4th August 2026: Forests are more than Collections of Trees
since i don’t think i make this clear in the text, by “pansexual” i mean something that includes both homos and hets (as per this definition from 2000); and when i talk about social attitudes to lesbianism i am talking about within the sorts of “queer” (sub)cultures i inhabit – i think i kind of elide that contemporary lesbophobia exists and so i’m gonna say here that it does to make clear that i know it does but i am writing about a fairly insular group of people that i don’t delineate very well when i get to that point. ALSO, this one has endnotes which are some criticisms/thoughts taken verbatim from a discord chat with my ex who gave this an early read (cause i think it’s nice to demonstrate critical engagement and productive disagreement) ; i’ve edited the essay in a couple places following her recommendations but not where i’ve put in an endnote. ANYWAY, this one goes 1) an ecology of discourse; 2) the language of lesbianism; 3) disambiguating “total power exchange”; 4) the language of lesbianism; 5) an ecology of discourse. there is lateral interrelation between the three topics here that maybe mostly makes sense in my head. but still, it’s only around 7,000 words (plus endnotes). breezy.
Discursive Ecology
This is a post about words as per usual but I’m going to start with some stuff about biogeography. I’ve alluded to this before, but I have a BSc in Environmental Science and an MSc in Geospatial & Mapping Science. I like physical geography. I am, in fact, reasonably good at it. I wish I could do anything with it but instead I get to be unemployed and survive by having friends who will buy my zines and parents who will buy me a flat.
At any rate, we went on this biogeography field trip at one point. I wish the lecturer for biogeography had been better because I found the course content reasonably interesting. Still, the field trip was pretty fun. It was mostly measuring the circumference of trees. The point was that you could glean something about how a forest developed through the trees and their layout. More-or-less evenly distributed trees of more-or-less the same size indicated that they had been planted. It’s actually kind of creepy when you start noticing it in the wild (so to speak).
The point is that forests have a history, they have interventions, they have boundaries, they are managed by people who have intentions. Every forest in Britain is like this now because humans have completely intervened in the entire natural environment of this island. I am not going to weigh in on whether farming or whatever was good or bad, but the fact is that now we inhabit an ecology where we have to be conscious of the history, the interventions, the boundaries, because we are inheriting a legacy of domination over nature.
In this sense, the natural world is anything but. When we talk about a forest, we are talking about a facet of our culture, not just a collection of trees.
Hi Lesbians!
I read a couple books about lesbian history recently: Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Madeline Davis and Liz Kennedy, and A Lesbian History of Britain by Rebecca Jennings. Boots of Leather is essential reading for anyone interested in butch-fem history (page refs will be to the PDF linked rather than my paperback and denoted by “boots”); Lesbian History was fine and probably not something I would buy but it’s available through the Glasgow Life library system if you want it (page refs will by to that 1st edition hardback copy and denoted by “history”). There’s a lot interesting to me about both of these books, but I’m going to focus on their mode of analysis and how that relates to the way they talk about language surrounding women who love women.
Both books introduce their approach to history as “queer” (boots, pg. 23–25; history, pg. xvi–xvii). What this means is looking at what is abject from normative sexuality, which is something that changes with class, location, and time period. This allows us to reckon with changes in systems of knowledge/language (discourse) and how this changes what is queer in a given context. This means that for some contexts where “lesbian” is neither a term that’s being used, nor is the modern conception of it discursively legible (which is to say, it is not a set of characteristics which made sense grouped together within a system of knowledge), then “the lesbian” does not exist. The most we can say is that if one of these women loving women were around today, they would probably be a lesbian. And I agree: if things were different, they wouldn’t be the same.
