I think that a simplistic feminist analysis that asks us to "uncover" sublimated homosexuality at the root of sexism serves neither women nor gay men. "Peel away the cover of a he-man institution, and there's a man-boy love!" It's like outing a Roy Cohn or a J. Edgar Hoover and calling it a feminist analysis that "uncovers" the truth of patriarchy. Women and gay men on the Left should be allies, but Irigaray's formula doesn't further this political possibility. Leftist gay men, earlier and more consistently than leftist straight guys, have drawn upon and supported feminist analyses and causes. By now most feminist and queer activists on the Left have come to see that homophobia feeds upon sexism and vice versa. Calling the structures that "necessarily exclude women" a male homosexuality that is "unquestioned because sublimated" doesn't help us here and sets us back in fact:
***** Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Gender Criticism: What Isn't Gender
...The lesbian interpretive framework most readily available until recently to critics and theorists was the separatist-feminist one that emerged from the 1970s. According to that framework, there were essentially no valid grounds of commonality between gay male and lesbian experience and identity; to the contrary, women-loving women and men-loving men must be at precisely opposite ends of the gender spectrum. The assumptions at work here were indeed radical ones: most importantly, the stunningly efficacious re-visioning, in female terms, of same-sex desire as being at the very definitional center of each gender, rather than as occupying a cross-gender or liminal position between them. Thus, women who loved women were seen as more female, men who loved men as quite possibly more male, than those whose desire crossed boundaries of gender; the self-identification of the virilized woman gave way, at least for many, to that of the "woman-identified woman." The axis of sexuality, in this view, was not only exactly coextensive with the axis of gender, but expressive of its most heightened essence: "Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice." By analogy, male homosexuality could be, and often was, seen as the practice for which male supremacy was the theory.(3) A particular reading of modern gender history was, of course, implicit in and in turn propelled by this gender-separatist framework. In accord with, for instance, Adrienne Rich's understanding of many aspects of women's bonds as constituting a "lesbian continuum" ("Compulsory Heterosexuality" 79) this history, found in its purest form in the work of Lilian Faderman, de-emphasized the definitional discontinuities and perturbations between more and less sexualized, more and less prohibited, and more and less gender-identity-bound, forms of female same-sex bonding. Insofar as lesbian object-choice was viewed as epitomizing a specificity of female experience and resistance, insofar as a symmetrically opposite understanding of gay male object-choice also obtained, and insofar also as feminism necessarily posited male and female experiences and interests as different and opposed, the implication was that an understanding of male homo/heterosexual definition could offer little or no affordance or interest for any lesbian theoretical project. Indeed, the powerful impetus of a gender-polarized feminist ethical schema made it possible for a profoundly anti-homophobic reading of lesbian desire (as a quintessence of the female) to fuel a correspondingly homophobic reading of gay male desire (as a quintessence of the male)....
3. *See, among others, Frye, "Politics," pp. 128-51, and Irigaray, "This Sex," 170-91.
<http://www.duke.edu/~sedgwic/WRITING/gender.htm> *****
Yoshie