Doublethink

"100% American" ideology says the rulers should "close the borders," supports East German-style border controls, and praises allied regimes which force immigrants out at gunpoint.

"100% American" ideology says that dissidents should "love [the regime] or leave it," and responds to criticism with "if you don't like capitalism, then move to Moscow!" [I got that from a school speaker in about '96.]

I, for one, would rather be un-American.

In response to some of the comments to this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tijana-milosevic/workaholism-america-europe_b_805975.html

Interpreting lesbian historiae

At some point, I'm not sure exactly when or from where, I picked up the dominant interpretation of recent lesbian historia.

Among other problems, this view misrepresents separatist feminism. Of course, separatism can have serious flaws, but its actual character don't always correspond with its supposed character.

In the dominant interpretation, separatism was uniquely lesbian, separatists retreated from engagement with the world and with mainstream feminism, separatists encouraged ideas of gender essentialism and/or female superiority, separatists attempted to police lesbian identities and sexualities, and separatists campaigned against trans people and trans inclusion in womyn's spaces.

Early separatist feminism was quite different. Many separatist projects were created by and for straight womyn; Cell 16, who created *No More Fun and Games,* are probably the most famous of these. Some others were created by and for lesbian womyn; the RadicaLesbians and the Furies probably contributed to the profile of separatism in their work against Freiden's attempt to purge lesbian womyn from the National Organization for Women. They did not retreat and abandon activism. They were not essentialists and, if anything, were far too subversivist. *The Woman-Identified Woman* pushes pansexualism as much as lesbianism, and androgyny as much as gynocentrism. Separatists helped organize trans-inclusive projects such as Olivia Records, and anti-separatists started the boycott against them.

Later separatist feminism seems to have gone in the opposite direction. The focus changed from creating womyn's spaces within mixed communities to creating womyn's communities far from men. Straights tried, and usually failed, to become political lesbians; lesbianism, in turn, was desexualized and lesbians were pressed to conform to straight rejections of butch/femme and so on.

That said, a clean division between early separatism and late separatism is probably impossible. We rarely consider small feminist spaces, such as bookstores or shelters, to be separatist projects, but they often are, and they are often closing due to invisibility and lack of support/money. We seem to be fighting the same battles over and over again, and queer theory, as an ideology, is just as misguided as androgyny was.