Actually, one of my favorite bits of political absurdity in a den of progressive liberalism was the self-immolation of the Wisconsin Alliance in the early 1980s in Madison, Wisconsin. The WA had been around for awhile and pretty active as a more or less semi-left progressive politics on the local scene. The issue that broke it up was whether or not someone who had changed their gender from male to female and who loved women could be/should be classified as a lesbian or not.
We are talking very serious stuff here, but, hey, I'm sure that Judith Butler would have an answer for that one, however long-winded and full of academicisms. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 09:37:04 -0500 Charles Brown <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:
> SnitgrrRRl,
>
> Are you kidding ?
>
> ChaRles
>
> >>> <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> 01/28 6:04 PM >>>
>
> >
> >Isn't this more a straight girl rather than a straight boy thing? You
> know, four-year lesbians, LUGs? I even read an article in the Village Voice
> about it.
> >
> >Josh
>
>
> this is an overlimit but I rilly rilly don't care at this point. this
> shitty little comment needs to be addressed. while i'd agree that there
> are some women who do this LUG thing, which means go through a period of
> exploring or talking about lesbian desire while undergraduates and who do
> so in an attempt to claim some sort of oppressed identity, i rilly rilly
> don't think that it's quite the same thing.
>
> Firstly, most of the LUG phenom is about feeling that, in order to become a
> 'good' feminist one must learn how to love women in a variety of ways.
> Secondly, there is a LUG phenom associated w/ a rejection of het men.
> thirdly, there is the good old 'i'll be a lesbian during the week' so's I
> can get laid and go out with some guy at the frat party this wkend so I can
> fulfill the expectations of middle class femeal heterosexuality and play at
> least a little bit hard to get.
>
>
> These examples are all, btw, from my students' journals.
>
> when I brought this up on another list, Katha Pollit and others noted that
> this wasn't new. As Frances noted there is a kind of political lesbianism
> going on here where women actually fuck other women and DON"T fuck men
> because they want to explore their capacities as a woman-identified-women
> in all senses of that continuum that Adrienne Rich once wrote about.
>
> Anyway, when white uppermiddle class guys run 'round embracing their
> queerness but don't actually fuck other men and publically but just confess
> their desires it's rilly rilly not quite the same sort of risk. Sure
> there's a big risk, but uuuhhh when they tell mom and dad about it, their
> employers, and others who might not like then I'll agree that they're
> putting something on the line AND when they do this in the relatively
> safe confines of Berkeley and among activists friends then it's pretty
> stupe and pathetic. A friend of mine from Berkeley just noted re a
> discussion of SNAG (sensitive new age guys) that the only way to get taken
> seriously as a SNAG in Berkeley was to seriously and publically consider
> castration; anything short of that and you're a poser. Obviously a bit
> hyperbolic, but surely not completely unmoored from any reality of
> Berkeley's rather liberal social milieu.
>
> SnitgroWl
>
>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu