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While we have questioned patriarchal politics, we have not questioned patriarchal ethics. This paper comes from the introduction of my forthcoming book, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value (Institute of Lesbian Studies, P. 0. Box 60242, Palo Alto, CA 94306, U.S.A.), and lays the groundwork for the challenge to patriarchal ethics I pose: I argue that the concept 'lesbian' is connected in important ways to the idea of female agency. I suggest the function of traditional ethics is social control and that we might instead focus on the development of individual moral agency and integrity. I discuss the use of language in structuring reality and trapping us in oppression. And finally I discuss the directions my work takes.
It is possible for us to engage in moral revolution and change the value we affirm by the choices we make. It is possible for lesbians to spin a revolution, for us to weave a transformation of consciousness.Indeed, during the emergence of the U.S. women's liberation and gay liberation movements we began to do just that. In our moral outrage we turned our backs on the fathers' categories and began to focus on each other. We began to follow our own agendas, to listen to, argue with, criticize, befriend, celebrate, in short, to acknowledge, each other. And in the process we began to enact new values. We worked to develop non-oppressive structures, and we created conceptual frameworks outside the value of the fathers. In that brief burst, hundreds of lesbian projects began: collectives, newspapers, record companies, bookstores, presses, film companies, schools, lesbian community centers, libraries and archives, credit unions, magazines, healing centers, restaurants, radio stations, food co-ops, alcoholism detox centers, rape crisis centers, bands, womyn's land, music festivals, more bars, and on and on.During the latter part of that time, I observed many of our organizations grow and then fall apart. This destruction occurred for a number of reasons. In direct response to our efforts to challenge the oppressive values we lived under and to create alternatives, we faced outright violence, severe economic limits, legal threats, F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Investigation) penetration and disruption, and all manner of other male sabotage, such as feminist men filing discrimination suits so they could enter our events or transsexual men claiming a right to lesbian space. In addition, we carried deep within us the values of the fathers, including classism, racism, ageism, antisemitism, sizeism, ablebodyism, and imperialism, as well as sexism and heterosexism - all of which informed our perceptions and none of which we immediately, nor have we yet, divested ourselves of. Of course we made significant mistakes as we traveled this new path, such as believing that because we were all women or all lesbians we could automatically trust each other.Aside from these formidable obstacles there seemed to be yet two other factors. I found it significant that despite our best intentions, our interactions with each other failed much more often than not, we at-tacked each other far more vehemently than we ever dared attack men, and generally we were doing each other in. Much of this was owing to class and race differences, and much of it was not. But in all cases it seemed to me that our survival skills were going awry. In "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" Adrienne Rich (1979) wrote provocatively of ways we use lying against each other. And that was an inspiration for this work.We had most of us learned well how to survive in the patriarchy, though often our skills varied according to race and class. We had learned how to survive on the street, on the job or through the welfare office, in the bedroom - and we were using those survival skills against each other. It seemed to me that the destructiveness of our interactions resulted partly from our lack of awareness of how we use survival skills and partly from our reliance on traditional anglo-european ethical values to structure our judgments about how to act with each other. I found both our survival skills and our ethical judgments undermining rather than promoting lesbian connection and community.Generally, we have not been able to hold our connections with each other and become a force capable of resisting and ultimately undermining oppression. We have not created a viable lesbian community. My thesis is that the norms we have absorbed from anglo-european ethical theory promote dominance and subordination through social control (what I call heterosexualism). As a result they thwart rather than promote the successful weaving of lesbian community. The book of which this paper is a spin-off (Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value), and this paper itself, is my attempt, with much stimulation and input from a number of lesbian communities, to describe at least one way we might continue to move toward lesbian connection and create a means by which we spin out of oppression. I call this attempt Lesbian Ethics.
I am a lesbian. While there was a period in my life when I was not a lesbian, I found that coming out was, for me, coming home. I experienced the sensation of landing and centering. It is lesbians who inspire me, lesbian energy which enlivens me, and lesbian community to which I refer. I will be purposefully vague about the term 'community', but I have in mind the loose network - both imagined and existing now - of those who identify basically as lesbians. What I am calling 'lesbian community' is not a specific entity; it is a ground of our be-ing; and it exists because we are here and move on it now.I write as well within a context of oppression. Lesbians have been and are oppressed, to my knowledge, in all societies under the rule of the fathers. We also are agents of oppression, for the values we most often appeal to, affirm, and are limited by are the same values which affirm and are limited by oppression. These values have been forced on us, but we have adapted them to our survival.Before we will be capable of resisting and undermining oppression, we must be able to work together in ways that do not nourish thinking which makes oppression credible. This is not a 'personal,' 'private' matter. I believe that without certain changes in the values we affirm through our interactions, there