The Case for Lesbian Feminist Subversion

Lesbians subvert the gender binary & the patriarchy, through the work of Monique Wittig & Silvia Federici

The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role “woman”. It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man. This, we lesbians and nonlesbians as well, knew before the beginning of lesbian and feminist movement. ¹

If lesbians are rebels against the societal power of men, what do lesbians mean to the feminist movement? How do lesbians help end the sexist oppression of womankind?

Monique Wittig (who

Talia Bhatt

recommended to me) answered that question. Lesbians refuse the economic, ideological, and political power of men — we do not depend on men to protect from other men, nor depend on male income. More that: lesbians subvert the entirety of heterosexual regime that makes women secondary to men.

How? Let’s back a step back to Wittig’s definition of sex:

For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society.

In plainer words: the two genders are oppressor and oppressed.

One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.²

The Prehistorical Origin of the Sexes

How did this condition of women as the oppressed come to be?

At the most basic level, “women” are the sex that mostly, for some period of their lives, can give birth to children. That ability led to their oppression. Wittig and Silvia Federici (Marxist feminist who wrote the book Caliban and the Witch and the essay Wages Against Housework) would consider the work of being pregnant and giving birth reproductive work. That work is appropriated by men.

Federici wrote about its origins with the creation of the proletariat. I think that view is too Western-centric. That women are the inferior sex is fairly universal in civilizations — and that last word is the key. It’s related, I believe, in prehistory, to the rise of agriculture.

Men appropriate children that women bear as heirs to their legacy and property.

This is my theory³: when humans switch from a hunter-gather, communal society to an agricultural one, the human condition — what’s important and what’s not to individuals— also changed dramatically. Humans became more stationary, tied to place that had access to water and good growing conditions. More than that, agriculture required transforming the land. This work was more likely done by men because of physical size and strength. It’s hard work. The concept of owning this land that this man tilled and harvested came to be. Harvestable land was something of great economic value — “economic value” was a new concept too. And with that ownership of land, ideas of heredity — what do to with this land after the owner passed — also came to be. And as civilization rose from agricultural societies, ideas of heredity turned into class, the unequal distribution of wealth, and the further oppression of women.

Because how did a man ensure a child was his flesh and blood — you know, before we had blood tests and genetic testing and all of that jazz? He had to trust the woman that was bearing his children wasn’t having sex with other men. Trust wasn’t enough for him. Read between the lines: this process, so emotionally distancing, so lacking in trust, was also destructive to men as oppressors. He locked her up and threw away the figurative key — sexually, but physically and emotionally too. To make sure that her children were genetically the offspring of the man laboring to feed and clothe them.

Even her movements and her existence in society to really make sure that she’s not out there at all. In pre-modern China, her feet were broken and bound when she was three or five years old, so that they didn’t grow properly. Her movements were literally restricted: she struggled to walk, which made her completely dependent on male provisions and protection. Among Hindus and Muslims, she was kept in purdah, her role in society curtailed, little to no contact with anyone that could impregnate outside of the designated man. If she’s never had sex with anyone else in her lifetime, all the better to ensure that any children she gave birth to belong to that one man who owned her body. Certainly he owned the parts of her body associated with sexuality and childbirth. If she didn’t comply, she was burned at the stake as a witch throughout Northern Europe.

Since she was in the house, bearing children, why not have her do all the housework and child-reading. That was the reality for women whose husbands could not afford hired or enslaved workers. Her power stripped through this system of oppression, she has little choice than to provide labor that wasn’t directly rewarded through the economic system of ownership. Ownership of the fruits of her labor were retained by men, increasing her dependency on them.

Her body, her time, her labor: she owned none of it.

“To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized.”⁴

And further and further down the spiral, until we had some pretty horrific oppressions of women the world over. The oppressions include abuse: forced marriage, forced birth, marital rape and rape besides, domestic violence, and a lack of economic power and displacement in society that kept women trapped in cycles of violence. What feminist thinkers call the patriarchy.

This oppression upholds the regime of child production for the sex we traditionally called women. Hunter-gather societies are often more egalitarian when it comes to gender because economic motivations in those cultures are very different. Without this system of property ownership and heterosexual reproduction of children, they have less need to define gender/sex in such narrowly binary terms. We also know that many from studies of modern hunter-gather societies that rape is viewed very differently in those societies versus our so-called civilized ones — that rape dishonors the rapist instead of shaming the victim. Ideas of who a child belongs to, eg., the village instead of a nuclear family, and ideas of ownership of property support this theory as the beginnings of sexism and misogyny.

And so, the physical difference between someone who would give birth (mostly) versus someone who could not but who likely had the advantage of size and strength slowly turned into the type of strong binary-gendered society we have today.

Today, most labor — even in agriculture — no longer depends on brute strength. It’s also much easier to prove paternity without restraining, controlling, and abusing people who give birth. And today, Earth as we know it is collapsing from the strain of the enormous number of people living on it — a population that exploded because of advances in agriculture⁵.

The supremacy and vehement reinforcement of heteronormativity — what Monique Wittig called the straight mind, and what Adrienne Rich call compulsory heterosexuality — is not only not needed, but is harmful to the planet’s livability, and to women and LGBTQI+ people the world over. Despite the harm, it still continues, and large numbers of people still call for a gender binary that oppresses women and LGBTQI+ people.