Snark aside, my point here is that while women who had sexual and loving relationships with women outside of normative sexuality did exist throughout time, it’s not always right to call these women “lesbians”. Hell, it’s not even right to describe this as same-sex desire since for the 16th and 17th centuries people were working off a one sex model of human anatomy (history, pg. 12), where the difference between men and women were their balance of humours (history, pg. 2). In this time period, women of the same household would sleep together and have erotic relations, which is actually something that shored up the heteropatriarchal importance of female chastity before marriage to a man since the worry was pregnancy (history, pg. 4–5). The type of woman–woman sexual desire that was queer then is that which threatened this heteropatriarchal regime, which involved worries about women with clitorises enlarged to the point that they could have penetrative intercourse, and these women were known as “tribades” (history, pg. 15–17). Something to glean from all this is that the discursively legible identity (as in, an exterior which creates the effect of an interior) which is abject from normative sexuality – i.e. “queer” – has little to do with affections between women. Instead, it is the woman who can become a man in a physiological sense. This, clearly, has changed in the meantime.1
So when do we greet lesbians as “lesbians”? In the 17th and 18th centuries, we see “female husbands” appear, which appears to be the route by which most women who love women at the time are actually be able to spend their lives in a relationship with other women – but there’s not much discussion in the book on how these women actually conceptualised themselves or how they were thought of beyond being criminalised as vagrants and frauds (history, pg. 30–37). (as an aside, this is kind of just my criticism of the lez history book as a whole. there’s a lot of info but no throughlines. we’re introduced to “tribades” but not told when that term stops being used. it’s actually hard to tease out the thread of legible lesbianism (for lack of a better word) in amidst all the unanalysed info. it’s also, like, left aligned rather than justified? who does that with paper print??) In the 18th and 19th centuries we see female friendships that we would now describe as lesbian partnerships develop for middle and upper class women. We see at least one of these couples maligned as “damned sapphists” for the suspected sexual nature of their friendship (history, pg. 45), but these sorts of accusations become socially legible through descriptions of (one of the) women as masculine, if not outright male (history, pg. 45–46). History suggests that there was no explicit language of lesbianism at this time through which women who loved women could conceptualise themselves, and so had to form an identity by connecting with contemporary male characters as well as homosexual practices from antiquity (pg. 54–55). This was done outwith any sort of understanding community and so did not develop into a coherent discourse of lesbianism.2
Towards the end of the 19th century and until the end of the 1920s we see the language of sexology and “inversion” start to appear, where women who pursue other women are considered “inverts” – that is, they are an inversion of the supposed character of female sexuality in the Victorian era, being masculine, active, and sexual (history, pg. 77). The result of this is that we have this distinction between inverts and the objects of their affection, meaning that the women inverts pursue are not considered themselves inverts because they apparently adhere to female gender norms, which is being passive and asexual, helpless in the face of a forceful invert (history, pg. 78–79). While there seems to be debate over how prevalent the sexologists’ conceptions of women who loved women were during this time period in terms of adoption by these women themselves or understanding by the general public, a faithful depiction of an invert entered broader social consciousness in 1928 with Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which was based on the theories of and approved by noted sexologists at the time (history, pg. 116–117). It’s really kind of hard to overstate the influence of this book on lesbian consciousness, with multiple butches in boots remarking on the influence it had on them and their understanding of their identity (pg. 496, 583, 588). However, the language used throughout The Well of Loneliness is that of inversion – not one mention of a “lesbian” throughout the text.
Okay, really, so when do we start to see the word “lesbian” appear? History just doesn’t give us an answer. Barbara Bell describes the bars she frequented in the 30s and 40s as “lesbian”, but this is from her 1999 memoir and isn’t necessarily representative of the language used at the time (history, pg. 132–133). To jump from Britain to Buffalo at this point in time, we see “lesbian” rarely used by working class women who love women (which are the subject of boots), though when it is used it is generally synonymous with “butch” (boots, pg. 59–60). That said, between the 30s and the 50s there is a shift in the conceptualisation of what makes someone queer from this sort of gender inversion to a preference for sexual object, the latter of which forms the basis for the Kinsey Reports (1953 for the female sexuality one) as well as the basis for homosexual identity in the 50s, by which time we start the usage of “lesbian” to refer to these women (boots, pg. 578–579). This is true in Britain as well, with recorded instances of “lesbian” in this usage popping up from at least 1947 (history, pg. 149). So definitely from the 1960s onwards it seems to be pretty firm that the word “lesbian” has come into common usage and refers to women who sexually desire other women. Perfect. I’m glad everyone settled on a definition and then agreed to it forever. Yay!
An Exchange of Total Power
All our Leather and kink terminology has a history. Sometimes these histories are some people sitting around then thinking up a word or a phrase or a way to cook a potato and hoping it catches on, but even that is on the back of other ways of describing – and as such knowing – how we (should) move through and exist in our environment, as well as what that environment itself even is. I worry that with these sorts of things, sometimes we fail to see the forest for the trees (so to speak). It is almost worse when a term has an on the face of it self explanatory description. This is true of a lot of things, but here I am going to write about “Total Power Exchange” (TPE).