can be no social change which will undermine oppression. Male-led revolutions - economic and military and intellectual - have not changed the essential dominance/subordination relationship at the heart of oppression.Yet, our energy is vibrant; our abilities, myriad; our accomplishments - the organizing, the healing, the creating, the dreaming - phenomenal. From where we come, we bring many gifts: experience, skills, understanding, perceptions, humor, imagination, intuition. What we accomplish does not and cannot, emerge from individual lesbians in isolation. These possibilities flower among friends in community where we move. For here we love and hurt and get it wrong and laugh and risk and plot, resist and change. Here we focus on ourselves and so create lesbian possibility.Lesbians have, I believe, a particular relationship to oppression. Lesbians are beaten up, denied jobs, denied housing, denied custody of children; we are expelled from universities, put in mental hospitals, experimented on, murdered, and face every brutality which anyone faces under any form of oppression. Nevertheless, though its effects are similar, I think the form of lesbian oppression distinct from other forms of oppression.In my estimation, lesbians as a group are not primarily targeted as scapegoats, as, for example, the oppression of jews has been constructed. Lesbians as a group are not primarily characterized as inferior and culturally backward in ways that justify enslavement or economic exploitation, as the oppression in the U.S. of blacks, Japanese, and Chinese, among others, has been constructed. Lesbians have not had lands stolen and then been rounded up and placed on reservations as the oppression of native Americans in the U.S. has been constructed. And lesbians are not primarily characterized in relation to others in ways that depict our identities as completed and our nature fulfilled through subordinating our lives to those of dominant members of society, as the oppression of women has been constructed. The form of lesbian oppression is not primarily a relationship.The society of the fathers, rather, formally denies lesbian existence: A lesbian is said to be a (heterosexual) woman who hates men (a man-hater); lesbianism is said to be a phase in some (heterosexual) women's lives; a lesbian is said to be a (heterosexual) woman who cannot get a man; a lesbian is said to be a man in a (heterosexual) woman's body. The perception of a lesbian as a man in a (heterosexual) woman's body, for example, emerges from sex-role stereotypes - the judgment that certain qualities are male (masculine) while others are female (feminine). Thus, a female whose behavior is perceived to conform to the masculine stereotype - for example, a dyke - is actually considered a man in a woman's body. Further, given sex-role stereotypes, we have the idea that for completion a female needs maleness (rationality, or the ability to construct nuclear weapons; aggressiveness, or the ability to maim and destroy, etc.). And the idea of women loving women is impossible, inconceivable.The equation of 'lesbian' with 'man-hater' is also interesting. Certainly many lesbians hate men, and there is reason to believe that man-hating is important to moving out of oppression (note Allen, 1986; Kearon, 1973; Russ, 1973). But many, many heterosexual women also hate men. This is clear in their art, their writing, their gossip. For example, anti-feminist make clear their sentiments as they exhort a woman to stand by her man no matter what stupid thing he might try (note Andelin, 1975; Morgan, 1973). Many heterosexual radical feminists make man-hating statements more often and more virulently than most lesbians. And many 'apolitical' housewives are quite clear about their disgust with men. This is significant, considering that blatant admission of man-hating is taboo while blatant woman-hating is pervasive. But it is also significant that 'lesbian' is equated with 'man-hating' while 'woman' is not.Lesbians love lesbians, so some lesbian energy and focus is not accessible to men. But how is this man-hating? After all, heterosexual men are not considered man-haters nor heterosexual women, women-haters. So why are lesbians as a group perceived as man-haters? To hate someone is to direct energy toward them, albeit negative energy, to maintain an aggressive connection. So how is lesbian denial of energy to men such an aggression? When is a withdrawal an attack?A withdrawal of something is an attack on someone only if that which is withdrawn is considered essential to that person's health, well-being, or survival. Thus, if I gathered men in a room and withdrew air from that room, my withdrawal could be considered an attack. Or again, if I withheld food from men, my actions would be an attack. The lesbian withdrawal of energy from men must, therefore, be considered an attack because the fathers regard female energy as vital to men's health, well-being, or survival. And such energy is apparently so vital to men that women are not even allowed to realize there are other than heterosexual ways of being in the world. When actual lesbians insist on being perceived, when we can no longer be ignored, we are used to scare women into line, lest they become monsters like us.This female energy which men, and the fathers' society as a whole, apparently consider so vital is more than the love of women for women. Historical and material conditions surrounding lesbian lives in Europe and the U.S. have changed recently to expose/create a lesbian challenge to masculine-defined female agency. According to Lillian Faderman: "The major difference [between nineteenth-century romantic friendships, which were not stigmatized, and twentieth-century lesbian-feminist relationships, which are stigmatized] had much less to do with overt sexual expression than with women's greater independence in the twentieth century: Now a woman can hope to carry on a love relationship with another woman for life. It can become her primary relationship, as it seldom could have with romantic friends of the past for economic reasons if for no other." (Faderman, 1981: p.20)The current social concern with lesbian withdrawal has to do with our usurping men's access to women; it involves the very structure of society. In discussing the terror both men and women exhibit at the prospect of feminist separatism Marilyn Frye notes: "Male parasitism means that males must have access to