Identity politics promoted coalitions of women dedicated to exploring their racial, ethnic, linguistic, or spiritual origins. Two anthologies—This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982)5—inaugurated a swell of books that focused attention on Chicana, African American, Asian American, and Native American women. Suspicious of identity categories, proponents of poststructuralist theory unraveled conventional ideas of masculinity and femininity, as well as heterosexuality and homosexuality, and in the process drew attention to multiple forms of eroticism.
Within the academy, feminists began writing and lecturing for each other rather than for general audiences. To advocates of identity politics, the term women was too capacious and in need of adjectival qualifiers (Black women, Native American women). For poststructuralists, it was too narrowly constricted by its heterosexual antitype (men). At the peaks of their positive influence, advocates of identity politics and of poststructuralism challenged feminists to explore new areas and think in new ways. In the troughs, both groups trashed their seventies predecessors as blind to the realities of women of color (“racist”) or as blind to the social construction of gender (“essentialist”).6
Even while academic conversations became increasingly opaque, such literary women as Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison illuminated differences among women that gave rise to differences among feminists. Especially in their deployment of identity politics, they extended feminist discussions to analyze sexual and racial injustice in transnational contexts. Eventually, the concept of intersectionality arose out of identity politics as both literary critics and creative writers explored the subtle ways in which gender is inflected by economic, religious, linguistic, and geographic factors.
ANDREA DWORKIN AND THE SEX WARS
At the start of the eighties, important debates in the women’s movement issued in a battle that pitted feminists against feminists. Much of the anger of seventies activists had coalesced in protests against the violence that girls and women too often experienced: rape, incest, child abuse, domestic battery, workplace harassment, and femicide (a nineteenth-century legal term that was revived). Activists questioned early sexual liberationists: how liberating is sexual freedom in a male-dominated culture?
The proliferation of pornographic magazines and movies suggested that pornography itself might be to blame for assaults on women. Snuff and slasher movies had surged in popularity. What should be done about them? This question led to the so-called porn or sex wars. Although no single crusader can represent the many voices raised against sexual violence, Andrea Dworkin often starred in that role. As activists organized the first Take Back the Night marches, Dworkin began to represent the group called Women Against Pornography. She was loud, large, and “the angriest woman in America”—a radical feminist, she explained, but “not the fun kind.”7
At the podium, Dworkin’s “dramatized martyrdom and revival-tent theatrics”8 arose from damaging experiences: she was assaulted at the age of 9 and later fled a marriage to a physically abusive husband. Before that marriage, at freewheeling Bennington College, she prided herself on having “never slept with faculty members, only their wives.” Later in life, she married the feminist activist John Stotenberg, who also identified as gay. After being arrested at an anti–Vietnam War protest and “sexually brutalized” by a gynecological examination in New York City’s Women’s House of Detention, Dworkin brought charges that eventually helped lead to the closing of the prison. Homeless at some points during a sojourn in Europe and resorting to prostitution, she returned to the States determined to lecture as a feminist “because I had a lot of trouble getting my work published.”9
Claiming that she was too impoverished to buy her favorite women’s movement button, “Don’t Suck. Bite,” Dworkin spoke out against the idea that women were to blame for the violence inflicted on them: “it was presumed that the woman was sexually provocative or was trying to destroy the man with a phony charge of rape.” She called for “a generation of warriors who can’t be tired out or bought off. Each woman needs to take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear, accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart.”10
Dworkin opposed those feminists who aligned with civil libertarians to reject all forms of censorship and who quickly became known as “pro-sex.” Wary of moral pieties that had historically inhibited women from experiencing sexual pleasure, pro-sex feminists emphasized the difficulty of distinguishing between sexually explicit art and pornography: “What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic,” Ellen Willis quipped. Dworkin dismissed this stance as a collaboration with the enemy, for she agreed with Robin Morgan that “pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.”11
Gloria Steinem, who supported Dworkin’s efforts, labeled her an “Old Testament prophet”; Susan Brownmiller dubbed her “Rolling Thunder”: “Perspiring in her trademark denim coveralls, she employed the rhetorical cadences that would make her both a cult idol and an object of ridicule a few years later.” 12 To others, she “seemed like a misogynist’s caricature of a women’s rights activist, a puritanical battle ax in overalls out to smite men for their appetites.”13 Inspired by Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Dworkin’s book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) reflected many feminists’ belief that the porn industry’s images of female humiliation robbed women of their humanity and promoted violence. Salacious magazines and movies, Dworkin believed, indoctrinated men into what today is called toxic masculinity.