If you’ve read my other posts about language in Leather and in kink, you’ll know that rigorous examination of this sort of terminology has a tendency to get somewhat messy and I have a tendency to get somewhat stuck in. With that in mind, I am going to provide a brief overview of terminology in M/s, gesturing at sources where possible (references to my own physical copies of things except where linked or otherwise stated). I say “where possible” because there are no histories of M/s discourse as far as I can tell. It’s at times like these we miss Michel most. At any rate, I’m going to mention two things in advance here: firstly, I am indebted in my understanding of Leather history to my flatmate who is effectively my research assistant on all of these sorts of blog posts for anything on Fet or in an archive; secondly, I am having to make a similar judgement to the lesbian history books inasmuch as I am having to select what counts as M/s when that term was not always around and has not continued to mean the same thing over time. To solve this, I am going to have to reappropriate the queer approach and look at relationships forms which are abject from mainstream gay & lesbian partnerships, as well as types of relationship which are abject from mainstream pansexual kink, whatever that mainstream (itself abject from normative sexuality) is at the time.
At the advent of (American) Leather publications in the 1970s, there seemed to be an east coast / west coast divide on literally everything. Even S&M varied between its sadomasochist usage on the west coast and “slave & master” on the east coast, as per the first issue of Drummer (and for those who don’t know, “sadomasochist” won out). That’s kind of just a fun tidbit, but throughout the ‘70s the terms masochist and slave, as well as sadist and master, are each synonymous. At least until the ‘90s there is an implicit underpinning of a power dynamic in Leather as this is what makes something “leathersex” (Learning the Ropes, Race Bannon, 1992, pg. 154). This understanding of SM as power exchange is reflected on the lesbian side too, with “Juicy Lucy” using the terms sadist, top, and dominant interchangeably in Coming to Power, and the same with masochist, bottom, and “passive” (SAMOIS, 1982, pg. 30–31). In Coming to Power, this all sits along the language of “mistress” and “slave”, both in the context of a relationship built on a power dynamic (e.g. pg. 44) and in the context of roles in a scene (e.g. pg. 185, and I’ll note that here the author, Susan Farr, also uses “dominant” and “submissive”). Similarly, in early issues of Drummer, “master” and “slave” refer to sexual roles in the confidential ads with interested parties specifying things such as “live-in slaves” (for example) if they wanted what we’d now call lifestyle power exchange.
The idea of an “exchange” of “power” is prevalent from the ‘70s, but this is implicit as a basic component of leathersex. As such, for leatherfolk from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, “SM”, “Masters” and “slave”, “Dominants” and “submissive”, even “tops” and “bottoms” all ultimately refer to who has is taking power and who is giving it up, however that materialises. Of course, what is legible as power is socially constructed as well and is constituted by the acts themselves. Power exchange in period is what I would describe as a service orientation, with Leather bottoms expected to in some way serve Leather tops, whether that was through being penetrated or through fetching drinks; bottoming without serving the top ceased to be legible as leathersex (see Leathersex Q&A, Joseph Bean [a former editor of Drummer], 1996, pg. 31 for a good example of this).
So when do we see anything referred to as “total power exchange”? Okay, so, here is a geocities website from 2003 that provides various definitions of the term: https://www.geocities.ws/dancer_of_gor/tpe.html. As per the page, here is the 1999 definition provided by Stephen S. Davis, who coined the term in the mid ‘90s on the newsgroup alt.sex.bondage (which my editrix, who was an active user at the time, says was pretty het) that also originated the term BDSM:
A TPE (Total Power Exchange) relationship, sometimes described as an absolute lifestyle d&s relationship (that such relationships can actually be neither "total" or "absolute" is agreed; these are ideal states to be worked towards but which will not be achieved, which is why TPE may be better seen as a process or goal than as a state), is a relationship in which no impediment to the exercise of the owner's power is accepted (some may, of course, exist, and what prudent owners do is to avoid direct collisions with these impediments, while working to overcome those that can be overcome (since the laws of gravity can't be overcome, a sane owner isn't going to ask a slave to fly (w/o appropriate equipment, of course), nor will a sensible owner try push a slave into things that are hard limits for hir (but the owner *might* push a slave up against what the slave thinks are hard limits but which sie can in fact overcome)). Such things as safewords, contracts, negotiated limits, and anything else which recognizes/acknowledges/formalizes limits on the owner's power are inimical to TPE.
