Political Heterosexuality, or: The Tragedy of Feminism

On the specter that is haunting feminism.

Preamble: Renee Nicole Good was murdered after I finished this essay

On the 7th of January, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was repeatedly shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Good and her wife had been acting as legal observers in response to ICE activities in Minneapolis, and Good’s extrajudicial killing at the hands of an unaccountable white supremacist force is hard to not see as retaliation for daring to place any limits on their rampage.

Good was called a “fucking bitch” after she was shot. ICE agents prevented medics from assisting her, and bystanders trying to reach her were told that ICE had their own medics to help—a lie. The reactionary media machine was quick to frame her death in terms that signalled Good was an acceptable target, an undesirable whose culling is to be celebrated and not mourned. Jesse Watters on Fox News mentioned that Good had “pronouns in her bio” and a “lesbian partner”. Fake mugshots and doctored images listing non-existent crimes circulated on X, and when they were easily revealed as shams, right-wing social media accounts resorted to the old, reliable tactic: pointing out that Good was a woman.

“I feel like I have been condescended to by a woman who looks exactly like this thousands of times”, reads a widely-shared post on X attached to an image of Renee Nichole Good… smiling.

Just smiling.

Good’s vilification by reactionary extremists in the wake of her death is telling. She was white and blonde and a mother, but her queerness (and perceived proximity to transness, through “pronouns”) was used to cast her as an enemy to the white Nation, to degender and mark her. At the same time the US President, in a statement justifying her execution, referred to her wife as her “friend”, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of their partnership. In the days since, other protestors detained by ICE have spoken of being taunted by agents who called Good a “lesbian bitch” whom they “had” to kill—for her insolence, her defiance, her refusal to perform the role expected of white women under a rampantly Nationalist regime.

She hadn’t known what was good for her, you see. She practically forced their hand.

Look what she made them do.

The following essay was written before these events transpired. It is not about Nationalism—not explicitly, though it does allude to the violence of Nation-building in parts. But it is an essay about lesbianism and lesbians and lesbian feminism, and the quiet, simmering hatred of those women who choose to love and be with women. A hatred that pervades politics both misogynist and feminist, both heterosexual and queer. It is an essay reflecting on the recent history of feminist movements and the quest for an ever-kinder, ever-gentler feminism that will, at long last, prove inoffensive and appealing enough to men’s sensibilities. It is an essay about how, despite men demonstrating their investment in violent patriarchal politics, despite men proving time and again that they would rather tear up the social contract and uphold authoritarianism than countenance a world where women are free to exist independent of men, it is easier for us to hate and resent and abhor the women who point this out than the men themselves.

I present it to you with all the despair and grief and rage in my heart, and invite you to reflect on a world where men’s feelings matter more than women’s lives.

Introduction: Heterodoomerism

In 2019, Asa Seresin published the essay On Heteropessimism, boldly declaring in the subtitle: “Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem”. Echoing the longstanding lesbian feminist critiques of heterosexuality as an institution that structures our lives rather than a mere description of how one engages in interpersonal intimacy, Seresin nonetheless grounds his piece in discussions of the personal, specifically exploring how women relate to, view, and engage with (others’, if not their own) heterosexuality. He begins with Maggie Nelson’s admission in her meditation-memoir that “Heterosexuality always embarrasses me” and attempts to explore the implications of that confession, asking what it means for straight women to performatively disavow heterosexuality while nonetheless being fatalistically resigned to participating in it.

How can a heterosexual woman navigate love and lust when her partners are expected, primed even, to always disappoint her? To let her down in the myriad ways men let down the women in their lives, demonstrating constantly that they do not value women’s internality or personhood?

Seresin’s essay is provocative in a way that caught the imagination of a culture on the brink of patriarchal backlash to perceived feminist overreach. Heteropessimism, and the synonymously-treated term heterofatalism, became fresh buzzwords for social media denizens and pop-feminist writers alike to examine, dissect, and misinterpret in typical and expected ways. “I don’t want to be, but I fear I’m heterofatalistic” reads an August 2025 article in an online wellness magazine, expressing a certain fatalism about being heterofatalist. A scant month prior to that, The Trouble With Wanting Men by Jean Garnett was published in an outlet no less transphobic and prestigious than the New York Times, chronicling one woman’s exhausting attempt to remain optimistic about her dating prospects and explicitly citing the term.

It seems that despite their best efforts, straight women find themselves embittered, embattled, and embarrassed by the men who they wish to love and cherish, but who do not reciprocate these sentiments in meaningful ways.

That is not to say that heterofatalism is here to stay. Chanté Joseph found herself both explaining and defending her piece Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?, which ran in British Vogue on October 25th, 2025. The response to her humorous observations on how women are increasingly coy and secretive on social media about the men they date was equal parts commiseration and defensiveness. One exasperated TikTok by Joseph, put out two days after the article’s publication, even had her addressing the myriad accusations that her article was the product of her being single, jealous, bitter—a restatement of the ancient charge that feminism is the pursuit of the “unfucked”, “frigid” woman who cannot find a good man. Joseph breathlessly explained that her article had many quotes from partnered women before being edited down and is not reflective of her own experiences, and that she is drawing from lesbian feminism, explicitly citing Adrienne Rich and Jane Ward in the comments. This is feminism from women definitionally incapable of being jealous of straight women, she almost screams, in a tone that I know all too well.

I almost feel bad for having to point out that being a lesbian doesn’t actually stop straight women from accusing us of envy.

Seresin almost certainly never intended his essay to become a battleground over the utility of the words he dubbed to describe the phenomenon. Many straight women taking umbrage with ‘heterofatalism’, believing it to be a fad for immature single ladies or fed-up divorcees, would likely be surprised to learn that Seresin’s piece is quite condemnatory. He believes that heterofatalism is little more than a soporific consumed by those resigned to never improving. He lays forth the charge:

“Spinning on its wheels, endlessly repeating, going nowhere—heteropessimists and queer theorists alike are convinced that this is heterosexuality’s permanent fate. I think they’re wrong, that there’s evidence heterosexual culture is changing. But even if it weren’t, we would have to believe it could, because tens of thousands of women are currently dying of it every year, murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, or exes.”

Interestingly, Seresin seems to think that heterosexuality is a neglected field of study amongst its supposed detractors. Exhausted straight women and haughty queers all stand accused of wanting to leave heterosexuality behind without considering how this does nothing to help those ailed by it, those that Seresin insists cannot meaningfully abandon it. It is a call for feminism to confront the futility of a utopian abolitionism, a repudiation of the feminist history that once regarded heterosexuality as a moral failure. “Yes, universal queerness and the abolition of gender may be the horizon toward which we are eventually moving”, he allows, in a tone I imagine to be cloyingly conciliatory towards us idealist militants, “but what happens in the meantime?”

What, indeed?

Chanté Joseph and Asa Seresin form a fascinating dyad in my mind—a cishet woman voicing her appreciation of lesbian feminism in defense of heteropessimistic attitudes, juxtaposed with the queer writer who coined the phrase to repudiate it as fundamentally poisonous, while obliquely denouncing lesbian feminism. The space between them tells a fascinating story that is, at its root, about feminist history itself: the doomed love between feminism and heterosexuality. The question here—the real, actual question at the core of all this frustration and disappointment and unrequited yearning—isn’t really about how best to be a feminist or how best to approach the topic of heterosexuality and the way it structures all of our lives. The question is simply:

“Can heterosexuality be saved?”

It is a question that is being asked in the shadow of second-wave feminism and its advocacy of political lesbianism. Feminists in times past, even as they observed how heterosexuality is mandated by patriarchal regimes, once decried heterosexual women as traitors, as those who “sleep with the enemy”. The idea that feminism and heterosexuality are fundamentally incompatible is one that has troubled feminists from before the heyday of lesbian feminism and continues to haunt us now. As we reckon with the antifeminist backlash giving way to the co-optation of feminism by conservative interests, culminating in the present-day escalation of conservative rhetoric that calls for a dismantling of women’s rights in the West, the question lingers, and almost demands an answer.