As her detractors pointed out, Dworkin often depicted sex itself as a violation, for she conflated heterosexuality with women’s abjection, especially in her book Intercourse (1987): “Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior status, . . . shoving it into her, over and over, . . . until she gives up and gives in—which is called surrender in the male lexicon.”14 She was, in other words, an early advocate of the view that men—programmed for aggression and rapacity—are from Mars, women—conditioned for reciprocity and intimacy—from Venus.15 In a male-dominated culture, many anti-porn feminists argued, men’s values were essentially distinct from women’s. Separatist communities grew, along with separatist music festivals. Some of the separatist rural communities were called “Womyn’s Lands,” and the best known of the festivals was the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival: note that it was important to distinguish women from men linguistically, by replacing the “men” in “women” with “myn.”
The separatists found confirmation in speculations that grappled once again with Freud, specifically his pre-Oedipal couple: the mother and infant. Dorothy Dinnerstein, for example, argued that misogyny is rooted in women’s childbearing and child-rearing, which means that a baby’s first other is generally the mother. As children grow up, she claimed, their anxieties and hostilities are projected onto a female figure who comes to embody not-quite-human otherness.16 The psychologist Nancy Chodorow considered a different consequence of the family romance, namely that the earliest desire of female as well as male babies is for the mother. Because of girls’ primary attachment to a female figure, homosexuality remains a significant component of their erotic lives. According to Chodorow, girls identify with the mother (and vice versa), whereas boys define themselves in opposition to the mother. Women who grow up invested in interdependence acquire fluid ego boundaries, whereas men with rigid ego boundaries are characterized by agonistic modes of self-definition. Carol Gilligan extended this insight into ethics.17
Taken together, these speculations helped generate lesbian studies in the academy and bolstered the view of separatists that women needed not equality with men but a revaluation of their differences from men: ergo the term difference feminism as distinct from equality feminism. To the extent that separatist communities espoused a unique identity for women, their founders might be considered the first adv
ocates of identity politics. In some lesbian feminist circles, men became as suspect as the trappings of femininity: high heels, makeup, dresses. Yet such a view alienated not only women in heterosexual relationships but also those advocating for sex workers or identifying as butch or femme. Just as alarmingly, it threatened to reinstate Victorian notions of men as hypersexualized predators and women as paragons of purity, as well as longer-lasting stereotypes of men as active and rational, women as passive and emotional.
