Lesbians, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis: The Second Wave by Judith Glassgold & Suzanne Iasenza

Author:Judith Glassgold & Suzanne Iasenza [Glassgold, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Clinical Success, Political Failure?

In a LGBT health workshop I recently attended, one feminist emphatically referred to postmodern feminist analyses as “intellectual masturbatory horseshit by those ivory tower types.” I believe the “intellectual masturbatory” character of postmodern feminism arises out of an obsessive tendency to detach such analyses from lived experience, or to conflate language with experience. In my analysis of lesbian relationship violence I have tried to stay connected to the materiality of lesbians’ experiences in order to articulate a language, containing a feminist psychoanalytic ethos, which allows for the complexities of lesbian relationship violence to be heard. What I have shown is that lesbian clients speak their violent experiences in multifaceted ways, and this multiplicity is often organized around an unconscious fear of psychic annihilation.

In sum, this paper leaves us with at least two questions to ponder: Do we try to squash lesbian experiences into a heterosexist model of relationship violence in order to preserve domestic violence politics? Or do we get rid of the model of political language all together? This exposition has shown how it is difficult to understand lesbian relationship violence outside of the theorizing of heterosexual relationship violence. However, through critically making lesbians’ experiences of relationship violence visible and heard within the framework of an ethical language, a more compassionate understanding is beginning to develop. I think that this compassionate understanding resembles more of a lesbian-izing of the political language of relationship violence than a language of lesbian relationship violence. Above all, this shift from politics to ethics is a reminder of how it is not just the concept of woman that is problematic in domestic violence theorizing, it is also lesbian desire that is a knotty word for the dominant language of domestic violence.

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