Lesbian Subversion

In particular, feminists have uncovered and denounced the strategies and the violence by means of which male-centered systems of exploitation have attempted to discipline and appropriate the female body, demonstrating that women’s bodies have been the main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power-techniques and power-relations. Indeed, the many feminist studies which have been produced since the early 1970s on the policing of women’s reproductive function, the effects on women of rape, battering, and the imposition upon them of beauty as a condition for social acceptability, are a monumental contribution to the discourse on the body in our times, falsifying the perception common among academics which attributes its discovery to Michel Foucault.⁶

How do lesbians subvert the gender binary? Lesbians break the heterosexual contract. We don’t play the feminine role in compulsory heterosexuality, the straight mind, “vehement reinforcement of heteronormativity”.

Thus a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society.⁷

In a nutshell: if the gender binary is made of oppressor and oppressed, then lesbians, are neither. We’re not the oppressor because we’re not men, nor oppressed as women through participation in the system of heterosexuality and child production. Instead, we’re a threat: our existence calls into question the the binary. We’re a third gender.

Wittig used that exact term. I’m ethnically South Asian — and the concept of a third gender existed in my ancestral culture⁸. Wittig — a lesbian — mentioned gay men a few times, but she also believed that lesbians were unique in their “double oppression” through the patriarchy and homosexuality. She didn’t address trans or non-binary folks directly (her writing and 2003 death predate our current discourse), but trans and non-binary folks⁹ would fit into Wittig’s definition of third gender — of breaking the heterosexual contract, and subjugation to patriarchy and homo/transsexuality.

The Lesbian Role in Feminism

For the middle class, white hetero-feminist, the goal of feminism was to free women and men from the patriarchy. It’s about insisting on equal rights for men and women. It ignores a lot: race, class, sexuality/gender, disability. It asks for substitutions of power, while the structures and systems of power remain intact.

Something I’ve written about at length before is that the goal of that type of feminism is too narrow. It insists on equal rights, but also seeks primarily to transform unequal relationships between men and women — I’m perpetually frustrated by this in so much of what’s written by third wave internet feminism.

Want to decenter men or stop your friends from talking about how badly their male situationship is treating them? Spend some time with lesbians. I remember a book review that called lesbians “mild narcissists” 🙄. Nah, a lot of us have a different sort of self-respect and cocky (haha) independence, forced upon us because we can’t opt into male protection and male economic provision. We have ourselves and each other — women, queers — working and loving and helping each other. Interdependence, mutuality.

The latter is why feminist writers and thinkers are disproportionality lesbian. We have to fight for a society that Wittig called “sexless” because we don’t fit into the binary. We have to fight for the end of the systems of domination and oppression,. It’s easier for us because those systems don’t benefit us or keep us locked in — we have no conflict of interest, no self-centered desire to keep the patriarchy thriving. We’re outside looking in, and that gives us a great view. It goes beyond “feminism”, it’s why I keep writing about the importance of intersectionality.

Because also, as much as I love women — as much of my time, emotional energy, and ease of using my law degree for a cushy job that I’ve sacrificed to instead be an advocate/advisor to ending sexual violence — as much as I love women and am occasionally floored that women exist, in all their beauty and indescribable womanness that’s somehow more real than reality — I still don’t believe that the answer is simply to hand power to women and trust we’ll be better oppressors. To that end, a lot of that sort of feminism advocates to merely replace men as oppressors with women. Argues sometimes for matriarchy, which Wittig also believed to be as oppressive as patriarchy. You know, I think if you replaced the current US presidential administration with their wives, their wives really aren’t going to be make our lives materially better or lead us away from potential totalitarianism. Alice Weidel — lesbian leader of Germany’s far right party, in a long-term partnership with a Sri Lankan woman — isn’t a person I’d elect to leadership. Women, lesbians, women of color — none of us are are inherently good because of identity(s) — we’re human, and often quite messy. Lesbians know this — ask any woman who has dated women.

Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman a specific social relation to a man, which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation…a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual. ¹⁰

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1. Wittig, Monique. One Is Not Born a Woman.

2. Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex.

Quoted by Monique Wittig in The Straight Mind.

3. I wrote a thesis on the rise of agriculture as the basis for civilization as my thesis for my degree in history (not everyone believes this, eg., Jane Jacobs argued that trade had more to do with it); I also have degrees in economics, and in law.

4. Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework.

From: ed. Shulman, Alix Kates & Moore, Honor. Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can. (New York: Library of America. 2021). p 262 -270.

5. Malthusianism argued that at some point, humans would face a catastrophe as population grew and resources — especially food — were not plentiful enough to go around. The way we overcame the production of food problem was through nitrogen-fixing, the Haber Bosch process, allowing for the production of ammonia, which allowed for fertilizers to be made on massive scale.

Fritz Haber also is called the “father of chemical warfare”. His work/story — and how his inventions were used — is fascinating and tragic.

6. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. 2004).

7. Wittig, Monique. One Is Not Born a Woman.

8. In speaking to other queer South Asian Substackers and through my own experience here — I’ll acknowledge that the South Asian “third gender” is controversial for a lot of people. Yes, the third gender was and is oppressed. My mention isn’t an endorsement of the tradition — it’s acknowledging the existence of.

And given that historical acknowledgement of the existence of, our early understanding of gender was likely different than that of a person whose understanding of gender is strictly, historically Western, with its strict gender binary.

9. Since this piece is built off three works of Monique Wittig’s that I read - One Is Not Born A Woman, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, and The Lesbian Body, and Wittig uses “lesbian”, I also use lesbian. But a lot of what Wittig called lesbian could be easily applied to trans and non-binary people also.

10. Monique Wittig in The Straight Mind. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). p 19.