1982 Conference on Sexuality: Audience Reception
Much of audience members’ criticisms towards panelists were their alleged misunderstanding of “anti-sex,” WAP (Women Against Pornography), and radical feminist positions. One audience member clarified radical feminists’ position against pornography, emphasizing that, “The form it takes in this culture, in the patriarchal cultural, is such that what’s largely eroticized and sexualized are the values of dominance and submission. And that's what radical feminism has been about--identifying those values, noting how that's been structured into identities and roles of masculine and feminine, butch and femme, and S&M--and saying: how has that shaped our sexuality, our sense of our selves and our expieriences?" She stated that radical feminist beliefs are not a political ploy against sexuality, as the panel seemed to indicated, but the “cummulative facts of our experiences.” She claimed these experiences had not been represented on the panel, and that, “if we shirk from looking at the facts of our experiences...because we are afraid that we're going to lose our sexuality because of identifying the values that have been degrading to us and harmful to us, then we have lost our revolution.” The tensions created through negotiating experience versus theory were central to the controversy at the 1982 Scholar and Feminist, and indeed remains at the heart of many feminist debates about sexuality to this day.
Yet, WAP was not without critique from the audience. After establishing her admiration for feminists for “airing all the dirty laundry” about sexuality, the same audience member critiqued the flyer WAP had distributed prior to the conference for spreading misinformation. Namely, she said, the leaflet was dishonest about her organization, “No More Nice Girls,” for alleging they supported pornography, when their organization did not take a position or focus on the issue. The audience members applauded her for her clarification and insistence that the conversation be carried out honestly.
Misunderstandings seemed to be a common theme of the Q&A session, as one audience member alleged the panelists misunderstood lesbian feminists’ views around sexuality. She found Alice Echol’s views on lesbian seperatism nostalgic, as she had called lesbian sexuality nurturing, loving, gentle, and not "up there" (speaker's words) with what sexuality should be. This ignores, the attendee claimed, that many lesbians "felt that by becoming lesbians we could assert our sexuality by not having it defined in terms of male sexuality, by removing it from the realm of dominance and submission,” and that lesbian seperatism indeed came out of deep emotions and political analysis of the dominant mode of sexuality. Although feminists now realized the idealism in lesbian seperatism, she said, it came from a deep criticism of the dominant culture. These ideas on sexuality could be seen as nihilist or antisexual because they were fully rejecting the culture and world they were brought up in, including the type of sexuality which was rooted in that culture. "We all have bodies that exist in and respond to this culture," she said. She called on the panelists and audience members, emphasizing the importance that they not lose the knowledge of the patriarchal society which they are up against, "in order to accomodate understandable desire and sensual pleasure in this world. If we have to exist with the most extreme cognitive dissonance, that's what we should do." In response, Echols affirmed that she valued the work of radical feminists, as they forced feminists to understand that sexuality was socially constructed.
One attendee said she joined the movement against pornography because pornography hurt her sexuality very much, “and it took me years to get any kind of sexuality back." For her, ideology was less important than personal experience, and told the panelists, "If you want to develop your analysis you better start listening to our pain and experience that underlie our movement." In reply, one panelist said none of the presenters meant to trivialize WAP’s efforts—which was met by a collective hiss from the audience. The panelist persisted, "There is some concern that anti-pornography feminists have completely lost sight of sexual pleasure in the scheme of things." In response to the allegation that they were not taking the experiences of women who were hurt by pornography into account, the panelist responded "I think we have to be careful not to base our analysis solely on our experiences."
One audience member was distraught with the lack of definition and contextualization of sexuality in the panel. Factioning the feminist movement into binary labels of anti-sexuality and anti-prudery, she argued, “Is polarizing the debate before we've got the context to really understand how we can deal with these issues.” She said, “We need an understanding of what sexuality is [...] whether it's an exchange of pleasures, some contract theory, or whether it's a constant recreation of some kind of gendered power relations within an essential interaction framework,” and felt that this issue had not been properly addressed. “We need to focus on what are our underlying theories of sexuality itself, rather than simply suggesting the equally important, it seems to me, aspects of the anti-prudery tendency, namely the liberating possibilities of playful role reversal, etcetera,” drawing applause from the audience. Ellen Carol DuBois later affirmed this desire for compromise over polarization, adding, “Had there been more open dialogue about issues of sexuality permitted by WAP in their own organized seminars, I think there would be less need for us to have this kind of gathering, which does not represent a monolith, but a persuasion” of feminists who felt like they had to choose between their feminism and sexuality.