Hostility between anti-porn and pro-sex feminists escalated until it came to a head at the 1982 Barnard conference “Toward a Politics of Sexuality,” where pro-sex activists sought to reclaim “pleasure and danger” for feminists.18 Pleasure especially was at risk of being forgotten with the overemphasis on danger. Administrators at Barnard, panicked at the prospect of bad publicity, confiscated the program notes created by the planning committee, and the conference was picketed by members of Women Against Pornography whose T-shirts read “For Feminist Sexuality” on the front, “Against S/M” on the back. Their leaflets accused the pro-sex organizers of lending “support to the very sexual institutions and values that oppress all women.”19
The foremost sex-positive thinker at the Barnard conference, the anthropologist Gayle Rubin, found herself “traumatized” by the ensuing acrimony. The anti-pornography protesters “attempted to excommunicate from the feminist movement anyone who disagreed with them, and they aggressively sabotaged events that did not adhere to the antiporn line.”20 Wanting to reclaim erotic fantasy for women, pro-sex participants delivered papers on sadomasochism, butch-femme roles, the history of sexual repression, and the sanitizing of lesbianism as sisterhood. The poets Sharon Olds and Cherríe Moraga read their verse aloud. At an off-campus speak-out, the pro-sex Lesbian Sex Mafia organized a slide presentation on dildos, nipple clamps, and bondage. Reporters from the anti-porn feminist newspaper off our backs decried a return to the allure of dominance, but Susie Bright soon founded a pro-sex magazine “for adventurous lesbians” and called it On Our Backs.21
In the aftermath of the Barnard conference, the spokesperson who would become Andrea Dworkin’s unlikely sidekick, Catharine MacKinnon, came forward with the decorous self-presentation fostered by her Ivy League legal training. She had already pioneered the legal argument that sexual harassment functions as discrimination in the workplace: in Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), McKinnon argued that “economic power is to sexual harassment as physical force is to rape.”22 By 1983, Dworkin and MacKinnon were team-teaching a class at the University of Minnesota, where they began to argue that pornography was a civil rights violation against women.
First in Minnesota and then in Indiana, they drafted civic ordinances that would outlaw demeaning sexual representations of women.23 “If a woman or girl was forced into making pornography or if a woman or girl was raped or assaulted because of pornography, the pornographer or retailer could be held responsible for civil damages,” Dworkin explained about the legislation.24 Why did Phyllis Schlafly back Dworkin and MacKinnon’s efforts?25 While lies and evasions proliferated about AIDS, conservatives campaigned for abstinence-only sex education and the censorship of sexually explicit representations. Both anti-pornography feminists and pro-sex feminists quickly realized, as one historian put it, “that the state’s interest in restricting sexual expression had nothing to do with a commitment to enlarging women’s rights.”26
Because of the rescinding of the ordinances—they were found to be unconstitutional—most commentators on the porn wars believe they were won by the pro-sex side.27 On the sidelines, we found ourselves leery of any form of censorship—we had read Rabelais, Joyce, Lawrence, and Nabokov, all of whom had created works labeled obscene—and therefore enlisted on the pro-sex side.28 But now we feel more divided. During an era in which a rape occurred every three minutes in America, both sides suffered a defeat. Both were undermined by a society that spouted puritanical pieties while commercialized forms of sexuality became perversely profitable.
What was to be done about all of this? When asked this question by a student journalist at Harvard, Andrea Dworkin had a discerning response. “That’s where first-person testimony of women has been so important,” she said. “Because the mainstream will say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t happen’ and then a group of women will say, ‘Well, it happened to me.’ ” Rebecca Traister, the author of the 2018 book Good and Mad (partly inspired by Andrea Dworkin), furnishes this account, and punctuates it by chiming in: “Yeah. Me too.”29 Johanna Fateman, one of the editors of a 2019 compilation of Dworkin’s writings titled Last Days at Hot Slit, attributes to Dworkin “a prescient apocalyptic urgency.”30
GLORIA ANZALDÚA’S MESTIZA CONSCIOUSNESS
While the words of Dworkin resonate with the #MeToo activists of our time, the writings of her contemporary Gloria Anzaldúa illuminate the history of immigration policies that led during the Trump administration to the separation of children from their parents at the Mexican border and their incarceration in bleak holding cells. By supplying first-person testimony about growing up as a Chicana in south Texas, Gloria Anzaldúa inspired feminist thinking about ethnic identity politics and transnational issues.
