, but also agree with so much of this. Like, I think the historical trajectory is so spot on, but like, yeah. I can only really speak anecdotally because I am not a historian.
But when I started volunteering for the sexual assault center at McGill, when I was an undergrad, the center had literally just decided to allow people who weren't women to join. And this had been like a major issue. And the decision was, if I remember right, that the space could not in good conscience be accessible to trans women. and trans men and non-binary people if it was a quote woman only space and that meant cis women. Okay.
I think this is essentially the movement that Eccles is talking about, right? Is a sort of movement of radical feminism. into a separatist movement right like this is where lesbian separatism comes in like the creation of a separate society just for lesbians the creation of a separate society just for women the creation of separate space just for women so it's not about organizing in relation to existing structures of power but instead we're treating from those and creating other spaces
So intriguingly, according to Eccles, it's this shift from radical to cultural feminism that gives us the emergence of the gender essentialism of the second wave feminist movement, right? That like really sort of encodes this like we're here creating a women's space based in women's values and women's identities and it leads into this essentialist notion of like what women are yeah and that is what in turn gives us the rise of the trans exclusionary radical feminist movement which
ironically, seems to have a lot more to do with cultural feminism than with the 60s version of radical feminism. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So... The actual relationship of radical feminists to gender was a lot more complex than contemporary TERF The question of whether gender was socially constructed or essential was hotly contested. But the way that movement has been cast in retrospect erases that contestation by collapsing together lesbian feminism, gender essentialism, and anti-trans sentiment.
okay right so it's this sort of recasting historically of being like this movement was always exclusive of trans people you know lesbianism as a sort of political movement was always married to gender essentialism And it's just none of that was always the case and none of that was inevitable. It's just the form it ended up taking. Right.
Which is why it's important for historians of lesbian feminism like Julia Golda Harris to call back to the last segment to emphasize counter histories and movement complexity. Okay. So it's this link between lesbianism, gender essentialism, and transphobia that the rising use of sapphic is... intervening in. That is what I'm about to argue in the form of a thesis. Okay.
well Hannah I'm ready for my thesis here we go queer feminism is characterized by amongst other things a complex relationship to our own movement history The disavowal of second wave feminism, for example, tends to paint that entire era with a single brush, dismissing it as gender essentialist, white-dominated, and sexually puritanical, when in reality, the radical feminist movement was characterized by deep complexity and internal debate.
The shift from radical to cultural feminism facilitated a shift in queer feminist conversations from what action should we be taking to what should we be like. facilitating both a version of feminism divorced from any real political organizing and a culture of political purity in which people's individual actions forms of cultural consumption, even physical appearance, are scrutinized as a litmus test of their dedication to the movement.
Lesbianism, with its complex intertwined relationship to radical feminist organizing, has seen a similar trajectory with the actual complexity of lesbian feminism smoothed over via its oversimplified identification with trans-exclusionary radical feminism. and with the performance of identity markers, rather than, as lesbian historian Julia Golda Harris puts it, quote, desire and the messy business of living, end quote. Sapphic may be a vibe, a marketing term, a meme trope.
but it is also a reflection of how queer and trans communities use language as a tool to articulate shifting notions of gender, sexuality, community and identity. and perhaps symptomatic of both queer feminists' fraught relationship to our own movement's history and our ongoing over-identification with the performance of identity rather than political organizing.
In this essay, I will. I want to talk about the way that Sapphic has come to sell books then because the history of feminism that you have articulated in this episode. has really shown how feminism has come to be co-opted by capitalism. Classic capitalism. Classic capitalism. Find a way to sell products. And it seems like... I think we have to come back to the fact that you, Hannah, encountered the term sapphic in relation to book consumption. Yeah, yeah. No term is neutral.
I mean, it just isn't, right? It just isn't. And there was so much in, you know, I didn't get into, like, the Reddit threads or, like, the comment sections on the auto-straddle piece. But, like... lot of people are like you know sapphic is being used because lesbians are dirty word yeah like because people just hate lesbians right or sapphic is being used because
It won't like ping censors in the same way that lesbian will. And that's, you know, I just couldn't find any evidence of that. Yeah. You know, it's like just a sort of a theory, but like a lot of people. who identify as lesbian are really offended. by the rise of another term.
like we have to sit in the complexity of that too and be like cool well you know how much of that sapphic is you know defanging lesbianism or is about like a continued stigmatizing of lesbianism and how much of it is just like a different generation of queer culture wanting their own language for
their own, you know, identities and communities. Again, it's like we're so in the middle of it, it's really hard to be like, probably both and a bunch of other things. But there is, I think, this really... interesting through line of like what does queer culture look like in the 21st century and how much of it is a kind of participation in a culture of consumption that you then reflect back through your social media presence. How much of it is a kind of practice of personal branding.
