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Who were some early feminist https://pornevening.com/ thinkers and activists? What's intersectional feminism? How have feminist politics modified the world?

lesbian feminism

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OutHistory.org - Lesbian Feminism, 1960s and 1970s

lesbian feminism, a subset of feminism that emerged within the mid-to-late 20th century on the convergence of the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the sexual revolution. Lesbian feminists consider similar-sex relationships professional and use their lesbian id as a basis for community constructing and collective action. Lesbian feminism challenges the notion of heterosexuality and male supremacy as "normal" and presents alternative routes of desirous about gender and power.

Historical background

Before the 1960s, thriving gay and lesbian communities developed throughout the United States, especially in urban areas, the place they usually centred on bars or private homes. During that era, many lesbians assumed feminine ("femme" or "fem") or masculine ("butch") gender roles-and, typically, manners of costume. Many of these communities functioned underground as a means of safety from pervasive hostility, bodily violence, social ostracism, harassment, and loss of employment. Because lesbians were working within a tradition that seen homosexuality as a form of psychological disorder and a threat to the effectively-being of American society, their social, authorized, and economic considerations-like those of their male counterparts-were believed better stored non-public. Slowly that concept began to be challenged. In 1955 a group of women led by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon formed the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the primary nationwide group for lesbians. Members of DOB organized for social and political purposes, searching for to end the sense of isolation many lesbians felt, to educate gay girls about their legal rights, and to extend their social acceptance.

With the rise of feminism’s second wave within the 1960s, the specific considerations of lesbians emerged as a part of a broader problem in opposition to sexism. Lesbians played a prominent position in lots of new feminist organizations, helping to prepare for equity within the workplace, the house, and the courts. Concurrently, the civil rights and gay rights movements and changing attitudes toward sexuality created openings for a extra-seen and defiant attack on sexual oppression. However, many taboos nonetheless surrounded lesbianism inside feminist organizations in the 1960s, and male sexism constrained lesbians throughout the gay rights movement. Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), famously known as lesbians a "lavender menace." She asserted that they threatened to taint the popularity of the feminist motion, driving girls away out of fear of association and diverting consideration from more-necessary campaigns for women’s equality. Likewise, within mixed-intercourse gay rights organizations, some lesbians found their issues marginalized by male counterparts who have been no more committed to ending sexism than was the broader society. Lesbian feminists responded by creating their very own organizations so as to rework shame into pleasure and to challenge the belief that equated lesbianism with deviance.

Theoretical underpinnings

Lesbian feminism offered a technique for women to free themselves from each male domination and heterosexism. Its analysis of society was primarily based on two central claims. The first was an assertion that heterosexuality encompassed much more than a form of sexual desire, that it additionally functioned as an institution that supported male supremacy and female subordination. Romantic love, familial constructions, conventional gender roles, and even the U.S. financial construction strengthened heterosexuality, making it compulsory and leaving its putative normalcy unquestioned. At the identical time that heterosexuality helped perpetuate the subordination of girls, it strengthened the benefits that ladies might acquire from participation in partnerships with males, which gave them added status and financial privileges. The menace of losing those advantages stored girls from challenging the established order and performing in methods that may jeopardize their standing. As certainly one of the primary lesbian feminist teams, the Radicalesbians, argued in a 1970 essay, "The Woman-Identified Woman," ladies had been called lesbians (pejoratively), no matter their preferred partners, when they dared to act as in the event that they had been equal to men. Fear of being labeled a lesbian acted as a robust deterrent towards women’s push for equality in addition to constraining the development of solidarity among girls.

The second claim of lesbian feminists, given the central significance of heterosexuality and marriage (then confined to male-female relationships) to the upkeep of male supremacy, was that lesbian individuals and relationships introduced a profound challenge to the social and financial order. They rejected male privilege and rejected the notions of male superiority and feminine inferiority. Indeed, lesbian feminists asserted that lesbians exemplified women’s liberation, demonstrating the personal, financial, and sexual independence that feminists believed all women ought to possess. That analysis helped present insight into the way that society constructed its notion of womanhood, recognizing that lesbians conformed to many traits generally construed as masculine. Moreover, some lesbian feminists asserted the superiority of women’s ways of living, suggesting that women who challenged society’s views of male supremacy may uncover extra egalitarian and fewer superficial methods of relating to one another. Using that rationale, many lesbian feminists criticized butch-and-femme role-taking part in as mere imitation of an oppressive heterosexuality.

Throughout the context of the late 1960s and the 1970s, lesbian feminists translated these concepts into a mass movement for women’s liberation. That movement primarily organized women on the native level into small groups, supported by an array of national publications, businesses, and gatherings. A branch of the broader feminist movement, lesbian feminism remained both linked to the bigger struggle for women’s liberation and highly important of it.

Strategically, the lesbian feminist motion emphasized its connection to broader feminist struggles and careworn group building among ladies. Lots of these within the movement believed that they constituted a revolutionary vanguard, the forefront of a broader political movement to create a extra egalitarian society. If society taught that ladies had been inferior, then lesbians, or "women-identified girls," experienced the best oppression, took the biggest risks, and most clearly demonstrated the depth of their commitment to gender equality. By defining lesbian feminism as centrally necessary to feminism, lesbian feminists helped convey higher acceptance throughout the women’s motion to those that identified as lesbian, and they fostered an atmosphere that made it possible for many ladies to call their needs and find consistency between their private lives and their political ideals. At the identical time, lesbian feminists had been criticized for promoting conformity inside the women’s motion by their assertion that lesbians most totally mirrored feminists’ commitment to women’s liberation. Support for women’s liberation, nevertheless, led some activists to establish as "political lesbians," an expression of their commitment to gender equality without an accompanying sexual attraction to women. Along these traces, lesbian poet Adrienne Rich spoke of a "lesbian continuum" and sought to develop the which means of lesbianism and embody a spread of the way in which ladies expertise intimacy and neighborhood.

For some lesbian feminists, separation into girls-only communities represented the logical extension of arguments advocating an finish to male domination and the energy of connections between girls. As a political strategy and a preferred manner of life for some, geographical segregation and voluntary immersion in a world of women-recognized women introduced the promise of a society that was less exploitative and extra just and caring. Acting on these beliefs, they formed women-only collectives and communes, along with commercial and cultural enterprises-together with a report label (Olivia), a publishing house (Naiad), and music festivals (such because the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival)-run by and catering to feminists. Lesbian feminist separatism peaked in the 1970s and ’80s. It subsided as lesbian feminists joined with heterosexual feminists and gay male activists to demand increased legal recognition for gay families and relationships and to confront points similar to AIDS, racism, and international trade.