There are two writers who could be described as queer whose responses to and discussion of On Heteropessimism highlight this underlying anxiety. The first, Collective Turn-Off, published by Sophie Lewis in 2019, approaches the question of heterofatalism as a byproduct of the increasing popularity of sex-negative feminisms. As someone who is familiar with Lewis through her strong family-abolitionist stance, I found Collective Turn-Off to be somewhat baffling in its condemnation of a cultural mood that she perceives to be regressive. Lewis contends that this is not a productive impulse, agreeing with Seresin that “ … the heterofatalist posture is still serving as yet another method by which white women like me can project outward our own cowardice and machismo – that is to say, our own aversion to vulnerability”. I personally struggle to comprehend how expressing misgivings with heterosexual structures of intimacy—something Lewis knows invites punishment—is in any way avoiding vulnerability, or projecting machismo. The most revealing line in Lewis’ piece, however, is the following:

“Indeed, misandry, as I see it, can never reliably be prevented from collapsing into transphobia.”

… News to me.

The other piece under consideration, Notes on “heteropessimism”, is not a structured essay, but a series of bullet points from Shon Faye’s Substack that was put out in December 2025, listing and building on her thoughts on “a term she can’t escape”. Faye is much more critical of Seresin, rightly pointing out that he muddles his own thesis by lumping together statements by queer women about a coercive system with complaints by straight women tired of being mistreated—and even statements by men expressing contempt for women!

“15. We do not need to call men’s contempt for their own wives or hatred of women generally for not having sex with them ‘heteropessimism’. To do so obscures that it is simply better termed misogyny. 16. I think grouping the way men express misogyny and the maladaptive, even mean-spirited ways women attempt to cope with its pervasiveness under one term is ethically risky.” [Emphasis mine.]

Faye, who has written at length about heterosexuality and dating men as a trans woman, unflinchingly talks about how many men “deeply hate the women they share their lives with and sleep next to”, viewing their partners less as people and more as patriarchal status symbols. Her clear-eyed assessment of men’s attitudes belies personal experience with these harsh lessons and an intimate understanding of the women who, having been repeatedly let down by the partners they chose, hoping against hope for the mythical “good man”, are now finding themselves at their wits’ end.

Faye is not entirely exculpatory of women’s role in patriarchy—she’s more than aware how the siren song of respectability and investment in the patriarchal positionality of the ‘mother’ appeals to cis women willing to barter for crumbs of status. She nonetheless asks us to recall that women who express a “hatred” of men are usually heavily policed for it, and reflects on her own complex feelings of anger, resentment, and distrust.

That said, Faye also cites Lewis towards the end of her piece, expressing her agreement with the anxiety that “misandrist inclinations” tend towards transmisogyny. “I think the current libidinal cruelty of TERFism is one of the main reasons why I won’t allow myself to succumb to my own misandrist inclinations”, she says, reasoning that her feelings towards men are something that she ultimately needs to make peace with.

My frustration with this conclusion is limited—this precise contradiction between being aware of how men treat women while being attracted to them is something many a straight woman has lamented. However, this pervasive fear amongst certain kinds of feminists—usually the queer and trans ones—that any strain of feminism critical of male-supremacy will always be doomed to reaction confounds me more than I can express. It speaks to a kind of feminist trauma, a reflexive recoiling that manifests when feminists are confronted with the inevitable, inescapable conclusion that our foremothers spelled out plainly. As if acknowledging how impossible men make it to love or believe in them will start us down a path that can only end with rabid transphobia and self-immolation.

I am familiar with these misgivings, and I understand where they come from. Queer people have been betrayed many a time by avowed feminists. Betty Friedan called lesbians in the women’s movement a “lavender menace”, and many of those radicals who protested and argued that they belonged turned around and expressed similar sentiments about trans womanhood. The sex wars were the apotheosis of this fear, this fury, this tension between recognising how sex under patriarchy is rigidly controlled and regulated for the benefit of men, and the libertine declarations of the burgeoning queer movement defending their right to live freely and engage in hedonistic pleasure. Seresin, Faye, Lewis, and others—we are all laboring under the burdens previous generations placed on us, still answering for their crimes and struggling to live up to their expectations. So please do not think me ignorant or callous when I say that I can only muster the following response:

Boo fucking hoo.

Part One: You Give Love a Bad Name

Since both Seresin and Lewis are emphatic about heteropessimism’s popularity amongst white women, allow me to flash my race card.

Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India is an ethnographic account of Indian working-class lesbians by Maya Sharma, published in 2006. The methodological challenges Sharma faced in putting it together were significant—she was only able to find most of her subjects through rumors and hearsay, looking into the local gossip and asking after the “talked-about women”. Over ten chapters, Sharma meets with various individuals and couples, some under the thumbs of their families, others who managed to eke out a solitary existence that is frequently denied Indian women, all of whom faced significant challenges to be with the women they loved.

Marriage is the Sword of Damocles that hangs above the whole text, prominently featuring in every story Sharma relates. Most of the women she speaks to aren’t able to avoid it, and some try to set boundaries with their husbands while continuing to see their paramours. That is, in fact, how Sharma finds out about several of them—the women’s group she is a part of is approached by family members, both in-laws and blood relatives, to try and mediate with or “talk sense into” the recalcitrant girls.

One of the women Sharma speaks to, Rekha, is only allowed to meet with her under strict supervision. Rekha and her lover, Dolly, had attempted to flee together to Punjab, at which point their families filed a Missing Persons report to get the police involved. Upon being returned, Rekha was practically under house arrest and not allowed to meet Dolly.

Rekha’s case fills Sharma with a profound sense of anger and powerlessness. She tries to slip Rekha her number during their meeting, so that she may be contacted in an emergency, but Rekha’s uncle enters the room and snatches the slip of paper away. Sharma is ushered out soon after; her subsequent attempts to meet with Dolly are unfruitful, and leaves her with few avenues to assist either of them. The best she can do is to write a letter to the local officer asking him to help the two women. She never hears back.

A common theme in the lesbophobia these women face is a perception of sexual impropriety. Sharma’s writing reveals that the lesbians she speaks to are rarely met with explicit homophobia, or a hatred that directly names their transgressions. Instead they are accused of “selling girls” or “prostitution”, even when obviously in monogamous couplings. Rekha’s uncle laughs at the notion that women can marry each other, dismissing the possibility out of hand—how can marriage occur when there is no man to take possession of a woman? Lesbianism, in being rendered an impossibility, is instead viewed as overreach, as women attempting to exercise sexual autonomy outside of their families’ influence. In societies as patriarchal as India, this refusal to let patriarchs regulate your sexuality is the same sin irrespective of the actual reasons behind it, and invites third-sexing and vilification as a ‘public’, ‘loose’ woman.

This actually happened to one of Sharma’s subjects, Mary, in her local women’s rights group. Mary had joined after enduring decades of domestic abuse, but found that her ‘friendship’ with another woman in the group led to rumours and discomfort among their co-workers. They were called into meetings, accused of being prostitutes, and told to separate. In Mary’s own words:

“What hurts is that there is no space for women like us even in a group like ours. It is here that we dream of reforming society and changing the world … and it is in this very place that we face opposition. It saddens me because the years with this group, where we found each other, have been the happiest in her life, as well as mine, up till now. …” [Emphasis mine.]

What struck me the most about Mary’s case was this sadness, this sense of betrayal she’s trying to put into words. Even amongst people who understand how unfair Indian society is to women, who try to help them through dowry disputes and widowhood and domestic violence, love between women is verboten, is something to be excised and punished and censured. It’s resonant with the wider history of feminist struggle and its latent tension with lesbians. Betty Friedan kicked off the second wave by talking about the plight of wives and mothers, about menial domestic labor, the burdens of childcare, and the overwhelming pressure to not speak of the pain and violence husbands put women through. Her opposition to lesbians within the feminist movement stemmed from a belief that lesbian issues were irrelevant to the vast majority of women—and that lesbians were in fact a threat to feminism as a whole.

Lesbian feminism emerged in part to address this myopia. To argue that women outside of the private sphere are not free of patriarchy and are also victims of patriarchal violence, just a different kind. Analyses of heterosexuality as an institution sought to cultivate unity between lesbian and heterofeminism, to make women aware of how we are all compelled into relationships with men and how our societies make the same heterosexist demands of all women. Whether we accept or refuse the patriarchal bargain, we are punished, and a feminism that is truly for everyone has to recognize the common roots of our oppression.

That utopian desire for feminist unity never quite panned out, though. One can trace many narrative threads across the history of the second wave if one wishes, and the story of how lesbian and straight feminists never quite managed to see eye to eye is a prominent one. Political lesbianism, in particular, stands out as a battleground whose casualties and scars feminists still reckon with to this day. In its heyday, militant lesbian feminists held that it was in fact impossible to be a feminist while continuing to associate with men. They called for separatism, for rectifying extant patriarchal society by daring to imagine a radical, egalitarian future and living by its ideals in the present. In a 2016 Lesbian History Group event, Sheila Jeffreys herself recalled how this idea emerged from the leftism of the 60s and 70s—“living the revolution now”.

The trouble with trying to build a new future while the existing order is invested in snuffing it out is perhaps obvious, at least in hindsight. Lesbian ethics and separatism is easy to see as a kind of early choice feminism, removed from its own materialist origins that were far more explicit about how little choice is afforded women. Attempts to overthrow heterosexuality through secessionism and trying to live as lesbian a life as possible certainly appealed to many women, but the point of patriarchy has always been that it’s coercive. You can’t escape it, dollface, and all that.

Frankly, many of the women who are most candid about heterosexuality aren’t even feminists at all. Dworkin’s Right Wing Women proved to have staying power in part because it shows how conservative women don’t make excuses for men’s violence, but rather resign themselves to it. They understand that they are women in a man’s world, and so they try to make the best of a bad deal. Their rage at feminists and queer people—and indeed lesbians—appears to come from a kind of sunk cost, a reflexive lashing out at those who say things can be better when they already made their peace with how wanting better is futile—a juvenile fantasy we all must abandon, as conservative ‘intellectual’ Midge Decter put it.

Several of Maya Sharma’s subjects, by no means trained feminists, voice similar sentiments about how inescapable patriarchy is, and how they struggle with the apparent inequality in relationships with men. It isn’t just that they love women, but that love between women is free of the expectation of being lesser, of being subservient to a man.

After all, no one’s as fatalist about heterosexuality as those who don’t have a way out.

I don’t actually like having to use the suffering of my people as a rhetorical sledgehammer. The pain and injustice my sisters experience weighs heavily on me, and even trying to write about it left me in profound distress for days. But the way whiteness is invoked in feminist discourses to imply that racialized and colonised and third-world women would never have cause to begrudge men or be critical of heterosexuality is frankly unacceptable. It belies how abstracted these conversations have become from the impact of misogyny on the majority of women worldwide, even as their names are invoked in pleas to be nicer to men.

I do confess that after years upon years of being treated with contempt for bluntly speaking about patriarchal violence, after being angrily denounced by women who haven’t read any of my work but presume I must be condemning them for being attracted to men, and after subjecting myself to pages upon pages of the same cyclical debates on the topic of Why Feminists Shouldn’t Be So Mean To Men even when the feminists under consideration were the exact kind of appeasers everyone keeps insisting we need more of… I kind of get it.

Of course some of the dykes wanted to fuck off to communes over having to put up with more of this unceasing bullshit.

Simply put, the endless relitigation of how we owe it to men not to speak plainly about their exploitation and abuse of us—a conversation that largely occurs between anglophonic women in certain socioeconomic spheres who have the ability to choose who to partner with to a degree that is mostly denied to women worldwide—pisses me off. If you are lucky enough to be able to determine what your relationship to men is, I would suggest you have a responsibility to do more than muse about whether it’s unfair of you to say any harsh words about the guys happily mainstreaming incel ideology and birthrate panics into the modern political landscape.

Because that’s the part we keep stubbornly ignoring in these discussions: that today, men everywhere want more patriarchy. A lot of feminists seem to be laboring under a collective amnesia of what the feminism that led us to this political moment was actually all about. We had nearly forty years of “patriarchy hurts men too” and sex positivity and making the case for anti-patriarchal politics to men. It did not result in the downfall of patriarchy, or a mass defection of men to the feminist cause. Instead, today we have Andrew Tate and fundamentalist Christian theocracy in mainstream US politics and Mark Zuckerberg going on podcasts to talk about how women in already male-dominated tech workplaces bring too much “female energy”.

Since we all seem to need the reminder, let’s revisit the feminist politics of appeasement. And if the feminism of white women is so objectionable, let’s consider the very same history of tension between lesbian and heterofeminism within the Black feminist tradition.

Part Two: Feminism Is For Everybody (Except…)

Lesbians

If there is such a thing as “third wave feminism”, bell hooks is no doubt an exemplar of it. She began writing about feminism in 1981 when she published Ain’t I a Woman?, which talked about the shortcomings of the contemporary women’s movement and put forth a feminist analysis incorporating race and class in addition to gender. Together with calling for the centering of marginal voices in feminism, hooks also maintained a commitment to accessibility and outreach. Of her most enduring works, Feminism is For Everybody is remembered as an accessible primer to feminist theory for all genders, written in 2000 to “rescue” feminism from its over-academic reputation. The Will to Change, written in 2004, is still widely cited as a feminist text that impassionedly and boldly makes the case for why men should oppose patriarchy too. She writes:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

The way hooks is recalled posthumously is somewhat at odds with how she was regarded while she was still alive, and indeed with her more radical feminist tendencies and influences in her earlier work. For all of her writings on the importance of “returning to love” between men and women, she always maintained that men are invested in patriarchy and have to commit to abandoning it. She also, in Ain’t I a Woman? and her essay Is Paris Burning?, discussed how the emasculative excesses of white supremacy towards Black men results in a kind of overcorrection, an investment in hegemonic masculinity that is made to heal a “wounded manhood”. I have seen as many men talk about hooks as just another man-hater as I have witnessed other men using quotes from The Will to Change to shut down feminist critiques of male-supremacy, which is itself a lesson in the utility of feminist appeasement. The radical critiques are forgotten, and the parts that can be appropriated are happily stripped from context.

In a sense, one could see hooks’ work as a bridge between the second and third waves. It is one of the most notable attempts to correct the radical feminist movement’s various issues with exclusion and militancy. In pursuit of that, she often writes of lesbian feminism as a misguided movement, and makes rather peculiar statements about lesbians overall.

The introduction to Feminism is For Everybody contains the following snippet about reformist feminists:

“... By accepting and indeed colluding with the subordination of working-class and poor women, they not only ally themselves with the existing patriarchy and its concomitant sexism, they give themselves the right to lead a double life, one where they are the equals of men in the workforce and at home when they want to be. If they choose lesbianism they have the privilege of being equals with men in the workforce while using class power to create domestic lifestyles where they can choose to have little or no contact with men.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is, generously, extremely weird. As hooks is talking about a specific kind of class politics amongst reformist feminists, it should perhaps be obvious that any ‘privilege’ they harness to “have little or no contact with men” is the consequence of their class, not their lesbianism. It is also somewhat bizarre to allege that being equal with men in the workforce is achievable for women, and especially for lesbians, given the prevalence of hiring discrimination based on sexuality.

Why mention lesbianism at all?

The introduction leads into an interesting claim that hooks makes, repeatedly, throughout the entire book. She expresses it most concisely in chapter 12, Feminist Masculinity:

“Conservative mass media constantly represented feminist women as man-haters. And when there was an anti-male faction or sentiment in the movement, they highlighted it as a way of discrediting feminism. Embedded in the portrayal of feminists as man-hating was the assumption that all feminists were lesbians. Appealing to homophobia, mass media intensified anti-feminist sentiment among men.” [Emphasis mine.]

Taken together with statements about how feminism that was not “anti-male” was “suppressed” to make feminism look bad—made without substantiation—hooks is essentially charging lesbian feminism with being a tool of the conservative media apparatus. This is an interesting charge to make, given that as far back as 1971, right as the radical feminist movement was kicking off, it was Germaine Greer who appeared on the cover of Life magazine, billed as a “Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like”. Greer—a career transmisogynist who in 2003 wrote a book about how beautiful prepubescent boys are and in 2018 derided MeToo as “whinging”—could hardly be described as ‘anti-male’ even then. Her 1970 book The Female Eunuch encouraged women to have more sex with men and be less monogamous—which has always been the kind of feminism elevated in the mainstream!

In chapter 16, Lesbianism and Feminism, hooks does her best to acknowledge and credit the contributions of lesbian feminists. The talks about having always been aware of lesbians and homosexuality growing up, and how when she began doing feminism, the movement was full of all sorts: “straight, bisexual and out gay women”. She also mentions something interesting about the reception to her very first book:

“When my first book came out and I was attacked by individual black lesbian women, I was stunned. I was accused of being homophobic because there was no discussion of lesbianism in my book. That absence was not an indication of homophobia. I did not talk about sexuality in the book. I was not ready. I did not know enough. And had I known more I would have stated that so no one would have been able to label me homophobic.”

We’ll come back to that later.

This repeated insistence on how much she knows and appreciates lesbians is thrown into sharp relief when hooks begins talking about the history of political lesbianism and how upsetting it was for straight women to be told that they were man-centered. In addition to “being useful to conservatives” and “trying to be equal to men”, lesbians must now contend with another allegation: that they made straight feminists feel bad.

With this context, I’d like to take a look at hooks’ most stunning statement on radical and lesbian feminism, which she made in chapter 15, A Feminist Sexual Politic:

“Nothing challenged the grounds of feminist critique of heterosexual practice more than the revelation that feminist lesbians engaged in sexual sadomasochism, a world of tops and bottoms, wherein positions of powerful and powerless were deemed acceptable. Practically all radical feminist discussion of sexuality ceased when women within the movement began to fight over the issue of whether or not one could be a liberated woman, whether lesbian or heterosexual, and engage in the practice of sexual sadomasochism. Tied to this issue were differences of opinion about the meaning and significance of patriarchal pornography. Faced with issues powerful enough to divide and disrupt the movement, by the late ‘80s most radical feminist dialogues about sexuality were no longer public; they took place privately. Talking about sexuality publicly had devastated the movement.” [Emphasis mine.]

Firstly: the omission of “the trans question” in this summary of why radical feminism imploded is highly conspicuous. But leaving that aside for later, the idea that the feminist discourses on pornography and sadomasochism, a.k.a the sex wars, were the least publicized aspect of the radical feminist movement is breathtakingly ahistorical. Moreover, hooks here is implicitly agreeing with the premise that lesbians who engage in BDSM—then called ‘sadomasochism’—do not have a leg to stand on when it comes to critiquing heterosexuality. This is not only a statement that is and was heavily contested by lesbian feminists, but it’s one that the most transmisogynistic and sex-critical feminists, such as Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond, subscribed to!

Taken together, hooks’ discussion of lesbians and lesbian feminism in Feminism is For Everybody comes across as incredibly… petty. It is less a recounting of feminism’s fraught history and more a listing of grievances, made by someone who seems to want to put lesbian feminists in their place for daring to critique heterosexuality and heterofeminists at all. Given all this, her insistence on how much lesbian feminists taught her about “pushing the boundaries of heterosexism” is somewhat trite. Especially considering what she writes as a thesis statement in the introduction to The Will to Change a scant four years after:

“It is a fiction of false feminism that we women can find our power in a world without men, in a world where we deny our connections to men. We claim our power fully only when we can speak the truth that we need men in our lives, that men are in our lives whether we want them to be or not, that we need men to challenge patriarchy, that we need men to change.”

Transsexuals

Is Paris Burning?, a 1996 essay by bell hooks, is a critique of Jenny Livingston’s 1990 documentary on New York city’s ball culture, Paris is Burning. The documentary sheds light on this underground drag scene, where queer people who we may today recognize as fem gay men and transgender women of color compete in “balls”, as a celebration of fashion, creativity and beauty amongst a heavily marginal population. Paris is Burning touches upon what life was like for ostracised queer people of color, organized into their own “houses” that are headed by a “mother”, and is in a sense about finding joy amidst each other even as they face heavy stigma and violence. The resemblance to hijra houses and the guru-chela system is uncanny, and it shows how queer people across time and space have come together to form their own kinship structures in the face of expulsion and rejection by their so-called biological families.

In her critique of Paris is Burning, bell hooks asks: why doesn’t this documentary about a marginalized and frequently ostracized demographic talk about their families more?

“Much of the individual testimony makes it appear that the characters are estranged from any community beyond themselves. Families, friends, etc., are not shown, which adds to the representation of these black gay men as cut off, living on the edge … At no point in Livingston’s film are the men asked to speak about their connections to a world of family and community beyond the drag ball. The cinematic narrative makes the ball the center of their lives. And yet who determines this? Is this the way the black men view their reality or is this the reality Livingston constructs?”

Many discussions of Paris is Burning consider how Livingston’s positionality as a white lesbian must influence what she chooses to frame and focus on in a racialized subculture she is external to. And indeed, hooks remarks on how little space is given to the murder of Venus Xtravaganza, who died during filming. Livingston’s motives and whether her work can be regarded as ‘voyeurism’ are and likely always will be hotly debated.

But I must ask: is the reason for the absence of traditional family, in favor of chosen family, in the lives of gay and transgender people of color during the height of the AIDS crisis not somewhat obvious?

And is it also not somewhat obvious why the film might make a deliberate choice to juxtapose “moments of pain and sadness”, as hooks puts it, with the pageantry of the balls, where its subjects are celebrated rather than punished for their performance of gender?

Leaving that aside, the thrust of hooks’ critique is twofold. She talks about how the femininity celebrated in Paris is Burning is, first and foremost, a “white, middle-class” femininity, and how far from being subversive, the queer subjects of the film reify and lionize the very same culture that oppresses them. This leads into her discussion of ritual, spectacle, and fantasy in the documentary, where she alleges that in making a spectacle of queer Black lives, mostly-white viewers will be left comforted by how aspirational whiteness is even to oppressed people.

“For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The ‘we’ evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.”

I confess that hooks’ words here reminded me of a lot of scholarship written by cis academics on the hijra. Not only because of how she studiously avoids discussing transsexuality at any great length—save for an instance where Venus Xtravaganza is referred to as “him/her”—but also because of how she interrogates and dissects the subversive potential that these queer people of color apparently fail to embody. Is wanting to be celebrated akin to mainstream fashion icons—who in a white supremacist society will be disproportionately white—upholding white supremacy? Do queer men and trans women who “perform femininity” uphold the patriarchy?

These academic inquiries rarely hold any space for the reality that impoverished queer people are perhaps not trying to make a statement about the societies they are excluded from, but envisioning a reality where they may find acceptance and even recognition. Perhaps that is not as subversive as it could be, but do those on the absolute fringes, who are abandoned by state and family, bear a responsibility to only live life in a way that is subversive? Have they not paid enough for their subversion? Is ejection from normative life not sufficient evidence that they are not, in fact, upholding the norms that punish them?

When those who are expected to be masculine and uphold manhood find value outside of it, and dare to dream that we may one day not be reviled for our refusal, are we reinforcing the hegemony or undermining it?

Livingston may be external to the scene she chose to capture, and we may question the efficacy of her portrayal, but the fact remains that Paris is Burning put a spotlight on people that their society would prefer buried and forgotten. Many women like Venus Xtravaganza have died as she died without anyone knowing their names or wishing to remember their passing, and hooks’ questions on the value of fantasy to such women, detached from the reality of why they do not dwell on their families, comes across poorly.

Of course, we’re talking about an essay written in 1996. Even Judith Butler put their foot in their mouth regarding this topic back then, and in later years hooks must have given the subject more thought. In fact, in 2014, bell hooks sat down with Laverne Cox for a 90-minute discussion on race, gender and colonialism. There, hooks demonstrated her understanding of trans issues by—

“One of the issues I think many people have with trans women is the sense of a traditional femininity being called out and reveled in, a femininity that many feminist women feel like, ‘Oh, we’ve been trying to get away from that.’ Can you talk a little bit about that?”

By repeating the same charges of “gynemesis”, “upholding patriarchy”, and “reinforcing feminine stereotypes” that trans women have contended with since before The Transsexual Empire was written. When Cox talked about feeling empowered presenting as she does and asked whether her blonde wigs “feed into patriarchy”, hooks commented “yes”.

“bell was so shady,” Cox would say in an interview with Them, after hooks’ passing, “shady in a good way. bell would read, but there was always love there. There was always so much love, and bell had so much love for me … It’s complicated, and in some ways, she’s absolutely right. And in other ways, that gaze is subverted, because of the nature of who I am [...] walking the streets of New York, early in my transition, throughout my transition it was about [having] armor, it was about survival. You know, if I’m fem enough, and can get through, maybe I won’t get killed today.” [Emphasis mine.]

A relevant point here is how women of color as a whole feel the pressure to perform hyperfemininity at the risk of being degendered. Singling out Cox’s heels as a synecdoche for trans womanhood’s feminist failures is underbaked at best, and more accurately is a reflection on which parts of radical feminism hooks actually liked. The negotiation between how femininity is imposed on women, while simultaneously being degraded and held up as a marker of our inferiority, applies to trans women as well as cis women. Ignoring how trans women are discouraged from embodying a legible womanhood in order to make a point about how our feminine presentation is at odds with feminism simply reinforces that stigma and hobbles conversations about the conflicting expectations placed on all women.

Additionally, this rebuke of feminine-presenting trans women registers as somewhat hypocritical coming from someone who wrote so much about how it is wrong to shame women for choosing to partner with men!

It is richly ironic that one of hooks’ most famous quotes could have formed the basis of an insightful transfeminist commentary: “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is … that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation … If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” These words demonstrate a remarkable cognizance of how men are expected to enforce sexed boundaries, and could have led to a discussion of the policing and violence that underlies transmisogyny. Men punish each other—and trans women—for being “like women”, for failing to embody a misogynistic and extractive ideal of manhood.

Instead, reviewing how bell hooks regarded queer women in her work, how she condemned lesbian feminism and transfemininity by often holding queer women more accountable for patriarchal transgressions than the men who most benefited from misogyny and heterosexuality, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that she considered men more worthy of solidarity and outreach than queer women. It is a sentiment found repeatedly in feminist conversations, where the fear of male dismissal almost manifests as a kind of paranoia—how do we excise the specter of those man-hating dykes?

Trans women and lesbians are both a kind of feminist boogeywoman, posing questions of how feminism should regard those on the outside of the traditional, reproductive heterosexual coupling. And again and again, in response to revelations about the artificiality of sex differences or how men are incentivized to exploit women, we see a reification of heterosexuality. Whiteness is frequently upheld as a confounding factor in women’s feminism, illustrating how an investment in white supremacy leads white women to adopt a self-serving feminist ethos, but investment in straightness is rarely given the same treatment despite it being perhaps even more predictive, across time and cultures. Every patriarchy asks its women to channel their dissatisfaction into reform rather than rebellion, into negotiating for better treatment over re-evaluating whether heterosexuality truly serves them. Every time the limitations of this heterosexual contract are revealed, even many feminists find themselves eager to shoot the messenger.

Just as hooks did when her Black lesbian feminist contemporaries criticized her first book.

Part Three: Feminism Is(n’t) Bourgeois

Barbara Smith

Even if you haven’t heard of Barbara Smith, you have heard of Barbara Smith. Co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and co-author of its famous statement, Smith can rightly be considered one of the godmothers of intersectional feminism. She also coined the term identity politics to stress how multiply-marginalized people—such as, for example, Black lesbians—cannot discount the effect their identities have on their marginalization or material circumstances. As a Black lesbian feminist who articulated harsh critiques of the women’s movement of the 1960s and the exclusionary feminisms of some in the second wave, Barbara Smith is an under-regarded titan of feminist thought who, in many ways, was the first to say a lot of things that we continue to re-hash in circular discourses to this very day.

That identity politics and intersectionality are much maligned, misused, and contentious terms today, stripped of their origins in radical Black lesbian feminist thought, is no accident. There is an entire cadre of such women who were no less a part of the second wave than the academic and cultural feminists whose legacy has been allowed to usurp and define the modern conception of radical feminism. Smith arguably typifies a feminist ideal whose unburial from the annals of feminist history is fiercely resisted, and whose open-minded, class-conscious and unapologetic politics remains a standard to strive for.

Which makes her commentary on bell hooks’ early work very interesting to revisit.

Black Feminism Divorced From Black Feminist Organizing, penned by Smith in 1983, is a critique of hooks’ first book, Ain’t a I Woman?. Smith opens her article by frankly discussing how she had really wanted the book to be “good, incisive, and, most of all, useful”, but instead it worried her “nearly to death”.

“But from the very beginning I found myself questioning the conclusions she draws from the factual material she presents and being constantly surprised by her answers to the questions she poses. It soon became clear that despite its subject I was in profound disagreement with the assumptions of this book.”

She starts with the book’s first chapter, Sexism and the Black Female Slave Experience. Smith’s and indeed hooks’ statements on the topic have to be understood in the context of what Smith calls “the familiar argument that slavery and racism were worse for Black men than for women”—an argument that hooks says was usually espoused by “sexist historians and sociologists”. Echoes of this line of thinking can be found today as well—in a 2016 Guardian article about “Say Her Name”, Kimberlé Crenshaw herself spoke about struggling to overturn the misconception that Black women in the US experience less police violence than Black men do. Clearly incensed by the notion, hooks highlights the systemic sexual assault of enslaved women as well as the reproductive burden placed on them due to gestational capacity—or bluntly, “forced breeding”. The overall point is one Smith agrees with, but she notes that hooks’ argument relies on some bold and unsubstantiated statements (that have indeed proven to be ahistorical.) One of the excerpts Smith considers is:

“The sexism of colonial white male patriarchs spared black male slaves the humiliation of homosexual rape and other forms of sexual assault. While institutionalized sexism was a social system that protected black male sexuality, it [socially] legitimized sexual exploitation of black females.” [The inline addition is Smith’s.]

Bluntly: this is a very naive and yet definitive statement to make, and one that can be easily disproven. Even if the relevant historiography wasn’t readily available at time of writing, it is not an assertion anyone should have been confident making. Smith dismisses it out of hand, pointing to lynchings as self-evidently sexual crimes against Black men, while also noting the way hooks dances around the topic of homosexuality and homophobia in order to make her point about sexism. This is a discomfort that, as we have seen, remains palpable in hooks’ future writings as well. Already, Smith’s apprehensions about the work are well substantiated—unlike hooks’ argument.

“It isn’t necessary to prove that slavery wasn’t so bad for Black men in order to prove how very bad it was for Black women,” Smith says. It is an observation that underscores hooks’ rhetorical style as inflammatory and antagonistic to a perhaps detrimental degree, without regard for veracity and, as we have seen, focused entirely on advancing the strongest argument in the moment, even if it contradicts a later or previous one. Uncompromising feminist analysis has always been vital, but hooks is worryingly unconcerned about consistency or accuracy.

This tendency is one that Smith reveals in the book, over and over. For example, after downplaying the severity of Black men’s suffering in order to make her point about Black women’s abjection, hooks abruptly turns around and charges enslaved Black women with being insufficiently feminist. Smith zooms in on a snippet that is oddly similar to hooks’ 1992 criticism of ball culture in Is Paris Burning?:

“By completely accepting the female role as defined by patriarchy, enslaved black women embraced and upheld an oppressive sexist social order and became (along with their white sisters) both accomplices in the crimes perpetrated against women and victims of these crimes.”

Smith—one imagines tiredly—asks whether Black women wanted to be “equal” to white women by “accepting the female role”, or whether they simply wanted relief from the state of being “sexual and economic chattel”. Such allegations are reflective of a tendency in hooks’ work (which persists in modern feminist discourse) that neglects the material conditions of abjectified populations and fails to consider the extremes of epistemic injustice wrought by existing at the margins of society. Must enslaved Black women, queens in ball culture, and impoverished hijras be accused of reproducing the conservative foundations of the societies that abhor and expel them? Is their desire to partake in the material privileges they are systemically denied itself conservatism, or are they allowed to simply want better for themselves?

This also draws attention to hooks’ selective representation of Black feminist consciousness. Ain’t I a Woman? holds (without evidence) that if surveyed, Black women in the 20th century would be shown to be more concerned with racism than sexism. Smith contradicts this by pointing to women like Ann Petry writing about male-supremacy in the 1940s, before digging into how and why hooks’ discussion of both Black and white feminists is so erratic.