Raven Kaldera corroborates this account of who coined the term and what it meant in Power Circuits (2010, pg. 17). However, by the time of writing for Raven, he notes that TPE is non-specific and there is disagreement within and between M/s communities to what counts – whether doing TPE necessitates living together, for example. My flatmate says that Stephen’s definition is “good” but I think he just means that that’s what he uses the term to mean. Current definitions of TPE are certainly a bit more vague, with Anton Fulmen defining it as one partner “unlimited power” within a relationship, which in context means that there is no aspect of the relationship where decisions are made in an egalitarian way (The Dominance Playbook, 2019, pg. 56), and with Dan and Dawn Williams simply describing TPE as “a relationship in which one person is the leader and one is not.” (Living M/s, Second Edition, 2024, pg. 6). I’m not going to go on the rant I always go on at this point, though that is relevant here.
What I am going to focus on is a weird discontinuity here. By the time we’re using the term TPE to describe anything, we’re in a pansexual scene rather than overlapping lesbian and gay scenes. This is where the dearth of sources really shows. Dr Bob and M. Jen outline how there are two different traditions at play at once within M/s, a Leather (gay & lesbian) approach and a BDSM (pansexual) approach (Master/slave Mastery – Updated, 2014, pg. 27-31). My flatmate’s vibe check on the history here is this:
There is the Leather paradigm of SM in the ‘70s in which M/s is wrapped up in every other type of play. At some point in the ‘80s, M/s is delineated as its own type of relationship, as distinct from SM in that it is lifestyle-based rather than scene-based (for example, MAsT forms in 1988 as a support group for gay men in M/s relationships). During the ‘80s and early ‘90s as well, there is the AIDS epidemic in which hundreds of thousands of gay men lose their lives to government inaction. As a result, for these M/s organisations to continue, they have to open up to the pansexual kink scene with its own paradigm about power exchange (for example, MAsT opens up as a pansexual organisation in 1997). This is the environment in which TPE is coined.
TPE was also notably coined on the internet. I can’t quite work through exactly what I want to say here, but by looking at the FAQs of soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm, a contemporaneous newsgroup to alt.sex.bondage, we can glean some things about this discursive environment. For these BDSM newsgroup users, leather seemed to amount to a fetish material (1995). “Full-time dominant/submissive relationships” are also explained to be the source of debate and “relatively few” in number (1995), which again indicates a difference from Leather where the language would have been that of “Master” and “slave”, as well a bit more numerous*. Straight up, the FAQ refuses to answer the question about becoming someone else’s slave (1995). There is usage of the term “power exchange” in the context of “a BDSM scene” (1995), but to me this seems to be taking “power exchange” to mean any situation in which power in whatever form is given up in whatever way – which is a far cry from its older usage to denote overarching authority and a degree of service orientation (and please, for the love of god, hold this idea in your head that someone has heard the term “power exchange”, inferred a definition without the actual cultural context, and then propagated a new definition as if that were naturally what it meant).
*(so my flatmate and i disagreed on this point. he said that i didn’t have the evidence to make the claim that leatherfolk were doing lifestyle power exchange more than kinksters were and he cited guy baldwin’s ties that bind (1993) which states that no one is really doing twenty four seven emm ess. i went away to think for a while and my counterexamples are that, like, the drummer ads were for live in slaves, there is tremendous discussion of this type of thing across the leather literature, and guy baldwin himself wrote a fucking book on doing twenty four seven emm ess called slavecraft (2002) which has an afterword by patrick califia who is just like, what the fuck why is guy lying that no one is doing any of this stuff i love doing it. see also miss abernathy’s concise slave training manual for evidence of lifestyle power exchange, which was written by drew kelly cambell who contributed to the second coming a leatherdyke reader, and was lauded as being a realistic guide for this type of thing by big names in leather such as laura antoniou, patrick califia, joseph bean, and race bannon. on the other hand, i can’t find much stuff to evidence any sort of bdsm emphasis on lifestyle power exchange except for gor maybe (and idek about gor i am not getting into gor rn if any of y’all readers are gor heads and want to tell me i’m wrong i will happily accepted the criticism but i am not getting side tracked by gor rn beyond that one geocities site) and a chapter in the new topping book (which admittedly was co-written by dossie who hosted the first samois party, but definitely is a book about bdsm/for kinksters), about “full-time d/s”3 which presents master/slave as scene roles being played full time, equal to daddy/boy, or mistress/dog (2003, pg. 167). i wish i could find a copy of the original topping book to compare but i just can’t. anyway. tangent over, and hopefully you have been reminded to make your own judgement about the way i evidence the history i’m writing.)
