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NEWS
Beatrix Campbell speaks out
An English journalist and socialist feminist, Beatrix Campbell recently visited Australia to speak at centenary commemorations of Karl Marx's death. Together with Anne Coote she authored the best seller Sweet Freedom, which has created considerable discussion and debate in the women's movement in Britain. Beatrix spoke to Campaign about some of the issues at the intersection of the women' and gay movements. On Radical Feminists
Lesbianism and the Women's Movement
WHAT'S clear is that at the level of bodies, anatomy and stuff, lesbians have an awful lot to share with heterosexual women. What's at stake for both sides is reclaiming pleasure, for women, which has been kidnapped from them by heterosexuality The common enemy is the organising principles of patriarchal heterosexuality that say that the magic moment is penetration in this rather numb place.
So feminist heterosexuality and lesbianism share this common ground reclaiming the feminine body and feminine pleasure. From this angle the only thing that's different is the selection of object choice, men or women. As it happens that's a big difference, and the "men" bit is used to divide heterosexual feminism from lesbianism.
At the moment the women's movement identifies with lesbians at the level of civil rights they think that we should not be discriminated against and that we should have custody of our kids, and the like. What isn't identified is the possibility of an alliance at the level of sex.
On Gay Men
WHEN we talk about reconstruction of masculinity and feminity, we have to see the place of the gay male movement as absolutely vital. They are the ones who generated the imperative in the first place. Although one may feel reservations about gay men who rarely demonstrate any kind of interest or sympathy with women in general.
At a political level, the issue of masculinity has been taken on as a part of gay men's discourse in a way that it isn't with men in general. Men in general are utterly unconscious about the problem of masculinity-men on the left especially, are committed to forms of masculinity that are absolutely the most butch kinds.
Photos: Tribune
THE original declarations of radical feminism that spawned the modern women's liberation movement are a kind of core to women's liberation politics; that is politics that are pro-women, that start from the principle that woman's condition has to be seen as an effect of subordination, and that experience of subordination can't be reduced to class exploitation. It took a long time for socialist feminists to wise up to this. There was something about the radical feminist approach that said in the end the structures of male supremacy are both systematic and they describe people's individual relationship to the world. It's no use saying, "You can't blame men, it's the system". There's a sense in which we're all engaged and all part of that structure and we're all culpable in a certain sense. You can't escape from the imperative to reconstitute masculinity and reconstitute feminity and you have to engage in a struggle with men.
There's an emotional question which is to do with politics that says. "Men are absolutely powerful and men are awful": relishing and repeating the catalogue of men's crimes and sins. This is one thing that I'm not really interested in. It's absolutely vital that the nature of men's dominance is documented but I'd rather cultivate the approach that comes from consciousness raising which is about speaking and naming a feeling of oppression. You have to name the feeling of oppression and you have to document it. The danger is that it can become an obsession and one becomes fixed on the immutable power of men.
S & M
I find it phenomenally difficult because I do not feel personally very sympathetic to the S & M debate. But I am also against the imposing of a good clean moral imperative that because we are all nice clean girls we don't have sex.
I take a civil rights approach, the same position that the gay movement takes, to support the investigation of complex sexual desire against the suppression of such an investigation.
Trade Unions
THE trade union movement is one of the instruments of male domination of working class women, so they have to be transformed. But I think we've also had some terrible experiences when women have been organised separately. That has been tried as a result of women being excluded from the trade union movement in Britain and the women's unions are now all incorporated into the trade union movement that exists.
I suspect that it's not really worth trying to bust out of that. The odd attempts that have been made have all been terribly defeated... plus the trade unions as a whole have massive resources. Why should we be starved of the resources just because they've never fought on our behalf.
I don't want to give the impression that the only thing I'm interested in doing is working within the trade union movement but it's really important to do whatever you can to command those resources in the interests of women.