Pink Triangles by Pam Mitchell

Author:Pam Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

There are problems in this route. Psychoanalysis has the advantage of taking us beyond the purely descriptive and classificatory. But the pursuit of the truth of psychoanalysis can lead to a sort of despair of political action or any wider social or collective activity, and to an indulgence in theorizing for its own sake.

Psychoanalysis and the debates on ideology provide a theoretical basis for the continuing struggles of women and gays against patriarchy. For if the capitalist social formation is a combination of levels, there are similarly different levels of practice and struggle, though they must not be artificially separated. As gays our specific struggle is ideological, though as socialists we fully participate in the necessary economic and political struggles against capitalism.

The Family

In previous issues of Gay Left the heart of gay oppression has been located in the family and we have attempted to explain why this should be so. In retrospect we probably overstressed the purely economic aspects of the family and mechanically assimilated homosexual oppression to it. But the stress on the family must still be central for it is here that in each generation the boy-child and girl-child enter into the rules of social life. Here also is where the dominance of reproductive sexuality is maintained. In our culture these rules closely relate gender-identity to a particular form of sexual expression. Male homosexuality has until recently been interpreted in terms of having “undesirable” social characteristics such as effeminancy, or in terms of a perverse disease/sickness model.

Lesbianism, scarcely defined at all, has suffered from the general ideological stress which has equated female sexuality as secondary, responsive and maternal. The ways in which male and female children enter the social world, with all its attendant expectations, are not yet clear, though psychoanalytic theory may be able to help our understanding. The usefulness of such an understanding is that it transcends essentially social and historical divisions of sexuality into heterosexual (good) and homosexual (bad), and strategically links the struggle against homosexual oppression in our culture with the struggle against patriarchy and for women’s liberation. The fight for gay liberation is thus an aspect of a wider struggle against male domination.

But having recognized that, and the need to work closely with an autonomous women’s movement, there are specific areas where homosexual self-activity on the largest possible scale is vital.

• in the defense of gay rights, especially when they are threatened with erosion by court and police pressure, and by public prejudice in this period of economic decline;

• in struggling for further gay reforms — for the rights of lesbians and male homosexual parents; against the age of consent; for extension of civil rights to all homosexuals, etc.;

• in the development of a theoretical and practical awareness of our situation;

• for lesbians and gay men, independent struggle for the development of our own non-oppressive community, leading to the articulation of a positive identity; including, in this, discussions of central areas such as the nature of relationships, sexuality and role playing.

The gay movement is wider than any specific organization.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.