We can kind of piece together here that TPE was created as a way to effectively re-invent the Leather conception of M/s within the discourse of BDSM (i.e. pansexual kink). What makes it weird from here is that Leather M/s and BDSM M/s collide both in real life communities and scenes, as well as on the relatively new internet. So TPE gets adopted by leatherfolk as well, eventually. It’s hard to figure out when this is. To my dismay, neither SlaveCraft (Guy Baldwin, 2002) nor The Compleat Slave (Jack Rinella, 2002) have any mention of TPE (and, just to be clear, neither do any of the earlier books i’ve mentioned because i do check my working both here and always and because these posted bio logs are written by a sweaty girl in a sweaty room and not by fucking ai). I was hoping that the second edition of Rinella’s The Master’s Manual (2006) would have it, but no luck there. However, it is mentioned in Master/slave Relations: Handbook of Theory and Practice, which is another 2006 book (and one I had to download), and it’s even by our pal, Dr Bob, who states: “For the sake of this section [about why someone might want to be “a slave”], I'll assume you want what is increasingly called, Total Power Exchange — a 24/7 relationship that involves power exchange, as opposed to scene-specific role-play.” (pg. 48). This is less comprehensive than Stephen’s original definition but it mostly proves my point about TPE being BDSM’s M/s. My best guess, genuinely, is that Dr Bob, being who he is with one foot in Leather and one foot in BDSM, might have actually brought the term TPE across the discursive divide.
(sorry, wait, addendum. i’m putting this in like this because these blog posts are supposed to emulate thinking out loud, like we’re working through something together. anyway, all the links on that gor site are dead and i tried a few last night and struggled with the interface, but i tried the last one this morning and found this glossary from 2000 which defines both leather and kink terminology, including TPE! okay, well, cool, is this just some rando? do i need to change anything? clearly the answers are, respectively, no and yes. this is dr gloria brame’s site who is a sexologist who was publicly writing about power exchange from the ‘90s. her book from ’93, different loving (of which my editrix had (and still has!) a copy; so that’s some evidence that gloria was salient in the ostensibly het asb crowd), was co-written with her husband and another guy, doesn’t include the term “total power exchange” (phew!), and also kind of validates my take on the development of a pansexual scene and the influence of online groups for developing its discourse (pg. 33–34). but she’s also got this 2000 book, solo authored, called come hither, which contains that glossary. so there’s our earliest printed mention of TPE, and it comes from someone who has the same one foot in leather one foot in bdsm thing as dr bob. except, unlike dr bob, gloria brame isn’t judging at leather contests. she is writing for a default het audience and explicitly writes from her own heterosexual experience (with, it must be noted, enormous levels of respect towards (gay and lesbian) leatherfolk) (pg. 210; see also the blurbs on her website for another indication of her audience – absent is patrick, race, guy, laura, joseph, even though gloria is writing in (explicit!) conversation with them). also! fucking also!! she states that her chapter entitled “view from the top: sexual dominants” is partly written so that it “puts dominance in a hetero context” (pg. 211). i am punching the air in my room rn dog; this kinda directly supports my entire take. and while TPE is only mentioned in the glossary (pg. 320; see also the site), it is also mentioned as part of the entry on “slavery”, which mentions “[i]n lifestyle slavery, the slave commits to a total power exchange in which the dominant’s power goes beyond the realm of sex and enters daily affairs.” so genuinely, as far as i can tell, TPE was originally just M/s in the language of bdsm.)
So now we know that TPE is the same as M/s and we can all agree forever. Yay! Wait… Okay, so, my flatmate is informing me that people are arguing on Reddit about TPE. And on Fet. Surely all of these people have put in an afternoon of work to go through the literature and locate TPE in its proper context? Okay okay I’ll stop being snarky. If you have managed to hold that idea from literally four paragraphs ago in your head then let’s return to it now (and if not, please reread this bit).
So the everyone agrees forever thing just isn’t how anything works. I’m sure a lot of the people arguing about TPE don’t even know who Dr Bob is, or potentially that Leather and BDSM have two different histories before becoming intertwined at some point post-AIDS crisis, or even that words have histories.4 This final assertion, that words have histories, is different from the pedantic assertion that “words mean things”. Obviously words mean things. What they mean is slightly more complicated, however.
If someone were to argue that, say, if you’re doing TPE then the s-type can’t be polyamorous, then my initial counterargument would be what I have described above, that TPE is really just ‘80s M/s reinvented within the language of BDSM where practitioners had misunderstood the Leather term “power exchange” and it had to be augmented by an adjective (“total”) to generate a new concept, which was really just an old concept in Leather though one that had been discursively illegible within BDSM up to that point (see again how that newsgroup FAQ refused to answer the question of “really” being a slave) because the practice of full time dominance and submission understood through extending consent and scene based roles into a lifestyle. But this doesn’t work as a counterargument because the rebuttal is, as always, “Well that’s not what I mean.”
And I have no answer to that, right? Someone’s definition of “total power exchange” might as well be “an exchange of total power”. What “exchange” means, what “power” is, and what makes that power “total” is at the whim of this someone’s explanatory acumen at any given point in the conversation. If this were thirty years ago (which is 1996 from time of writing), I would have been able to appeal to the illegibility of whatever their definition turned out to be in the actual environments that they inhabit. Arguing that definition of TPE at that time would have been like arguing a Lesbian was really someone from Lesbos – it’s just not what any of us mean when we say the word. But we aren’t in the ‘90s. We’re here now, and now here. We inhabit a discursive environment where it is impossible to stake a claim precisely because it is equally possible for everyone to stake a claim. (Christ, I’m speaking in riddles.)
What I actually mean by this is that everyone is able to define their own terms and this has the effect that we struggle to build a shared language. The same thing that made kinksters misunderstand Leather “power exchange” due to not understanding the context of Leather is happening with all current kink and Leather language because everyone is now free to create and work within their own discursive bubbles.5 I’m repeating myself, and I think that so long as we are trapped in this paradigm of validating each other’s unfounded, non-analytical, ahistorical assertions on the basis that “well that’s what it means to them” at the expense of any sort of discursive legibility for anything we are doing as practitioners of lifestyle power exchange, we are all going to be repeating ourselves ad infinitum.
Bye Lesbians!
Wait… Okay, so, my flatmate is informing me that people are arguing on reddit about lesbians. And on Fet. And, uh, everywhere? What do you mean that defining a lesbian as “a woman who sexually desires other women” was fraught in the ‘60s, ‘70s… all the way up till now? Lemme check what the Buffalo butches have to say.
…why are the butches saying that all fems are bisexual? (boots, pg. 608; pg. 637–638)
So, to be clear, not all the butches are saying this. There’s this argument between two of the narrators about who counts as a lesbian which comes down to gender inversion vs. object choice both with this added element of actually being in the lesbian life (boots, pg. 606–608). The interesting thing to me is that these narrators were providing Madeline and Liz their oral histories in the ‘80s; that is, the argument about who counts as a lesbian happened between two (admittedly old) butches in the ‘80s. This reflects the arguments and attitudes of bar culture in the ‘40s and ‘50s, but like, that was an argument and attitudes of still living lesbians in the ‘80s as well. The inversion vs. object choice debate was still, in a sense, alive.
The ‘70s and ‘80s was also the period of lesbian separatism, which was the political tendency advocating that women separate from men and build their own culture because “[i]t was not that men held the power, but that men were the power” and so women must be “either celibate or lesbian” (Separatism: A Look Back in Anger, Janet Dixon, quoted in history, pg. 175–176). So, sexually speaking lesbian refers to being with another woman, but beyond that, any separatist is legibly a lesbian for their refusal to engage in any sort of heteropatriarchal male culture. At the same time, you have revolutionary lesbians who build this concept of the “political lesbian” who is “a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men” (Political Lesbianism: The Case Against Heterosexuality, Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, quoted in history, pg. 177). In both of these conceptions, lesbianism is a political act prior to being an expression of sexual preference, as well as being a celebration of femininity and the female form, eschewing the embodiment of any kind of maleness or masculinity (see: Sheila Jeffreys’s anti-butch-fem schtick). So, contemporaneously, we have lesbianism as gender inversion, as object choice, and as radical anti-heteropatriarchal politics. How do we get from there to now, where the definition of lesbianism that seems to be most agreed upon is “identifying as a lesbian”?
In the first season of the L word, there’s this character called Lisa. He identifies as “a male lesbian”. He’s not a trans man, to be clear. He’s also not really a trans woman (though in a better show, he would have transitioned). He is a cis man who is a lesbian. He dates Alice, who is bisexual, and she ends up breaking up with him after he is too much of a lesbian for her. He wants to use toys and cum at the same time and be all egalitarian and stuff rather than taking control like she wants him to, since he’s, y’know, a man, and that’s why she’s dating him. This is, obviously, a weird, reasonably transphobic joke character, but I think this whole mini plot-line reveals the essential stepping stone that gets us to this present moment.