women; it is the Patriarchal Imperative. But feminist no-saying is more than a substantial removal (redirection, reallocation) of goods and services because Access is one of the faces of Power. Female denial of male access to females substantially cuts off a flow of benefits, but it has also the form and full portent of assumption of power. (Frye, 1983: p.103)If lesbians were truly perceptible in society, then the idea that women can survive without men, do not need to put up with men, might work its way into social reality. And it is to avoid this and maintain primary access to females that male-dominated society attempts to render lesbianism non-existent.This erasure of our real, material lives suggests that lesbian existence is connected logically or formally in certain ways with female agency. That is, lesbian existence holds a certain possibility which can effect a transformation of consciousness: the conceptual possibility of female agency not defined in terms of an other. This possibility is key to the focus of my work.Besides a logical possibility, I find a more concrete possibility emerging from lesbian existence (note Allegro, 1975). Alix Dobkin (1980) sings, "There's something about a Lesbian." In introducing her lesbian herbal, Witches Heal, Billie Potts writes: "For me, the keystone of the lesbian outlook is womon-identification, trusting and giving primary allegiance to womon-energy. For this reason, I believe, lesbians today are more willing to take risks treating ourselves with womon-recommended remedies. It ties in with the politics of questioning authority and our deep, lifelong struggle to resist male authority. (Potts, 1981: p.3)There is something in each lesbian which encourages us to affirm a connection with lesbians. There is something in each lesbian that questions the norm at some level and starts us on our own path. That is, there is something within each lesbian of the spirit I consider crucial to the sort of ethical concepts I'm interested in working on. It is a certain ability to resist and refocus, and it is this ability in all lesbians which draws me.As I have suggested, within the conceptual framework of the fathers, lesbians are beings who are not perceived and so who do not exist. We are located in a reality which excludes us. Yet we realize we exist if we realize nothing else. Thus, in merely affirming our lesbianism, we have questioned social knowledge at some level. Our existence is itself a break past some of the limits of fatherly knowledge and perception, and it can thereby provide a basis for challenging that world view out of which the denial of our existence arises. By our very existence lesbians challenge the social construction of reality.This is not to say that as lesbians we are less likely to have absorbed the values of the fathers. Members of oppressed groups will absorb significant aspects of the dominant culture; for while survival requires maintaining a separate status in certain respects, in other respects it requires assimilating into the dominant culture. As lesbians we have also participated in oppression - our efforts to date have been fraught with the agendas of the fathers. I do not find it surprising that we carry with us the tools of the fathers, including a most pronounced internalized heterosexism. What I find significant is that, despite the conceptual coercion of the fathers' framework, many lesbians have begun to break from it.In spite of our varied assimilation, through lesbian existence comes a certain ability to resist and to refocus, an ability which is crucial to the sort of moral change I think can occur. Because of this, my focus is lesbian.I did not appreciate all this at first. As I was coming to lesbian-feminist consciousness out of my earlier political consciousness, like many I came to believe that feminism was the theory and lesbianism the practice (note Kramarae, 1985: p.229). But over time I slowly became dissatisfied; I had stopped dreaming, stopped being inspired and inspiring. Then, as a result of prodding from Ariane Brunet of amazones d'hier, lesbiennes d'aujourd'hui of Quebec, I began to realize I was focusing on lesbians both in and outside feminism. In response to my panic that if I did not talk of lesbian-feminism, I would have no political base, she merely replied, "Then you don't perceive lesbianism as political?" And at some incomprehensible level, I began again to dream: I dreamed lesbianism the theory, my theory.I began to question the focus of U.S. feminism. Thinking about analyses developed by radical lesbians in Quebec and France, I have become convinced that the concept 'woman' is a created category, like the concept 'feminine', and is bankrupt. 'Woman' exists only in relation to 'man' (someone who dominates), and as long as this identity holds, male domination of women will appear socially desirable and, even, natural.As a result, I mean to contrast lesbianism and heterosexualism. What I am talking about when I talk about heterosexualism is not simply the matter of men having procreative sex with women. I am talking about an entire way of life promoted and enforced by every formal and informal institution of the fathers' society, from religion to pornography to unpaid housework to medicine. Heterosexualism is a way of living that normalizes the dominance of one person and the subordination of another.Thus, I focus on 'lesbian' because I am interested in exploring lesbianism as a challenge to heterosexualism, where heterosexualism is a matter of men (or the masculine) dominating women (or the feminine), whether that be as protectors or predators, whether that domination be benevolent or malevolent. I am interested in exploring ways to work the dominance and subordination of heterosexualism out of lesbian choices.In general, aside from the fact that the situations I write about are located in lesbian community, I dream lesbianism mostly because of certain possibilities embedded in it. More importantly, lesbian connection and creation to date move me as a lesbian - and make these possibilities I write of more than idle speculation.Some will wonder whether others besides lesbians fit in to what I am calling Lesbian Ethics. My answer is that, of course, others can fit in what I am saying. Heterosexual women can fit in this schema, for example. However, they fit in exactly the way lesbians fit in heterosexual society. We fit there, but not as lesbians. Heterosexual women