T This page intentionally left blank Getting Specific Postmodern Lesbian Politics Shane Phelan University of Minnesota Press h London cOPYRIGHT 1994 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NNESOTA KLKKKK aN EARLIER VERSION OF CHAPTER 1 WAS PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN DIFFERENCES 3, NO. An earlier version of chapter was 1 previopuusly bliished T 1 (Spring 1991): 128-43. An earlier version of chapter 3 was previously pub- lished in Signs 18, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 765-90. Copyright 1993 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phelan, Shane. Getting specific : postmodern Lesbian politics / Shane Phelan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Lesbianism—Philosophy. 2. Lesbianism—Political aspects. 3. Feminist theory. I. Title. ISBN 0-8166-2109-8 (he; acid-free paper) ISBN 0-8166-2110-1 (pbk; acid-free paper) HQ75.5.P47 1994 305.48'9664—dc20 94-17529 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Introduction xiii 1. Specificity: Beyond Equality and Difference 1 2. Building a Specific Theory 16 Interlude I: Getting Specific 32 3. (Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics 41 4. Lesbians and Mestizas: Appropriation and Equivalence 57 5. Getting Specific about Community 76 6. The Space of Justice: Lesbians and Democratic Interests 98 7. Oppression, Liberation, and Power 114 Interlude II: Lost in the Land of Enchantment 131 8. Alliances and Coalitions: Nonidentity Politics 139 Notes 161 Index 187 v This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Many people contributed to this book. Christine Di Stefano, Ann Fer- guson, Dennis Fischman, Nancy Love, and Diana Robin read and commented on the entire manuscript, and their critical effort and sup- port are more important to me than I can ever say. Dennis read every- thing, wrote long letters, and nourished me. I would also like to thank Mark Blasius, Bill Chaloupka, Tom Dumm, Kathy Ferguson, Minrose Gwin, Kirstie McClure, Bill Norris, Ruth Salvaggio, Jana Sawicki, Christine Sierra, Vicky Spelman, Carolyn Woodward, and Iris Young for reading and critiquing chapters. Dorrie Mazzone, John Sharpe, and Edmundo Urrutia provided excellent research assistance and en- thusiastic discussion. Sandi Gonzalez and Mary Morell helped me to think through some of the arguments presented here. Janaki Bakhle, my editor at the University of Minnesota Press, pushed me to think and calmed me when I panicked. This book is much better because of her efforts. Paul Schwankl and Laura Westlund did a fine job of copy- editing, and I appreciate their help. Kaile Goodman read the manu- script with great care, saving me from embarrassment and misunder- standing. Both the Political Science Department and the Women Studies Pro- gram at the University of New Mexico have been tremendously sup- portive over the years. I wish to thank the Women Studies Program for the semester I spent as research scholar; without that time to think, this book would be more jumbled than it is. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. I would like to thank these journals for permission to reprint. I dedicate this book to the lesbians of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who have shown me the pain and the possibilities of coalition politics. Without their work the storytelling that is political theory would have no life. To the extent that I know what I am talking about, it is be- cause they have given me a chance to learn. vii This page intentionally left blank Preface My first book, Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community, was written five years ago. In it, I explored the way that themes of identity and community were developed and deployed within the loose collection of thinkers known as lesbian feminists. I concluded that lesbian feminist theorists had been mistaken in their construction of a too-monolithic, often essentialist "lesbian," and that lesbian feminist understandings of subjectivity and authenticity pro- pelled the battles of the 1980s between "sex radicals" and "lesbian feminists." I concluded that community was a dangerous ideal in modernity, though one that moderns find inescapable. I thought then that I had had my say on the topic, and I expected to move on. Identity Politics was published, as it happened, in the midst of a wave of critiques of lesbian feminism and of identity politics in gen- eral. These critiques eventually led me back to the question of lesbian identity and the politics that might foster different, more resilient, and potentially coalitional identities. I am a political theorist; as such I am driven by a love of theory and philosophy simply for their beauty, as well as by the desire to foster justice in the world. It became clear to me that my first book honored the first love above the second, and that more than critique was needed. In short, I needed to attempt an answer to the classic question of politics: What is to be done? This awareness grew simultaneously with the conviction that the problem of global theory was not a problem just for some feminists, or some theorists, but in fact shadowed all our contemporary efforts to think through a democratic politics. The thread of specificity emerged as I sat listening to a debate on whether women should press legal and political strategies based on equality (understood roughly as sameness) or on difference from men. I knew then that neither was sufficient, that progressive strategies have to focus on specifics of dif- ferences and commonalities. This knowledge and this argument have been developed over the last several years among legal theorists but ix