I am going to posit a throughline to all this. Feel free to email and correct my history if I’m getting details wrong or there’s good counter-evidence for my theory here. I will post an update saying I was wrong and trying to get it right because I really do care about the stuff I’m writing, even when it’s [checks time] 1:42am on a Sunday. Anyway,
Gay Liberation in the 1970s focussed on coming out of the closet, taking ownership of a queer identity in a way that empowered people to build political power and develop self-consciousness of that identity, at the expense of homogenising the different identities within lesbian communities into one lesbian identity (boots, pg. 676–677). This movement was in lineage with the queer people who were visible as queer and were in the right environment to build and defend communities and institutions, such as the butches and their fems who made certain bars recognisably lesbian, thus creating the space for an enduring subculture of lesbianism (this is kinda just what boots is about but see pg. 341–351 for in depth direct discussion). What the Gay Liberation movement did, however, was relocate queer visibility from gender inversion to the announcement of object choice as a political act. Part of the legacy of this strategic manoeuvre is the tying together of lesbianism itself and the speech act of announcing one’s lesbianism, increasingly present from this point forwards in the continuing push for lesbian (and gay) people to “come out”. All the separatist stuff is also part of this legacy insasmuch as, for the separatists, the queer political act of outright rejecting some heteronormative social structures is foregrounded as lesbian but the actual stuff about object choice has become tangential. Downstream of that is lesbianism as a set of politicised aesthetics that simulate gender inversion, object choice, and rejection of heteropatriarchy – or, in a word, lesbianism as Lisa.
Obviously, in the mid 2000s when the first season of the L word aired, there were still women who are actually having real sex with other women and consider themselves lesbians. These sorts of women even exist today (I have actually met some of them!). But simulation doesn’t really mean not doing something; what I am grasping at here is that this cultural model of lesbianism, for many individuals at least, is understood prior to the development of any sort of actual romantic or sexual love for another women – or, in the case of trans women, even the understanding of themselves as women. If separatist and revolutionary conceptions of lesbianism were language that masked and denatured the profound reality of women’s sexual involvement with each other, then the lesbianism as politicised aesthetics developed from it masked the absence of this reality (certainly in the case of Lisa). Finally, we have reached the era of lesbianism itself as speech act, that is self identifying as a lesbian without any claims on a set of aesthetics, much less on any sort of assertion of gender inversion, object choice, or rejection of heteropatriarchy; in this sense, lesbianism has no relation to any reality whatsoever, instead being its own pure simulacrum. (thanks for the help, jean.)
Okay, no, that’s unsatisfying. What do I actually mean by this? I genuinely think Baudrillard’s whole thing about simulation and how “there is no more hope for meaning” (link above, pg. 164) does help us make sense of this situation, but there’s still more to say. There has been, I believe, an emphasis on acceptance in many progressive circles as a counter to right wing bigotry. This “acceptance” has come to mean just outright believing what anyone says is at least true for them. When someone says they are a lesbian now, we understand it to mean that they believe that they are a lesbian and that this might have little to do with gender inversion, object choice, rejecting heteropatriarchy, or the aesthetics of those things – or, in fact, it might have everything to do with one or more of those things because they have come into their own lesbian consciousness through an understanding of lesbian history and picked a side. In either case, the term lesbian itself conveys nothing unless it is elaborated how the lesbian in question chooses to interpret and embody the word.
In the face of such a situation, it seems easy to insist that lesbianism is actually the specific combination of lesbian paradigms we deem to be acceptable, politically useful, sexy, whatever, and then argue this ruthlessly with women on the internet who only date men but call themselves lesbian. However, this seems as antiquated as a ‘50s butch insisting on the language of inversion. It seems arbitrary and reactionary to me to harken back to a better lesbianism. The word lesbian is maybe meaningless now inasmuch as it is entirely self referential, and I’m sad about that too, but maybe we can make new words for a new understanding of what we want. Maybe this will help us grapple with an discursive environment that validates everyone’s self assertions at the expense of legibility. Maybe we can locate what is queer about us now in the way that we as women love other women and build a new community around that.
And I have this thought that in, I don’t know, fifty years or so, someone will write a book on a ____ history of Glasgow, and this ____ history book will analyse how my friends and I saw ourselves as lesbians instead of ____ which is kind of hard to imagine for the younger audience of the book, and then in thirty years after the publication of that book, at which point I will hopefully be extremely fucking dead, some sweaty girl in a sweaty room who is starting to feel weird about calling herself a ____ will write a blog post about the book, how ____ used to mean something, how she and the women she loves should maybe try to figure out something entirely new. And hopefully she won’t reference Baudrillard.