Born on a ranch settlement, at age 11 Gloria Anzaldúa moved with her family to Hargill, Texas. Throughout her childhood, she experienced pain and shame because of a hormonal imbalance that brought about very early puberty—“I was always made to feel ashamed because I was having a period and had breasts when I was six years old”—but she would soon find an “escape through reading” and eventually through writing that she associated with physical and spiritual healing. After the death of her father when she was 15, Anzaldúa labored as a migrant worker until she earned her B.A. in 1969 and then an M.A. in 1972 that enabled her to become a high school teacher. While writing Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), she was “much more extreme, political and angry” about the situation of Chicana women than when she had left Texas for California, but “yes, I was always angry and I am still angry,” she explained after the book made her famous.31
Declared Anzaldúa, “gender is not the only oppression.”32 Ethnicity and geography play a major role in Borderlands/La Frontera, where she used history, autobiography, and myth to promote understanding within Chicano and Mexican cultures as well as communication between Chicano/Mexican cultures and Black, Native American, Anglo, and international cultures. At the heart of the book, she argues for a new awareness of the paradoxes that she calls “mestiza consciousness”: a recognition of conflicting allegiances bequeathed to those residing in borderlands, who must learn to live with multiple identities.
For Anzaldúa, mestiza consciousness evolved out of rage at Anglos who appropriated the land of Mexicans when they incorporated it into the state of Texas, and at the mistreatment of legal as well as illegal immigrants. Writing about the traffic from the south to the north during the Reagan years, Anzaldúa reminds us that crises at the border have been going on for decades: “Without benefit of bridges, the ‘mojados’ (wetbacks) float on inflatable rafts across el río Grande, or wade or swim across naked, clutching their clothes over their heads.” Especially at risk, the Mexican refugee woman is often raped by “the coyote (smuggler)” or “he sells her into prostitution. She cannot call on country or state health or economic resources because she doesn’t know English and she fears deportation”: “This is her home / this thin edge of / barbwire.” Even for natives, the borderland is a landscape of exploitation “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.”33
Within southwestern Chicano communities, “Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them.” Only “a very few” can evade subservience by “entering the world of education and career,” as Anzaldúa did when she was the first in her family to go to college. Loyal to her origins, Anzaldúa nevertheless abhors how her culture “cripples its women�
�� and “makes macho caricatures of its men.” “Being lesbian and raised Catholic” produces “loquería, the crazies,” since “Women are at the bottom of the ladder one rung above the deviants. The Chicano, mexicano, and some Indian cultures have no tolerance for deviance.” She feels “sold out” by the Anglos but also by her own community: “The dark-skinned woman . . . has been a slave, a force of cheap labor, colonized by the Spaniard, the Anglo, by her own people.”34
Because Anzaldúa’s personal rebellion “was quite costly—cramped with insomnia and doubts”35—she knew that traumatized borderland women often needed healing. Both linguistic and spiritual practices contribute to the therapies Anzaldúa prescribes in Borderlands/La Frontera. As the book’s bifurcated title indicates, English and Spanish must be sutured to reflect mestiza consciousness. Anzaldúa writes in a potpourri of standard English, English slang, standard Spanish, Mexican Spanish, North Mexican dialect, Chicano Spanish, and Tex-Mex. Switching codes, she does not always want “to accommodate” English readers. Instead, she seeks to raise their awareness of their own linguistic limitations by leaving some passages untranslated. With creolized idioms, she mines images that function as “a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge,” creating meaning out of “a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland.”36
Just as Lorde turned to African goddesses, Anzaldúa returned to Indian, Mexican, and Catholic myths of powerful female figures, reinventing them as supporters of her spiritual quest for self-validation. Malinali (or La Malinche), a Mexican woman who served as the adviser to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés; la Llorona, the folkloric abandoned, wailing woman who drowns herself and her children in a river; and the Virgen de Guadalupe (the Virgin Mary): all needed to be reimagined. Anzaldúa also seeks to reinvent the great Aztec goddesses Coatlicue, Tlazaolteotl, and Cichuoacoatl because “Azteca-Mexica culture [gave] them monstrous attributes.”37
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