Other audience members took the opportunity to challenge panelists on historic inaccuracies, and racist or homophobic biases. One audience member confronted Echols with the lack of representation of Black lesbians, both in the room and in her presentation. She mentioned the Salsa Soul Sisters, a Black lesbian feminist group in New York City, and how they picketed the lesbian bar called, “The Dutchess,” in order to include Black women at the white bar which purposefully excluded their Black sisters. She called onto Echols to share her views on race within the feminist movement, to which Echols affirmed there should should be no heirarchies on race and class within the movement.
One attendee challenged Echols’ historic inaccuracies when she called the suffragist Francis Willard “repressive” of young women’s sexuality. The attendee said, “Francis Willard was far from repressive of young women’s sexuality, as love letters from many of her students indicate quite the contrary. She was very imaginative,” which drew laughter. Continuing, she bolstered the radical feminist project of building new sexuality, claiming "Why is there not another body language and why, especially, does this not develop in the 20th century among feminists?" Gordon replied that 19th century feminists did not think of early feminists as sexual, nor did they explore the power dynamics and hierarchies in their relationships with one-another, much like women in the current movement. She argued that there was a "blindness towards what goes on among women that we need to explore."
Another attendee, a woman named Blanche, took this opportunity to directly challenge Linda Gordon on her allegations of sexual relations between 19th century feminists. She calmly stated, “What you just said, Linda, about the blindness we need to explore, is your blindness. I think you’d be surprised to know, that some of us think your paper is heterosexist and homophobic [...] You exclude the fact that there were a whole bunch of women who talked about pleasure with other women. You exclude that as you emphasize the heterosexual moral reform movement [...] Your only mention of the lesbian, the ‘genuine lesbian’ you say, is the passing woman [...] You then go on to the sexual radicals [...] and you say they are the women who talk about women-loving relations as adolescent. Now that is absolutely untrue and I’d love to see your evidence for that.”
Gordon replied, “I do not know of any 19th century feminists who discussed sexual pleasure among women [...] I’m really seriously confessing ignorance [...]”
Blanche then cited Lillian Wald. A panelist, possibly Ellen Carol DuBois, then chimed in an answer that easily verged on elitist and colonialist in its assumptions. She argued, “I think this is [...] a very complicated nugget in the debate that is taking place among historians [....] For better of for worse, as I think [...] Michel Foucault points out, sex is moved into the realm of power. Hortense [Spillers] was talking about this somewhat [in another panel at the conference]. We are really are not in a position to retreat from that and go back to the unarticulated, unlanguaged, unpolitical realm of sex. So the question is not what people experienced...the relationship between experience and language and intellectual systems is itself extremely complex—can people experience things that there are not names for, that’s already a question that needs to be addressed. But—”
Blanche cut in, “You mean there were no medieval lesbians because there’s no medieval word for the word—”
“Blanche, Blanche, I’m really trying to answer a serious intellectual question—” The audience responded with gasps, laughs, and sighs.
Blanche replied, “Well, so am I.”
One audience member brought up issues of psychoanalysis and genetic technology. She commented how she felt psychiatry was a backlash against the women’s movement and how genetic technology was doing the same. She commented that soon genetic technology would make gender and sexuality irrelevant, which was met with laughter from the audience. In reply, DuBois said that psychoanalysis was a mixed blessing for society, but that genetic engineering, sociobiology, and biologizing “are always inevitably something that works to the detriment of women.”
Despite all the turns and angles present in the Q&A session, the conversation in all its controversy seemed to be met in good faith. The value of the conversation, and the historic significance of the conference was felt immediately in that room. As one audience member, who congratulated the panelists on their work put it, “I think this is going to be a very important intellectual and political event in the history of feminism, undoubtedly. Somebody else is going to write that history." The comment was met with applause.