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Susan Hawthorne
Victoria University
'From The Lesbian Body to Same-Sex Attracted: The Depoliticising of Lesbian Culture'
This paper is dedicated to Monique Wittig who died in the first week of 2003 and whose life and work was not celebrated by obituaries in the mainstream media. In 1975 Monique Wittig's book, The Lesbian Body was published. In it she explores the many ways in which the lesbian experiences her body from muscle and sinew to vulva and thighs; from the cellular level to skin, hair spittle and juice. A decade later Nicole Brossard writes about the ways in which lesbian imagination arises from 'the body and the sex who inhabits it.' (1988). Lesbians, radical feminist lesbians, are the only group who claim to choose their marginality. They take up Monique Wittig's chorus that 'lesbians are not women' (1978), that lesbians, like speakers of a second language, move between the codes but when they are their lesbian selves they do not participate in the social economy of woman-being or of heterosexual discourse. Heterosexual discourse is alive and well in the twenty-first century with lesbian culture being eroded by clinical terms such as 'same-sex attracted', a term popular in bureaucratic and academic discourse. In this paper I explore some of the codes of lesbian culture and look at the works of lesbian philosophy and literature which have contributed to the development of a rich lesbian culture.
Bio: Dr Susan Hawthorne is the author of a novel, The Falling Woman, a collection of poems, Bird and the co-editor of several anthologies of lesbian writing including Car Maintenance, Explosives and Love and other lesbian writings (with Cathie Dunsford and Susan Sayer). She is working on a series of hypertext poems on lesbian culture and a work of lesbian philosophy. Susan Hawthorne completed her PhD in Women's Studies through the Political Science Department at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Bio/diversity and co-editor of September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives (with Bronwyn Winter) and of CyberFeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity (with Renate Klein).
<hawthorne@netspace.net.au>