From Nowhere to Everywhere by Gill Valentine

Author:Gill Valentine [Valentine, Gill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Women's Studies, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781317992998
Google: eazaAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-09-13T05:50:43+00:00

What would lesbians know about sexual assault? Who would be assaulting them?

—John Prentice, Hamilton-Wentworth regional councillor (Peters 1993b)

INTRODUCTION

In November 1992, a women’s shelter in southern Ontario, Canada, ran an ad for a relief and child-care worker. The ad included the following commonly-used employment equity statement: “applications [are] particularly encouraged from lesbians, racial minorities, aboriginal and francophone women” (Tait 1992: B6). Members of local Rotary Clubs quickly threatened to withdraw a $500,000 pledge (for a new 20-bed shelter) and joined several regional councillors in demanding that the shelter explain what the category “lesbian” was doing in the ad. Halton Women’s Place (the shelter) quickly apologised, stating a mistake had been made and that all future ads would simply indicate that they were “an equal opportunity employer.” The shelter, and the pledge, survived the controversy (Longbottom 1992).

However, when an almost identical controversy erupted less than two months later, over nearby Hamilton Sexual Assault Centre’s use of similar wording, the reaction of that women’s organization was very different. Its executive director stated that there would be no apology for the inclusion of “lesbian” in the ad, arguing that “you don’t back down from a position you feel is right because your funding is threatened” (Peters 1993a: Bl). Local representatives from municipal government, social service, feminist, and lesbian and gay organizations, became involved in a protracted public debate over the validity and intention of the inclusion of “lesbian”; before too long, the first of several anonymous complaints arose (via the local media) about the Centre being “anti-men,” “anti-police” and having a “lesbian bias.” The Centre could only weather the storm so far before “asking” its three main funders for an organizational review.

These and several other events surrounding local feminist anti-violence activism in the early 1990s suggested that despite the popularity of lesbian chic, despite k.d., Melissa and the ubiquitous “gay” storyline in prime time, the lesbian threat was alive and well and living in southern Ontario. In this paper, I draw on doctoral research1 conducted during 1991,1992 and 1993, to briefly illustrate one of several interconnected processes which operated to regulate and contain organized anti-violence activism in and around the city of Hamilton,2 Canada during that time. By suggesting that feminist anti-violence activism-as a set of counterhegemonic ideas and practices which challenge the current gender system-constitutes “UnWomanly Acts,” I illustrate ways in which the process of “deradicalization” can be understood, in part, as a punitive consequence of feminist anti-violence activists and/or organisations not “doing gender right” (Butler 1990).

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