can fit here, though not as heterosexual women - that is, not as members of the category 'woman'.In naming this work 'lesbian', I invoke a lesbian context. For this reason, I choose not to define the term. To define 'lesbian' is, in my opinion, to succumb to a context of heterosexualism. No one ever feels compelled to explain or define what they perceive as the norm. If we define 'lesbianism', we invoke a context in which it is not the norm.Further, when we try to focus on ourselves, often we feel compelled to define what it means to be a lesbian. And immediately the question arises of who gets to count. We feel we must define what a lesbian is so we can determine who is a lesbian and thereby defend our borders from invasion. We feel threatened from the outside, and we want to determine whom we can trust.Yet we have found we cannot trust someone simply because she's female or because she's lesbian. Even if we had a firm and theoretically coherent definition which articulated the borders of lesbian community, it would not serve us in the way we have imagined. So I let go of the urge to define. I begin to think of lesbian community in a different way.I think of contexts. I think of lesbian context, and I do not think of defining its borders. I do not use the metaphor of a fortress which requires defending from invasion. I think of lesbian community as a ground of lesbian be-ing, a ground of possibility, a context in which we perceive each other essentially as lesbians, a context in which we create lesbian meaning. This context exists, not because it has walls, but because we focus on each other as lesbians.In stressing a centered focus rather than one riveted outward, I do not intend to encourage a uniform perception of each other. I mean to suggest that we perceive each other in all our aspects, from our varied backgrounds to our political differences. But I also mean to suggest that we move among each other as 'lesbians', not as 'women'.One of the devastating effects of heterosexualism on lesbians is an erasure of lesbian meaning. When we interact as lesbians, out of that interaction comes the meaning of our lesbian lives. When we do not interact as lesbians, there can be no lesbian value.Once it was enough to just come out as a lesbian. Now we know better. We understand that being lesbian at most creates the possibility of a certain kind of female agency. I want to get on with the project of realizing this agency. And that involves the area of ethics.
Since 1977, I have been developing this material I now call Lesbian Ethics. At first I refused to address the area of ethics. As a philosopher I had been drawn to epistemology (the study of knowledge), and before that, existentialism; and women finding jobs in philosophy who wanted to address feminist issues were assumed to be concerned with ethics. I did not agree that feminism was simply a part of ethics; I also resented being relegated to what many clearly considered "women's place" in philosophy. I proceeded to explore feminism as having the ability to give meaning to questions of metaphysics and epistemology - what counts as reality, and how we know it.Then from Minnesota, Toni McNaron invited me to do a weekend workshop on lesbian ethics at Maidenrock women's learning institute in Minneapolis, and I happily settled down to play with ideas I found central in lesbian lives. I prepared a program for Maidenrock which involved four parts: power, sabotage, survival, and support. During this time I began to feel that ethics was an important area of feminist thought and not simply a matter of the boring old male question of whether women should have equal rights, which I simply refused to discuss. And I began to feel that examining the area of ethics is crucial to understanding much of what goes on between us.As we worked with each other on various projects, over time we found we were less than ideal lesbians. So we began to concern ourselves with ethical behavior in addition to political activism. However, our choices mostly resulted in undermining lesbian connection rather than promoting it. Part of the reason for this has involved our perception of ethics.Typically, when we reach for ethics, we want rules or standards or principles. We want to know what is the "right" thing to do in a given situation; that is, we want to get through a situation safely and without making mistakes. Alternatively, we appeal to ethics because we want a tool we can use to make others behave; that is, we want to get them to do what we think they should do. These are traditional uses of ethics, and I think they are both a mistake.Professional philosophers will argue that if there are no general principles to which we can appeal as the foundation of moral choice - to determine right and wrong - then ethics is impossible (note Lavine, 1984). Lesbian desire for principles is equally strong. We tend to feel that if we have no ultimate principles with which to judge ourselves and each other right or wrong, then ethics has no meaning.However, there are several problems with appeals to rules or principles. Principles cannot guarantee good behavior; they are of no use if individuals are not already acting with integrity. At most they serve as guides for those who already can act with integrity. Thus, for example, we have fairly intricate strategies for fair fighting or conflict resolution, and yet we can use them to sabotage mediation and to undermine integrity (note Krieger, 1983; Chapter 5).Secondly, rules or principles do not tell us how to apply them. When making a moral decision, we must first decide which principles apply in a given situation and how. For example, suppose that we agree we should always be honest with each other. But what counts as being honest, especially if, as Adrienne Rich (1979) has pointed out, silences can be lies too? Should I interrupt absolutely anything you are doing to tell you how I feel? If I don't, am I being dishonest by withholding information? While the questions may sound silly, we have done the former and accused each other of the latter. Or, if you don't want to address something and always change the subject when I bring it up, perhaps breaking down in tears, am I lying to you if I do not force the issue? It is not always clear what counts as being honest.Thirdly, when two lesbians seriously disagree, often we will also disagree about which principles we think apply. Alternatively, lesbians will be focused