Right? Which is like kind of most of how we do our identities these days. Oh, exactly. I was going to say, like, do we have ways of identifying as anything without literally buying stuff? do it personally No! You know, it's well established to anybody who knows anything about me that I am a huge Tressie McMillan-Cottom stan. I was reading some screenshots that she had shared recently about... The idea of America as a scam nation. And her idea of like,
the sort of principle logic of the scam. Like at this point, people assume that they are always being scammed in some way. And so that normalizes scamming. But she had this like point in there where she was like, We primarily practice our identities through acts of consumption.
and it wasn't like and this is bad and we need to stop it's just like she's a sociologist she's just observing the way that american culture works and she's like this is how you do it you buy your way into an identity and so like that piece of identity labels of like it is about the things that i buy is undeniably part of how we need to talk about like queer cultural formations in the 21st century.
But also... i think like looking back at these histories of queer feminism and complicating them gives us an opportunity to like re-embrace organizing as a principal expression of political identity in a way that I mean one I think has been intentionally definged by capitalism's appropriation of identity into consumption markers. Absolutely. And also that we need it so vitally. We need it so vitally.
I went to a workshop on organizing a couple of weeks ago, and it was like this fabulous long-term community organizer just being like, okay, here's how you do it. here's how you organize an action. Like, and just walking everybody in the room through it. And I was like, oh shit, how have I been like, you know, a leftist for this many years and nobody has ever sat me down and said, here's how you organize an action.
i was like oh fuck like i teach a publishing and social change course And I don't teach my students how to organize. No, like, because it's not, you know, it hasn't been part of my own education. Nobody taught it to me other than showing up at protests that other people organize, which is also great. It just hasn't been part of my own political education.
So one of the things that you talked about that really activated my nervous system. I got to tell you, researching this whole episode really activated my nervous system. Yeah, no kidding. I believe you. The notion that lesbians are better feminists than non-lesbians, for example. Yeah, when you're fucking men, you're providing aid and comfort to our oppressor. It is literally true. And yet it is also like the material reality for so many of us.
And I think what I'm struggling to articulate here is something that is sort of inherent to all of the complexities that your research brings to light about the history of feminism, which is that there are...
so many material conditions that complicate radical positioning. So it's like absolutely legit to say that fucking men means providing comfort to our oppressors. Good, because I would say it every day. And also that Fucking men for the purpose of reproduction reproduces more oppressors into a system in which non-cis men are continually and objectively marginalized unless we align ourselves with heteropatriarchal capitalism, right? Like, we know this. We know that this is true.
However, it has also, as your history has shown, always been the case that there are material complications to taking those firm positions. like Audre Lorde talks about being a black lesbian feminist and also being sick. Right. Yeah. And so like, Illness, disability, these are real things that literally impact people's abilities not only to organize but also then to show up. Capitalism has meant that... So many of us are literally too exhausted to organize.
too exhausted to even show up and this is the point right the system that keeps us oppressed by making us too fucking tired to do anything else and so I think one of the reasons why this episode has activated my nervous system in this way is because I feel... so like simultaneously called to action. and also reprimanded for having not done enough and for having...
And for having made the choices that I've made, right? And when I feel that way, when I start to feel like defensive or stressed out or triggered or whatever in these ways, I have to remind myself that this is one of the reasons why. I became a historical materialist in the first place is because I am... so much less interested in making assertions than I am in understanding the way that things work. Right. And so like, yeah, I have to remind myself that one of the things that I can contribute
is my capacity to think through the complexities of these histories or the complexities of these material conditions and that that is valuable. Yeah. That that is something. Yeah, that is part of the work. That is part of the work. And the other piece of that, right, is that When we are talking about, say, you know, sapphic as a category that is like identified with consumption and sort of the performance of identity in digital spaces, like that is also...
about understanding how things work and how they became that way yeah right like what does the landscape of queerness look like right now and what are the material conditions that have made it like that Like that becomes part of a toolkit of continuing to navigate the world as a like complex.
material lived experience is like understanding the reality of the world that we are actively in and i often feel empowered by understanding Not only the material conditions that are framing the world that I'm in, but also the material conditions that framed the past.
so that i can see examples of the ways that different people also navigated that kind of complexity totally and like a big part of it for me is about reframing understanding material conditions from something that disempowers us to something that empowers us right like organizing, right? Like, I think that I won't impose this on you. I will say, for me, when I think, when I sort of think about organizing in general,
In my head immediately, I'm like, cool. It's the pinnacle of political action. And everything that you do that isn't that is a waste of your time and a sign of weakness. yeah right but like that itself is also tied into the sort of cultural feminism performance of identity stuff yeah right trying to look the best trying to do the thing that will make me look
you know, the most feminist. Signaling your feminism. Yeah. And it's also about an image of organizing that comes from a different historical moment. that was responding to different material conditions. So to understand for yourself, what does it look like for me to participate in organizing right now?
it also is going to involve being attuned to the material conditions that are shaping your life and your kinds of participation in the present moment. So like understanding those forces and how they shape us. I think is a really useful tool that can help us move through moments of political paralysis.