“Hooks’ interpretation of events to suit her purposes is most blatant in her discussion of the women’s movement. She describes a movement I find barely recognizable. Hooks collapses the totality of feminism into its most conservative manifestations: bourgeois, reformist, professional, and self-aggrandizing. It is the equating of the women’s movement with its least progressive elements (long a tactic of the slick media and certain varieties of anti-feminists) which I think most distorts the impact of the book. Hooks describes the women’s movement and white feminists in such derogatory terms that it is hard to imagine why any black woman reading this would want any part of it or why any white woman would be inspired to change. Yet ostensibly it is Hooks’ purpose to encourage feminist opposition to sexual oppression in the black community and racial accountability among white women. It is necessary to examine how this fundamental contradiction in the book came about.” [Emphasis mine.]

In her book The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom, this is Barbara Smith’s definition of feminism: “Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement.” [Emphasis mine.] Smith is far from a stranger to the realities of movements plagued by unexamined conservative sentiment—being a lesbian of color will quickly teach you just how many people see you as lesser. Yet, she still writes about patriarchy and race from a place of intellectual honesty, rather than one of resentment. She does not treat liberation as a scarce resource and does not allow her personal experiences to be parlayed into a theoretical foundation that minimizes the misogyny less-oppressed women experience.

Her feminism is, in fact and deed, for everyone.

That is the understanding that Smith and I find so lacking in hooks’ work. In her eagerness to make the case for Black women’s place in the feminist movement and express her ire at their exclusion, hooks once again elevates the concerns of her own demographic by obfuscating the reality of how similarly all women are oppressed. Smith also notes that hooks speaks in a strict dichotomy of Black and white, going so far as to erase indigenous women and other women of color in declaring Black women as uniquely oppressed. A subset of the excerpts that Smith takes issue with are below:

“Prior to slavery, patriarchal law decreed white women were lowly inferior beings, the subordinate group in society. The subjugation of black people allowed them to vacate their despised position and assume the role of a superior. Consequently, it can be easily argued that even though white men institutionalized slavery, white women were its most immediate beneficiaries.”

“In America, the social status of black and white women has never been the same. In 19th and early 20th century America, few if any similarities could be found between the life experiences of the two female groups…. In fact, white racial imperialism granted all white women, however victimized by sexist oppression they might be, the right to assume the role of oppressor in relationship to black women and black men.” [Emphasis mine.]

Put simply, this is a lot. Smith is understandably baffled by how this sentiment “overlooks the reality of obligatory child-bearing, rape, and battering, to name only a few common female life experiences”. Most egregious, however, is how lacking hooks’ class-based analysis is. Ain’t I a Woman? seems to only mention class to denounce the women’s movement for accepting “the terms of white capitalist patriarchy”, while the existence of impoverished white women—sex workers, farmworkers, factory workers—is elided to position white women as not simply untouched by, but actively benefiting from patriarchy.

“Yes, they had white skin privilege and were no doubt racist, but why doesn’t Hooks examine the complexities of being white combined with being economically and sexually exploited instead of acting as if no such women exist?” Smith asks and answers her own question: “For one thing, integrating an analysis of class would not support her opinion that white women are not oppressed.”

The degree to which this resembles the condemnations of feminism that Crenshaw observed amongst her students (in her 2010 paper on dominance feminism) is eerie. By ignoring the feminism and activism of her contemporaries, in forefronting the most reactionary elements of the women’s movement while failing to even mention the socialist ones—that Smith actively participated in!—hooks lays the foundation for a feminism that defines itself in purely oppositional terms, that advocates for its own interests by denying the existence of others’ oppression. If intersectional feminism is to be defined by the misappropriation of intersectionality theory that posits solidarity between white women and non-white women is impossible, and that white women and non-white women have no common interests, then bell hooks can be regarded as an intersectional feminist.

Which brings us to perhaps the book’s most stunning declaration, whereupon hooks turns her ire towards the contemporary Black feminism she’s revealed herself to be so unfamiliar with. Smith describes it as “absolutely heartstopping”, before pointing to this passage:

“Some black women who were interested in women’s liberation responded to the racism of white female participants by forming separate ‘black feminist’ groups. This response was reactionary. By creating segregated feminist groups, they both endorsed and perpetuated the very ‘racism’ they were supposedly attacking. They did not provide a critical evaluation of the women’s movement and offer to all women a feminist ideology uncorrupted by racism or the opportunistic desires of individual groups. Instead, as colonized people have done for centuries, they accepted the terms imposed upon them by the dominant group (in this instance white women liberationists) and structured their groups on a racist platform identical to that of the white-dominated groups they were reacting against. White women were actively excluded from black groups. In fact, the distinguishing characteristic of the black ‘feminist’ group was its focus on issues relating specifically to black women. The emphasis on black women was made public in the writings of black participants. The Combahee River Collective published ‘A Black Feminist Statement’ to explain their group’s focus.” [Emphasis Smith’s.]

After everything in the previous chapters, after studiously refusing to consider impoverished and queer and disabled white women, after saying that white women “benefited from slavery” more than white men did, as though the creation of a lower underclass in and of itself constitutes elevation, hooks actually calls the Combahee River Collective racist—against white women—for forming a group to advance Black women’s interests in the very same women’s movement whose exclusionary elements she supposedly condemns!

This is, to put it succinctly, nightmarishly incoherent. There is no defense of this—this is just hooks demonstrating a flagrant disregard for her own supposed principles for no reason other than, I imagine, a desire to declare her own work as superior to the Black feminists whose efforts she doesn’t even acknowledge and who were actually fighting the battles that hooks purports to be so concerned with. After issuing this incomprehensible rebuke of Combahee, hooks in the very next paragraph calls for “bonding on the basis of shared understanding of woman’s varied collective and individual plight in society” instead of this, as she puts it, “polarization.”

What. The. Fuck?

There is something incredibly macabre about reading the co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and one of the foundational scholars of Black feminism have to address an accusation of anti-white racism, made in a book that is better enshrined in feminist collective memory than Barbara Smith’s name. To read it knowing that Ain’t I a Woman? was praised as a still-relevant work of radical political theory in a 2019 New York Times review. The work of Black lesbian feminists lies at the core of the concepts that modern feminists pledge fealty to without fully comprehending or engaging with them, but these contributions languish unheeded. Meanwhile, feminism that seethes with lesbophobic resentment and waxes poetic about how lost feminists are without men’s input is lauded as our gold standard.

But white supremacist capitalist patriarchy loves to elevate “anti-male feminism”, right?

Smith, I think, understood how this would go, even as she emphasized hooks’ heterosexualism. Ain’t I a Woman? pleads for interracial solidarity between white and Black feminists by explicitly dubbing antagonism between the two groups as “competing for male favor”, “to be the chosen female group”. The lesbian is rendered an impossibility, while hooks lambasts “attacking heterosexuality” as a dead-end for women who, she says, “[seek] to attain the kind of power they feel men have”. Her bitterness at lesbian feminists once more manifests as bilious degendering, as spite towards women she seems to think can and do escape patriarchal punishment, making them women who aren’t really feminists, like she is, but are just looking for an avenue to express “anger, jealousy, rage, and disappointment with men”. Conversely, hooks espouses her own feminism as superior—gentler and kinder and more understanding of men, you see.

Unlike those man-hating dykes.

So begins the career of a writer, the same way it ended. Smith asks at the end of her critique: how, why, and for whom was Ain’t I a Woman? published? South End Press was not, at the time, in the business of publishing feminist books by Black women. Why this book? Why this Black woman amidst a library of white male theorists? “The answers,” she says, “are no doubt themselves lessons in the racism and anti-feminism that pervade white-male-left establishments.” It is easy enough to give a platform to a Black feminist without checking how accurate her work is, if her thesis and conclusions are ultimately useful.

“But how better to disavow the significance of the women’s movement than through the words of a Black woman who is supposed to be a feminist?”

I wonder if Barbara Smith knew how prophetic her words would prove to be.

Nobody else did.