on different principles - "she's being unfair" versus "she's being racist" - each riveted on the fact that the other is not adhering to the principle she is concerned with. Ironically, principles only work when they really are not needed.Our own attraction to rules and principles comes in part from a desire to be certain and secure. If someone will only tell us a rule we can follow, we will not have to be in doubt about what we are choosing - we will not have to worry about being mistaken. Or if someone will only set down the rules, then everyone will have to conform. (This, of course, is simply false. Refusal to conform is part of what makes us lesbians.)Our desire for certainty also involves a desire to make judgments regardless of particular circumstances and regardless of individual intentions. If we have a principle or rule, then we can hold another accountable for her actions without having to investigate the particulars involved in her choice. Thus, we simply set up principles and codes, and we begin to cease considering the transformations we go through in our lives as a result of our choices, we ignore a great deal. Acting from principle actually interferes with rather than enhances our ability to make judgments.I am not suggesting that we never try to articulate or use principles or that we should abandon strategies and rules of thumb, such as fair fighting, being honest, or antiracism. We have begun developing fairly intricate strategies for interacting (note Cross, Klein, Smith, and Smith, 1982; Hawxhurst and Morrow, 1984). I am merely suggesting that what counts as an application of a given principle depends on the circumstances of our lives. When appeal to principles works, as Denslow Brown notes, it is because we are already acting with integrity (Brown, workshop on conflict resolution, Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, August, 1982).To apply principles, we must already have an ability to make judgments, and we must be able to gain and assess information about a given situation. We already must be adept at making judgments. With that ability and that information, acting from principle becomes superfluous. Acting from principle is not something we can turn to when all else fails.Yet this is exactly the illusion traditional ethics fosters. So I find myself drawn to examining the function of moral rules and principles designed to help us judge what we ought or ought not do in order to be good. For much of what is called ethics in our culture involves, not the integrity and moral capability of an individual, but rather the extent to which she participates in the structural hierarchy of a social group or organization by adhering to its rules. The ethical virtues as we know them are master/slave virtues. Even in its most subtle form, traditional, normative (everyday) ethics involves principles or rules of obligation to those higher in the hierarchy (including gods) and rules of responsibility for those lower in the hierarchy, often "for their own good." I find that the function of traditional ethics involves promoting social organization and control at the expense of individual integrity and agency.This leads me to consider the basic value of traditional ethics. I am concerned with value, though not so much in the usual sense of determining which acts are right or wrong, nor in the more philosophical sense of considering which principles we can appeal to in order to justify particular moral rules. My concern lies with value inherent in our perceptions of reality, value presupposed by the way we address the world. What I am talking about is not value we deliberate about or think we ought to choose, but a deeper value, the value we give life to by virtue of our choices. The value I find at the heart of traditional ethics is dominance and subordination.My thesis about traditional ethics is this: (1) The focus and direction of traditional ethics, indeed its function, has not been individual integrity and agency but rather social organization and social control. (2) The values around which traditional ethics revolves are antagonistic, the values of dominance and subordination. As a result, (3) traditional ethics undermines rather than promotes individual moral ability and agency. And (4) these aspects of traditional ethics combine to legitimize oppression by, redefining it as social organization. Appeal to rules and principles is at the heart of this endeavor.When I think about ethics, I think about individuals making choices, that is, making judgments and acting. I think about our ability to interact, to connect, to be intimate, to respond. I think about our ability to perceive and judge, our ability to attend and gain information. I think about constraints on our choices, limits on our options. I think about our ability to interact, to connect, to be intimate, to respond. I think about our integrity and about transformations we undergo as a result of our choices - how we grow and change. When I think about ethics, I think about choice under oppression, and I think about lesbian moral agency.In stressing a focus on choice and moral agency, I do not mean to deny that factors affect us which we do not control. Rather I mean to defy the masculine myth that says we must be in control of a situation to make choices. A moral or political theory useful to anyone under oppression must not convince the oppressed that we are total victims. While we do not control situations, we do affect them. In focusing on choice and moral agency, I mean to invoke lesbian ability to engage, to act in situations - that we move here now makes a difference. And I mean to suggest that whatever limits we face, our power - ability and agency - lies in choice.What we need, among other things, is a notion of moral agency under oppression. This includes developing ability within a situation without claiming responsibility for the situation. It involves resisting de-moralization under oppression. It involves resisting the belief that if we cannot control a situation, our actions make no difference and we are powerless. Moral agency involves the ability to go on under oppression: to continue to make choices, to act within the oppressive structure of our society and challenge oppression, to create meaning through our living. I want to suggest that the locus of value of Lesbian Ethics might be what I call autokoenony (o to ken o ne), or self in community, and that its function