Show description

Butler’s, and perhaps also Bensinger’s, political program would at best simply replace ‘man’-based patriarchy (male power), 30 31 Bensinger, ‘Lesbian Pornography: The Re/Making of (a) Community’, 84. Ibid. Separating Lesbian and Feminist Theory 39 with masculinity-based patriarchy (masculine power). Under masculinitybased patriarchy, anatomical females and males would have an equal opportunity to appropriate, with complete naturalness, masculine power over feminine individuals, who themselves could be either anatomically male or female.

4 For instance, Jeffner Allen states in her introduction to the anthology Lesbian Philosophies and Cultures (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, 1–11), ‘The primary emphasis of this book is lesbian philosophies and cultures, rather than lesbianism considered in relation to or in contrast to, patriarchy, or heterosexuality’, p. 1. g. 5 All of these are issues that had their birthplace in feminist theory. They became lesbian issues only because the general concern with women’s relation to women was narrowed to lesbians’ relation to fellow lesbians.

What matters is not, for example, whether the Greeks regarded man–boy sexual interaction as homosexual. What matters is that we do. Only by looking at how people that we ‘read’ as lesbian or gay were treated can gay history and anthropology reveal the arbitrariness of our contemporary hostility to lesbianism and homosexuality. ’ need not distort the historical or anthropological record so long as we are selfconscious about what we are doing. That individuals get into gay and lesbian histories and anthropologies because we read them as gay or lesbian does not entail that historians and anthropologists should not also attend to how these individuals would have been categorized and complexly described from their own culture’s perspective.