Cheryl Clarke

Cheryl Clarke is a poet and Black lesbian radical feminist. Her arguably best-known work is Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community, an essay that, just like much of lesbian feminism, seems more relevant today than ever. She begins with an account of her experience at the First National Plenary Conference on Self-Determination in New York city, assuming that a Black lesbian feminist like herself would surely be welcome within the Black Liberation Movement. Perusing the flyer that she says was “left on every seat”, Clarke found the following passage:

“Revolutionary nationalists and genuine communists cannot uphold homosexuality in the leadership of the Black Liberation Movement nor uphold it as a correct practice. Homosexuality is a genocidal practice.... Homosexuality does not produce children.... Homosexuality does not birth new warriors for liberation... homosexuality cannot be upheld as correct or revolutionary practice. ... The practice of homosexuality is an accelerating threat to our survival as a people and as a nation.” [Emphasis mine.]

Oh, dear.

Written in 1983, Clarke’s essay continues a trend of lesbian feminist insight that has been under-appreciated, if not largely forgotten, despite its clear identification of the patriarchal anxieties underlying reactionary politics. Clarke compares the text of this passage to the text of the 1981 Family Protection Act, which stipulated that federal funds could not be used to “promote homosexuality”. Her appraisal of this resonance between the two bluntly outlines the fixation on machismo, manhood, and reproductive control that lies at the heart of all Nationalisms—even supposed revolutionary ones. This homophobia—this patriarchal agenda—is, according to Clarke, to the benefit of Black intellectuals who embrace “the Western institution of heterosexuality” and Christian fundamentalism to position emancipation as a masculinist, male endeavor.

One of Clarke’s most damning examples comes from Amiri Baraka, who was elected Chairman of the revolutionary organisation Congress of African People in 1972. She cites a 1965 essay where he wrote:

“Most American white men are trained to be fags.... That red flush, those silk blue faggot eyes. So white women become men-things, a weird combination sucking male juices to build a navel orange, which is themselves.” [Emphasis mine.]

This fascinates me as someone who became familiar with the work of British anthropologist Morris Carstairs while I was writing The Third Sex. Carstairs’ work on the hijra in 1957 is of a decided Victorian slant; he was cited in Neither Man Nor Woman declaring the hijra to be a form of “institutionalized homosexuality”, betraying the “latent homosexuality” in the “Indian national character”. The difference between Carstairs’ words and Baraka’s is one of race—not in the sense that homophobia is the exclusive purview of white, Western institutions, but that Carstairs’ whiteness gave him access to a certain legitimacy and institutional backing that allowed him to declare an entire nation (incorrectly, sadly) as a nation of faggots while, at least for a time, remaining a part of the anthropological canon. It is harder to imagine Baraka’s appraisal of faggy white men and masculine white women appearing in any serious scholarship.

Nevertheless, it does demonstrate how the act of Nation-building is fundamentally about boundary creation—our well-defined, structured, legitimate division of labor, set against the Outsiders’ senseless, irrational, inscrutable ways that blur the lines. Perhaps Baraka was aware of the racist history of white academics citing the alleged gender-ambiguity of non-white races as proof of primitiveness and inferiority, and felt clever reversing the slander. Or perhaps he determined from first principles that one’s manhood is always made most apparent by contrast with those deemed lacking. Either way, as Clarke pointed out, his Nationalism did not so much repudiate the Nationalism of his political opponents as it rhymed.

Compared to Barbara Smith’s critique, Clarke’s discussion of Ain’t I a Woman? is much more brief. She, like Smith, isn’t afraid to explicitly call hooks’ work homophobic, calling attention to hooks’ erasure of lesbian feminists and scoffing at her defense of heterosexuality. “Ain’t lesbians women, too?” she asks; one imagines her winking at Monique Wittig. Perhaps hooks could have done with a little attacking of heterosexuality herself, reasons Clarke, given how much Black women chafe under its weight. Perhaps, just like Black men, the Black woman intellectual is

“... afraid to relinquish heterosexual privilege. So little else is guaranteed Black people.”

Failure to Transform is, after all, a critique not of specific intellectuals and works, but of a wider issue in political movements that seem resistant to acknowledge the contributions of their most marginalized members. Clarke is as frustrated with the heterosexualism in Black revolutionary politics as she is by non-Black gays and lesbians who say that the Black community is uniquely or excessively homophobic. She details her own experiences of acceptance (with some exotification) amongst poor and working-class Black communities, postulating that a sense of empathy may be fostered between those cast out from white society.

In her words I see spelled out the same question that plagues her as it plagued Barbara Smith and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Nida Manzoor and all the women and feminists of color whose lives are made an endless series of loyalty tests. Who can I claim when I am racialized amongst women, a woman amongst the racialized, and a dyke amongst both? Who can I claim when no one seems to be willing to claim me?

Why do I keep on fighting for everyone when no one fights for me?

As a piece of feminist history, Failure to Transform, much like Barbara Smith’s critique, reveals to me just how little has changed in decades. How lesbians of color were asking the same questions in 1983 that we ask today, and how difficult it is to keep fighting losing battles on every front we are drafted into.

I also get the impression that hooks never quite forgave Clarke for writing it.

Ain’t I a Woman? was followed by hooks’ next book, From Margin to Center, in 1984. It reads, in some ways, almost like an apology, with hooks echoing many radical and lesbian feminist points and giving her due to lesbian feminist contributions. She criticizes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique for its narrow focus on middle-class wives, discusses the importance of ending compulsory heterosexuality, and even cites Barbara Smith—though, she takes care to reiterate that feminism “identifying men as the enemy” yields no positive results.

“Had feminist activists called attention to the relationship between ruling class men and the vast majority of men, who are socialized to perpetuate and maintain sexism and sexist oppression even as they reap no life-affirming benefits, these men might have been motivated to examine the impact of sexism in their lives.” [Emphasis mine.]

Why do men beat, rape, and extract sexual and domestic labor from women? Because they are tricked into mistakenly believing that this benefits them, by the powerful men who actually oppress us all. How silly of working-class men to think that they gain anything from women being reduced to the status of personal indentured servant! (And hooks does, in fact, use the term “brainwashing”, rather than considering that perhaps men are not merely morally corrupted into misogyny, but materially incentivized to uphold it.)

If only feminists didn’t insist on demonizing men—telling men that patriarchy doesn’t benefit them, and hurts them too, will surely make much more headway!

Amusingly, hooks makes a point of using Smith’s own words in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology to continue grinding an axe with lesbian feminists: “Black feminism and Black lesbianism are not interchangeable. Feminism is a political movement and many lesbians are not feminists.” That hooks’ grudge against political lesbianism is as strong in her 2000 book as it was in 1984 is impressive, and hooks’ acknowledgements of lesbian feminist contributions ring just as hollow in both. Though if hooks is sly in how she cites Smith, she’s downright defensive when she addresses Clarke’s essay directly.

“Clearly Clarke misunderstands and misinterprets my point. … My point is that feminism will never appeal to a massbased group of women in our society who are heterosexual if they think that they will be looked down upon or seen as doing something wrong. My comment was not intended to reflect in any way on lesbians because they are not the only group of feminists who criticize and in some cases condemn all heterosexual practice.” [Emphasis mine.]

Just as white feminists—whether “third wave”, “decolonial”, or whatever other subschool they subscribe to—demonstrate complexes about lesbian feminist critiques of heterosexuality, hooks too ascribes lesbian feminists like Clarke outsize power. While she nominally allows that feminists who critique heterosexuality are not necessarily all lesbians, she obfuscates that such feminists are still an absolute minority within feminism. Political lesbians cannot set the feminist agenda while they are outnumbered by political heterosexuals, whose commitment to toning down feminist critiques of male-supremacy has repeatedly won out. Whether or not the masses of women who are untrained in formal feminist doctrine are receptive to these ideas—and many non-feminist and even conservative straight women are quite cognizant and critical of men’s power over them—the actual problem that hooks and feminists like her refuse to name is that these critiques makes them uncomfortable.

Because there is no amount of genuflecting that lesbian feminists as a whole can ever do to make up for the transgressions of those few bullheaded enough to loudly proclaim the inherent feminist superiority of all lesbians. This fear—that attraction to and love of men simply makes a woman less feminist, less radical, and complicit somehow in her own oppression—is indeed one that women have wielded as a cudgel against each other since long before any dyke was allowed to voice her thoughts on the matter. It is an insecurity and a shame that is deeply embedded in the collective feminist psyche, and whether we use the term “man-centered” or “woman-centered” or “girl’s girl” or “pick-me” or any iteration of the same core concept, it is a demon that we will never be able to exorcise for as long as we refuse to admit just how much this central tragedy of womanhood burns at our very souls.