be the preservation and development of individual integrity and agency.Thus, what I am calling Lesbian Ethics is not a set of rules of right behavior, a list of do's and don'ts aimed at guaranteeing happiness and success or freedom from pain or mistakes. I am interested, not in principles to guide and direct our behavior, but rather in the function of our ethical judgments, the central value of ethical judgments, and our lesbian moral agency. I am interested in ways of perceiving (that is, judging) situations, ways we affirm values (often unwittingly) by our choices in situations, and ways of developing our moral agency in community. Ethics starts with our personal interactions and with the values we spin and weave through these interactions. I am interested in weaving new values through our choices: values which develop lesbian agency and be-ing, preserve our integrity, and make us less susceptible to oppressive values. This is what concerns me when I think about ethics.
I work with language and concepts because I am a philosopher. More importantly, I work with language and concepts because language is involved in any transformation of consciousness as well as in resistance to such transformation. Many lesbians feel that attending to language is a waste of time. Indeed, some have argued that to focus on language is classist.Language, of course, is not the only source of oppression nor the only tool of domination. But the use of language in structuring reality and trapping us in oppression is not separate and distinct from the manipulation of the material conditions of our existence to structure reality and trap us in oppression (Conversation, Jeffner Allen). For example, the process of colonization includes sending in Christian missionaries to write down and categorize the language of colonized peoples. The missionaries set up schools where the children are forced to learn their "native" language through Christian and colonial categories and then produce for the sake of those categories.Language is a tool of oppression, for we remain trapped in oppression when we perceive only what the oppressors perceive, when we are restricted to their values and categories. Language interests me because of its insidiousness as a means of maintaining a political perspective, and because of its susceptibility to change once we become aware. However, the way language functions can be confusing and difficult to understand at first. For language is a matter of agreement: in using language we participate in a consensus, often unwittingly; but our participation is also coerced (note Star, 1978; Starrett, 1975).In the first place, the values embedded in language are a matter of agreement, of consensus. That is, no matter what laws (rules) are passed, the conceptual values embedded in our use of language persist or change because of a general consensus in our usage and in our perceptual judgment. I do not mean that we get together and reach agreement about these matters; I mean that we do not disagree, we do not argue about them. We agree in that we continue to use certain concepts without question (note Wittgenstein, 1968: remark 24). 'Femininity' is such a conceptual value: no matter what kind of research scientists do in connection with so-called feminine behavior, and no matter what kind of qualification feminists and lesbians include when appealing to the feminine, through these activities we all participate in the consensus that this is a fundamental category of human understanding.Language and perceptual judgment are a matter of consensus in that certain judgments go unquestioned, held in place by all that surrounds them, from research to gossip. This core has no justification, and it does not justify. That is, our knowledge holds in place what is central to it.Yet, while the core of our knowledge is held in place by what revolves around it, it also limits and focuses our perception and judgment. For example, while the concept of 'woman' appears to be a descriptive category, it actually determines for the unquestioning perceiver what would count as a woman. It determines our perception of normal female behavior. A particularly tidy illustration of this comes in the form of a well-known riddle: A father and his son were driving when they had a terrible accident. They were rushed to the nearest hospital, and the surgeon on duty was called. The surgeon entered the son's room and exclaimed, "Oh my god, that's my son." How can this be?The solution to the riddle, of course, is that the surgeon is the son's mother. However, those lodged in masculinist thought will miss it; and while they will come up with creative answers - the surgeon was a priest, he was a grandfather, he was the stepfather - their imagination will be limited to male categories. Through her linguistic research, Julia Penelope (Stanley, 1977b) has found that words in English denoting powerful and prestigious positions like 'surgeon' carry with them a value marking of 'male' and 'white': we presume surgeons to be male and white unless told otherwise. Our judgment, our perception, is directed by the values embedded in the language we use, setting limits to what we might imagine. If language did not focus and limit thought this way, the surgeon riddle would not be a riddle.This brings me to the way language, while a consensus, can also involve coercion. For the language we speak is the language of the fathers. I do not mean to challenge the idea of focus and limits in language. After all, it is limits and focus which help us give form to what we are doing. My concern is with the type of limits patriarchal language sets and the means by which we are coerced into patriarchal values.The consensus is coerced in that men have stolen the power of naming from us, as Mary Daly (1973) explores in depth. Thus we have not named ourselves 'woman' for ourselves. What does not serve men's needs is called "unnatural." And 'femininity' is a name for females, which men have developed, that normalizes female subordination.Aside from overt religious and scientific naming of women, a masculinist focus emerges through everyday language use, both in semantics and syntax. Since in masculinist culture women are primarily hearers and readers rather than speakers and writers, our perceptions do not become embedded in the language.In the area of semantics several feminist linguists have written of the systematic derogation of women. For example, Muriel