Discursive Succession
When we talk about a forest, we are generally talking about the climax of a particular environment’s ecology. Grasses give way to shrubbery which gives was to evergreens which give way to huge deciduous trees that block out the light and prevent much of what came before from growing beneath. This is ecological succession. But it’s impossible to take it back a step or two; if you want something entirely new you have to light a fire and start afresh.
But you can keep things where they are. Farmers and their sheep ensure that thousands of hectares of land in England stay as pasture. The succession is deflected. Who would want a rainforest in the Lake District anyway? Still, this is not necessarily a permanent state of affairs. If we want to see what kind of environment will arise were the underlying ecology able to change, spill over and into itself, become something new, then our problem lies with the people who manage this land and the way they manage it.
This has been a post about words, same as my other posts. I would like to advocate for a kind of discursive stewardship. What I mean here is that we should treat our language and the system of knowledge through which we understand ourselves as an ecosystem in its own right, old modes of understanding organically giving way to the new over time, stagnant systems either needing to be burnt down or set free. I believe this is possible, so long as we see this increasingly complex ecology as a forest, not just a collection of trees.
notes from my ex
1. "this, clearly, has changed in the meantime" I am not sure if this is sarcastic or not. this is true but the whole enlarged clitorises Vs acceptable female friendships thing feels v resonant to my personal experience from teen years of it being fine to be say, bisexual if you're feminine, or to kiss other girls at parties if you're both feminine. but if you seem like a dyke (ie gender nonconforming in some way) then it's gross and the social hammer comes down. not to say that femme women together don't get harassed but like, bathroom panic around trans women which caches out as harassment of all gender nonconforming women is more about the "not woman-ing properly" things. I've met a lot of queer women who's family more or less expressed things like "thank god you're still feminine". obviously things have changed but the systems of now come from the systems of the past etc etc. anyway if this line was sarcastic this ramble is meaningless but you might need to flag that more clearly. [yr girl’s note: fwiw i meant that people no longer believe in the one sex model and that vaginal prolapse means growing a penis, but this is a really good point that i failed to examine.]
2. the thought I have about the whole female erotic friendships thing (and history more broadly) is that I am constantly haunted by the thought of not knowing how anything is intended when written. are the men writing history trying to shore up their own positions against their felt experience of reality or is their writing a reflection of reality? like how disconnected the writers of print media news are from most people now, and a lot of their writing clearly comes from a defensive position. this is a really rambly point sorry, but it's a point I don't really see addressed that commonly in history writing that is aimed at "the educated public". if all that survived our current day was the writing of columnists, what picture would that paint of a society? I don't know if it would strengthen things to include this but it occurs to me as I'm reading.
3. re: D/s and M/s, in Akasha [Eden]’s talk about the schism she started by defining her terms, and she talked about distinguishing M/s from D/s by the approach to power - floor and ceiling, I'm sure you know it, if not [your flatmate] can tell you. I have no ability to trace or back up her implication (but not as I heard it, quite an explicit claim) that the D/s method of power exchange comes from a more pansexual BDSM culture and that the M/s on comes from gay Leather practice, but it may be an interesting addition to note this distinction between D/s and M/s, though this is one being msde [sic] looking back in time so equally it may just confuse things.
4. what history can tell us (from what I've read and studied) is that people have used different terms to mean specific things local to their practice and community. the history of the word trans/transvestite/transexual/transgender (or indeed the history of the meaning of "woman"), and how each is used in different places and times, is probably my best understood example of this. this is kind of gestured at in your comment that words have a history. I feel like there is something missing about why this problem now, that relates to modes of communication and also exposure without communication enabled by technology, as well as economic conditions and changing relationships to community. cf: our conversations about what makes something relevant to "trans history".
5. I would appreciate a gesture towards why you think everyone can "define their own terms" outwith defined practice now, which is implied I guess but I think it would make sense to name it or at least gesture to the depths of exploration you could do there. Like you could pick through the fact that the internet has produced subcultures of people with definite practices that differ from other definite practices in a way that also happened pre-internet but that the technology of internet has changed the sociality of. there's also then the analysis to look at it through the lens of how Social Media encourages us to form identity and interact with practices (I can dig up a paper on platform theory I used during my masters, which is alright as a model but already outdated) versus earlier internet subculture formation. that may be beyond the scope of this essay, but it boils down to: your assertion of "everyone is now free to create and work within their own discursive bubbles" to me feels under-examined, if obviously true. how is that different now to how it was in the past and why? worth thinking about even if it doesn't result in much of an addition in the end.