Yeah, because that experience of paralysis is real. It's real. The content of information that is mentally destabilizing so tired so tired from knowing too much about what's happening too much too much too much of the world can't actually deal right so
yeah that for me like again to come back to like why are we talking about the sapphic right it's like what we are talking about is one particular outcropping of an ongoing desire to create a version of the world in which we can collectively thrive so like Yeah, part of it is that like that manifests through signifiers of consumption because it's, you know, like capitalism and that's what we do. But also a big part of it is saying, how do we organize?
spaces in which we can say like This is for... trans women trans men non-binary people cis women queer like how do we actually do that and like language is part of that right it's not all of it and that is also organizing right like creating spaces that are safe for all of us. The work of a rape crisis center. changing its policies so that trans people can also access that service, that is also organizing, right? Like, that is also part of the work.
and that language is one component of the larger of things that happen to make that work possible. you know like yeah it's not only marching with a sign in fact it might not be any marching with a sign maybe marching with a sign is not very useful right now There are so many things to march with signs for. I mean, I love a sign. I love a sign, but, you know, I also recently saw a friend of the pod, Sinara Geisler, shared with me a TikTok from a civil rights organizer who was like,
hey guys, you know, if you march somewhere, but then you don't do something when you arrive, that's not an action, that's just a walk. That's vicious. It's like, When you arrive, you've gotta, like, be, like, occupying a space, or... demanding that somebody talk to you or demand you know doing a like a die-in where like people can't get out or like getting media it's like you gotta have a thing that's happening at the end of the action
But then that also sounds kind of like, unless you do it this way, there's no point in doing it. And I don't agree with that. I think that... I think that doing a march, even if you don't do anything at the end of it, is still really valuable because it's showing all the people in the neighborhood, all the people that you walk past, all the people who drive past you or who have to wait.
at stoplights while your march is walking across the street it's showing all of them that this thing matters yeah and like that is not nothing and it's putting people who feel isolated and scared into a shared space together so that you can remind your poor animal nervous system that there are other people who care, who also care and who are also here in a shared space with you. Yeah, yeah.
Fuck, it's hard. And it was hard historically, which is like why it's useful to remember this and not just be like, nice try, 60s feminists. You did it bad. It's like, yeah, okay, like every movement has fucked up in all kinds of ways, but it's hard, you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I haven't yet found the perfectly inclusive movement, but when I do, boy, howdy, I'll be there. Let us know. Yeah, yeah. Listeners, if you happen to be part of one, please write in, tell us, tell us where to go.
Yeah, we got puritanical, but then I end up in a consultation process at my university where a colleague is unironically in the chat saying that he doesn't think our university should divest from arms manufacturing because he loves our troops and wants them to be able to protect our freedom. I'm like, oh, wow. Thanks for saying it in the chat and not out loud. Thanks for putting it on record.
one last thing that I think might be worth just talking about a little bit because I don't know it seemed to come up for me or it has come up for me lately something about being 40 knocking on 41 all of a sudden I'm thinking about how like So many of my peers are looking at the folks in their 20s and making judgments about the way that they do things in a way that feels a little too soon, guys. Feels a little too soon. We were just there.
We were just the subject of ongoing nonstop media dissection and to all of a sudden be like, you know, Gen Z. Yeah. They don't appreciate blah, blah, blah. Or they're coming up with all these new terms. We don't need those words. Yeah. We've got words for that. Just like Carol. We're making up a lot of names for a lot of bad actors today. Listen, Carol. Carol, I'm going to need you to just chill out. Because again, different material conditions are going to produce
Different material responses, I guess. Just let the kids use their words. You know, to return yet again to Tracy McMillan Cottom. Another argument she has made is that the right wing currently is doing a much better job of embracing and encouraging the radical youth in its movement than the leftist. Like on the right, you got like these fucking Nazi youth.
And they're like, well, you know, they might be going a bit far, but gosh, we love them. And on the left, you've got like the mass disavowal of students involved in the Palestinian liberation movement and this constant sort of like. the youth are going too far the youth are taking that like yeah you know we agree with them in principle but they're too extreme and it's like that is a de-radicalization and undermining tactic that is like again like a deliberate way of taking the teeth out of
leftist organizing. Like, embrace the radicalism of the youth. If you can't join the encampment because you've got a job that you can't miss, you can bring them granola bars. Just bring them granola bars. Bring them a cooler. Bring them some chairs. You can help. You don't have to be there if you can't be there. You can still help. You don't have to shut it down because it makes you feel uncomfortable. Hey, fellow people in your 40s, calm down.
Material Girls is a Witch Please production and is distributed by ACAP. Feminism is the theory, and the practice is heading to owitchplease.ca for transcripts, reading lists, and merch, as well as our other shows, Gender Playground, a podcast about gender-affirming care for kids. and Making Worlds, a video podcast about sci-fi, fantasy, and the radical power of imagining otherwise.
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