Schulz (1975) has explored a number of different categories of terms for women (in contrast to terms for men) and found that over time, terms for women having positive connotations will eventually acquire negative ones and come to mean those who relate sexually to men. Julia Penelope (Stanley, 1977a) has analyzed a list of 220 terms for women who relate sexually to men and found that the words can be mapped on a grid whose parameters are the length of contact with a man and the amount of cost to a man. The paradigm of woman as prostitute shapes social perception and creates stereotypes of women with which we have to live.Drawing on the work of Muriel Schulz and Julia Penelope [Stanley], Dale Spender articulates two semantic rules governing English usage. First, "any symbol which is associated with the female must assume negative (and frequently sexual - which is also significant) connotations" over time. (Spender, 1980: p.19) Secondly, "there are two fundamental categories, male and minus male. To be linked with male is to be linked to a range of meanings which are positive and good; to be linked to minus male is to be linked to the absence of those qualities." (Spender, 1980: p.23) This is significant, for insofar as we accept English uncritically, by virtue of the very language we use, we will be expressing values we never agreed to, certainly that we never fully evaluated.In addition to sexist and heterosexist values, English is laden with racist values - the most notable example being terms for 'light' and 'dark', which carry positive and negative connotations respectively (note Spender, 1980: p.19). Also permeating the language, as Kathy Hagen and Mardi Steinau note, are ablebodyist values (for example, words which equate sight, not just with one form of knowing, but with knowledge itself such as "I see what you mean," or terms which equate blindness with a lack of understanding such as "She remained blind to her own oppression" (Conversation, Kathy Hagen and Mardi Steinau) as well as sizeist values ("cutting the fat out of the budget") (Conversation, Julia Penelope).Aside from the area of semantics, values become embedded in language through syntax. Perhaps the most a-mazing work in this area has been done by cunning linguists (Conversation, Julia Penelope). Drawing on her own work as well as work done in conjunction with Susan J. Wolfe, Julia Penelope [Stanley] (Penelope, 1980) shows us how - through mere stylistic choices - something someone does to a woman becomes something that happens to her. Then what happens to her can develop into a temporary or accidental characteristic of that woman and, from there, become an essential part of her state or character. When it occurs, this is a process whereby speakers and writers embed values. And since this process occurs in stylistic choices in language use - rather than through discussion, argument, and justification - readers and listeners don't always have a chance to examine, and either challenge or accept, the valuation unless they are extremely sensitive to language and are looking for such valuation.Consider the sentence Julia Penelope [Stanley] offers:On the other hand, consider the passive construction of the same situation: Further, the passive construction makes sense without an agent: Finally, once we have enough Marys, we have a number of: Then, as Julia Penelope [Stanley] explains, through the stylistic choice of treating the action (beating) as a modifier ('beaten') and moving the verb-turned-modifier in front of the noun (thereby changing the truncated passive to a passive adjective), we get: The consensus is coerced through both semantics and syntax. The consensus is also coerced through ridicule. For example, when feminists agreed upon 'ms.' to replace 'mrs.' or 'miss', thereby challenging mandatory public announcement of the sexual availability of women to men, we met with heavy ridicule and disdain. And the media named movement activists 'women's libbers' - an automatic discrediting done to no other liberation movement.Further, the consensus is coerced in that those who do not support it are not likely to gain positions of power within institutions from which the naming emanates. If they do, they will be isolated and dismissed as "eccentric" or "off the wall" - particularly in that great academy of ideas, the university. They will be judged politically biased (unlike their colleagues), hence unscholarly, and thus ignored as they challenge the consensus (status quo). In general, society labels those who challenge the status quo "biased." And it labels those perpetuating the status quo "objective", their message "universal," thereby denying the political nature of their message.Beyond this, those individuals who have perceptions undermining the consensus are discounted and rendered imperceptible, even labeled "mentally ill." That is, if someone rejects the presuppositions of consensus reality, she may at first be treated as if she is mistaken; those in power may marshall "evidence," "fact," to prove her "error." However, because her questioning challenges the core of knowledge, the "facts" are irrelevant. If she continues to resist "correction," she is neutralized - fired, married, locked up.Now, given this idea of a consensus that is coerced and the idea that lesbians are involved in a transformation of value, there remains the question of how change can occur. Following Mary Daly (1973: p.19), I want to suggest our strategy need not be one of trying to prove oppressive values false, thereby working within the existing paradigm, but rather one of transforming the collective imagination so that existing values cease to make sense. This is not an individual project, but it begins with individuals. And that, of course, is where ethics begins.During the emergence of the women's liberation movement, such a transformation of consciousness began. The movement began, for a few years, to give rise to a new concept, 'womyn', which had not been present in masculinist thought. This conception did not result from laws passed or from men's benevolence but from something many lesbians and women were doing, from a breach in the masculinist consensus of women's place. We stopped focusing on the social conception of what it meant to be a woman - namely, someone who is by nature helpmate to a man - and simply acted. There were bursts of anger and outrage, bursts during which we interrupted (that is, stopped responding to) the fathers' categories. These categories held in place the patriarchal foundation of male domination and female subordination. They embedded the implication in general, liberal, humanist perception that it is reasonable and rational to discuss whether women should have equal rights, even though it is the value men embrace as they strut with their nuclear toys that threaten to destroy the planet. In outrage we disdained the debates, refused to honor the consensus, stopped trying to justify our rights, and simply claimed our due. As a result, women's liberation, not women's subordination, was the value held in place by our actions, the value around which we spun our choices. We were focusing on ourselves in a way not present in mass media portrayals of women, acting for ourselves in our own names and independently of male approval or sanction.For a number of reasons this focus began to ebb. But for a while the focus was there, and it was powerful (that is, enabling), giving rise to a different reality, which then allowed women to develop in new directions. I want us to continue moving. I start with language because I am not interested in improving the way we act on existing values. Nor am I interested in directly confronting the existing values and proving them false. No, my desire is for us to pursue our transformation of consciousness, continuing to create a new conceptual framework, so that existing values - values which make oppression credible and acceptable - cease to make sense. It is possible for us to spin a revolution. And I begin with the values we weave in our actions with each other.
In my opinion dominance and subordination lie at the heart of social interactions in the form of the institution of heterosexuality, and so long as that axis remains intact, oppression will be a reality - all forms of oppression, not just male domination of women. There are those who argue for oppression - Hitler was one - and the justification is fairly complete. Under fascist ideology, subordination to a higher order is essential for humans to become moral agents: obedience and the cessation of individual judgment are the essence of what it means to be moral and achieve meaning. Within that framework, what I am discussing as moral agency is unintelligible, makes no sense.What I am after is a dismembering of the existing conceptual schema by calling into question its foundation and participating in the weaving of a new conceptual schema. In so doing, I will not be proving that one is right and the other is wrong, though of course I do choose one rather than the other. To say that dominance and subordination are morally wrong is no different from saying that dominance and subordination are oppressive. And that is really no different from saying dominance and subordination are dominance and subordination.Thus, rather than prove false a patriarchal framework which revolves around dominance and subordination, I want to clarify its boundaries, show that some of what is claimed in this framework is a contradiction, and dislodge its foundation. I want to suggest how dominance figures our perceptions in ways and areas we might not have suspected. And I want to make some suggestions about how our perceptions and judgments can be different.It is my judgment that the relationship of dominance and subordination undermines moral agency. This is not a judgment which can be defended so much as a judgment that can be held in place by what surrounds it, by the daily choices we lesbians make. It may well be that many simply reject the axis of value I am suggesting. And if that is so, then their ethical needs can be more than adequately met by traditional anglo-european ethics.My idea is that without tacit agreement concerning the value of our integrity, there will be no moral agency for us outside the master/slave virtues of the fathers. Even with such agreement, our efforts can seriously go awry, owing, at least in part, to the ideology we have adopted from dominant anglo-european ethical systems.Further, what I am outlining here is not a program for guaranteeing behavior; it is not a program for getting lesbians to act ethically. It is a program for lesbians who already want to be ethical, want to act with integrity. That is, we make many mistakes, and sometimes we stay in patterns for a long time as we try to understand them. But when we finally understand how a given pattern functions destructively, we act to change. Lesbian Ethics is not a book for those who have no desire to make changes.I want to add that what I have in mind concerning the shifts in perception which I am calling Lesbian Ethics are meant to be used in lesbian community, among ourselves, as we weave new value, as we explore the possibility of creating, as we try to work out of the habit of dominance and subordination, thereby becoming beings who are not used to it. Whether these values can be developed from a different angle as part of a political strategy to confront patriarchy is an open question. On the one hand, it seems that giving up our survival skills in a framework of dominance and subordination is a mistake. On the other, I am finding that more and more, for myself, the values I am trying to articulate here are a source of empowerment in patriarchy in a way that our survival skills are not. I once felt that these values were meaningless in patriarchy. I am no longer sure.Nevertheless, my focus is lesbian community, for it is within that context that these values make sense and have a chance of developing. There is new value emerging in lesbian community - for I have not woven this work in a vacuum; and what I hope for in the transformation possible in lesbian living involves a conceptual framework, a new paradigm, in which oppression is not automatic - where rape, pogroms, slavery, lynchings, and colonialism are not even conceivable (Star, 1978: p.19).In attempting to develop a different conceptual schema, I in no way mean to suggest that if it works, there will be no problems, no pain, no error, no misunderstanding. But if the values of oppression are no longer normalized - are no longer fully integrated into our lives - our interactions will less readily result in destruction. If we can interact in ways that weave a different locus of value, then our habits and instincts and reactions will less likely lead us back to the fathers. Then we may become an energy field capable of resisting oppression.