Truthfully, straight feminists and straight non-feminists (and even queer men and the queer feminists still trying to apologize for Dworkin’s existence) all desperately want there to be some magic fucking key that will unlock an arcane, secret reserve of empathy that men have, for all of recorded history, failed to access, squirreled away in their heart of hearts. We don’t want to confront the inevitable conclusion, to endure the psychic agony that comes with finally comprehending one’s destiny as designated resource for the ones with actual agency, most of whom simply find it more beneficial to dehumanize you than try to understand.

Imperialism is about borders and Others, but patriarchy is intimate in a way nothing else is. It freely invades our very homes, our bedrooms, our most private fantasies and even the bloody positions we like to do it in. “The personal is political” wasn’t a paradigm shift, but the acknowledgement of a generational curse, an utterance of forbidden knowledge that has driven feminists mad since before we could name it.

You can’t escape patriarchy, dollface.

And fucking hell we desperately, desperately need to.

Conclusion: Adrienne Rich Was Right

In the beginning, Adrienne Rich said that heterosexuality was an institution. Everyone promptly lost their minds.

Underneath all the fretting about heteropessimism, misandry, separatism, white feminists, and how much patriarchy hurts men, lies the actual specter haunting feminism: the lesbian. The figure whose crimes can never be forgiven, whose freedom from the curse of loving men inspires envy and resentment and fury in equal measure, who is too removed from heterosexuality to belong in feminism even as her distance from heterosexuality makes her a kind of feminist ideal that other women fear they will never achieve. She is too reactionary, too transphobic and man-hating and unfeminine and ugly, and also too pure, too fantastical, too idealistic, dreaming of a world beyond gender that is both too beautiful and too horrifying to allow ourselves to contemplate. Feminists recoil at the idea of being treated like her, desperately and loudly declaring that they’re not all lesbians. Feminists wish they could be like her, when the weight of heterosexuality feels like too much to bear, when the yoke of the womanhood they’re meant to enjoy and celebrate chafes their skin raw.

Dykes have been the sin-eaters and whipping girls of feminism long before the trannies made it fashionable, really. The Lavender Menace you can’t quite rid yourself of.

Because feminists keep trying to rescue heterosexuality, and the obvious conclusion that it can’t be saved breaks their little hearts. Abolish the family, abolish borders, abolish the state, abolish capitalism, and hell abolish gender, but abolish heterosexuality? Don’t you know most women are heterosexual? Don’t you know how much we love men? How could you be so heartless?

It really does feel like feminists are in an abusive relationship with men, sometimes. And just like those stuck in the endless cycle of betrayal and hope, they lash out at those of us on the outside of the dynamic, who have the clarity and therefore the temerity and the sheer obstinate gall to give them a frank prognosis. The endless whispered promises that “This time, it’ll be different, baby” are more comforting.

And Wittig help us, but lesbians are collectively tired of being the bitch you all run to when you’re in the mood to trash your ex right before getting back together with him.

I’d like to posit that hooks’ empirically dubious statements in Feminism is For Everybody are less about what conservative media actually promoted and more about this persistent heterofeminist anxiety of being dismissed and lumped in with those cringey man-hating dykes who make us all look bad. It is an anxiety that ignores how much epistemic injustice feminism has always been and will always be subject to, how little awareness of any kind of feminism there is in the mainstream, and how even the mildest feminist critique can and will be summarily dismissed by antifeminists because antifeminists are not beholden to what is true. The dismissal of feminism as too loud, too radical, and too misandrist happened during suffrage just as it happened during the second wave and the third wave and still happens today, despite how thoroughly lesbian feminists of all stripes have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

So let me conduct an autopsy on the grand, decades-long, misguided heterofeminist experiment instead of further jabbing at everyone’s guilty consciences about how they treat those angry, ugly, unfeminine, man-hating dykes. It’s over, girl. You gave him everything he wanted, and his response was to demand even more, to find religion and talk about how nice it would be to have a tradwife who can’t vote or divorce him. Feminism cannot make straight men any promises that are more appealing than the depths of domination and depravity patriarchy has on offer, and the protracted, tortured, overdue reckoning with the fact that men demonstrate sex-class solidarity and will protect their collective sex-class interests—even if it means giving more powerful men more power over them—is what’s making women everywhere have a crisis of faith in feminism.

I do not mean that all women absolutely must shave our heads and march to the nearest bra crematorium en masse. Lysistrata is not quite a feasible tactic in a world where men’s most valued freedom is their ability to coerce sex with impunity. At the same time, consider which developments the modern men’s grievance movement has organized in response to. Birthrates are falling because today, women everywhere are more educated, more autonomous, more independent, and more able to establish lives and incomes and stability outside of male-dependence. Women who opt to co-parent with other women instead of remarrying, or can avail of abortions, or be childless or gay or transgender or sluts with access to contraception at unprecedented rates may not constitute a literal worldwide sex strike, but our increased ability and demonstrated desire to opt out of the heterosexual contract is frankly being treated just like one.

So I apologize, personally and deeply and from the bottom of my heart, for every lesbian who has ever shamed women for loving or sleeping with men. I say that because more than ever, we need to forgive each other for the sins of feminists past, present, and future, and confront the reality that even when disenfranchised men have the will to change, they will frequently and with frightening consistency choose to make things worse for us. I say that knowing that it probably won’t do much good, because whether or not there are actual political lesbians and separatists going around shaming women, it’s the political lesbian in all our minds whose words cut deepest.

Personally, I think we need women to stop caring about whether wanting to fuck men makes them traitors to the sisterhood, and more importantly we need to them to stop pre-emptively crashing out at each other over such fears. What good has it done? What good will it possibly do?

In a similar vein, we need to stop betting on a horse that has, repeatedly and consistently, kicked us in the head every time we’ve done so. Feminism cannot afford to wait for those demanding an end to no-fault divorce and a government-assigned girlfriend to come around.

What we need most of all, though, is to recognize that feminist struggle has to build power and structures outside of the family, outside of the state, and outside of heterosexuality. We need to be ready to hold each other as the endless war that is simply living as a woman continues to take a toll on each and every one of us, and we need to remain dauntless in the face of a resurgent, uncaring, and gleefully cruel libidinal political moment that wants nothing less than to reduce us to the state we’ve fought so long to escape.

How do we fix heterosexuality? I don’t really know or care. I want women to be safe. I want them to be able to own property and earn incomes and be equally able to pursue single motherhood and single spinsterhood. I want women to be free—free of gendered obligations, free to escape prisons of financial dependence and social ostracism for the crime of refusing to be male property. The question of love and the crisis of masculinity in response to expectations of egalitarianism in intimacy is, to me, a secondary concern that will remain so for at least decades. Can we liberate women first, before we start pontificating about how best to liberate sex?

The defanging of feminist activism actively threatens our ability to meaningfully respond to misogyny as an animating political force. And at every turn, there are women whose investment in patriarchy and readiness to call compromise and complicity “feminism” will undermine the project of liberation. But the existence of collaborators doesn’t mean patriarchy has no gender, or that there isn’t a clear gender hierarchy that the most reactionary elements of modern politics want to enforce. That women can betray feminism doesn’t mean feminism must abandon the woman, especially when she needs feminism the most.

So, knowing all the risks, keeping in mind all of the fraught history and the way it can and has gone wrong, I implore: stop running from the specter of the lesbian. Consider that no struggle can be won by asking at every turn if the terms of resistance are acceptable to those most opposed to liberation. And if the idea of not putting a love for men at the center of feminism disquiets you so, consider this question that I know makes me an asshole to say out loud, but that I have to ask all the same:

Are you going to wait forever for men to love you back?

I would like to acknowledge how much my feminism, and indeed a lot of the feminism we take for granted, is indebted to Barbara Smith. The Smith Caring Circle was established in 2017 to enable her to retire with dignity and safety, and I would like to encourage my readers to consider supporting her.

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks another entry of my upcoming book, Brown/Trans/Les. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting me by pre-ordering.

My initial essays on this blog have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts.