12 Days of Aniblogging, Day 1In my Cardcaptor Sakura gushpiece last year, I made an offhanded promise to write about why Tomoyo’s mom is a political lesbian once I finished my watchthrough. With all 70 episodes under my belt, it’s time to investigate what I was grasping at there.I will never be over Sakura’s poncho in episode 2We hear about Tomoyo’s mom as early as the second episode of the show. After Sakura and Tomoyo make plans to break into their school at night, Tomoyo arrives with a full security escort in a tinted vehicle, with an armored van full of costumes for Sakura right behind her. You see, her mother is the president of a very large toy company, which means that she’s ridiculously rich and able to assign bodyguards to her kid like it’s nothing. The two observations that instantly come to one’s mind are that a) all of the bodyguards are women, and b) they all have the gayest haircuts imaginable. “And here are my conspicuously butch and femme bodyguards” The rest of Tomoyo’s family situation really only shows up in Episode 10 and 11. We are properly introduced to her mom (Sonomi), and the chip on her shoulder. She’s out to spite Sakura’s father in increasingly lavish ways, and we learn that this stems from a long-standing grudge – Sakura’s dad married the girl that Sonomi was also helplessly in love with. So that’s the ‘lesbian’ box checked off of my argument. That haircut..sure is asymmetricBut what about the ‘political’ part of ‘political lesbian’? I probably should have started with that rather than Cardcaptor wiki synopses. Political lesbianism is a combination of second-wave feminist ideals with the notion that sexuality is a choice. Rather than dumping a manifesto onto you, I’ll sum up the underlying philosophical argument at play here:1. Sexual orientation is a choice, as is choosing to act on sexual orientation.2. Heterosexuality is inherently patriarchal and oppressive. 3. Women have an obligation to avoid and fight patriarchy wherever they can.___________Conclusion 1: All women should avoid heterosexuality.Conclusion 2: All women who continue participating in heterosexuality are abandoning their obligations.This is a seriously weighty argument. If we accept all three premises, we are left with the conclusion that not only is heterosexuality harmful to women, but women must abandon straight relationships, otherwise they are actively collaborating with the enemy. What does the world even look like if one follows this argument to its conclusion? Most political lesbians also believe in lesbian separatism – the notion that women’s liberation cannot be achieved by collaborating with men. Women ought to give up marriage, families, and sex with men, otherwise they will never be able to overcome institutional sexism. As an alternative to sex with men, women could consider…sex with women! But whether they have sex with women or none at all isn’t a big deal in the scheme of things. What really matters is the political action of refusing heterosexuality. political lesbian praxisThe Daidouji family’s living situation all but confirms Sonomi’s commitment to separatism. She lives in a modernist mansion where all of her maids, guards, and other servants are women. Most notably, she has no husband or male partner to be seen whatsoever. Sakura even makes the observation that Tomoyo never talks about her father. Other than whatever happened for Sonomi to have Tomoyo, she appears to have completely cut the concept of men and patriarchy out of her life. If her goal was to create a lesbian separatist dynasty, she appears to have succeeded (Tomoyo is, of course, a baby lesbian in the making). Me gaining class consciousness There is a certain allure to political lesbianism. The idea that men are the root of all suffering and cutting ties to men provides a fairy-tale escape for some women. For anyone who has ever felt threatened or imbalanced in heterosexual relationships, it offers an explanation on top of the way out. Of course, choosing to be a political lesbian still requires swallowing some pretty big pills. Should we try? The most challenging premise at first is the idea that sexual orientation is a choice that can and should be changed on a whim. The social construction of sexuality is definitely not a mindset that has won out. In fact, the modern gay rights movements in the United States has specifically been spearheaded with the idea that gay people are “born this way”, a purely biological challenge to the idea that someone can just decide to like women once they hear about the evils of men. Indeed, the political lesbians of old were somewhat split on whether sexuality is socially constructed or a biological impulse. However, they can just take the middle ground and argue that it doesn’t really matter – lesbian relationships may or may not be able to provide an alternative to heterosexual relationships for historically straight women, but what really matters is the political act of refusing heterosexuality. If a woman cannot bring herself to love other woman, she can simply take a vow of celibacy or otherwise avoid men. This brings us straight to the second and third arguments – that heterosexuality itself is oppressive and must be actively resisted. Sure, patriarchy and oppression are bad, but the routes chosen to argue against them are important. Although they believe in flexible and constructed sexuality, political lesbian’s arguments against heterosexuality are extremely biological. The seminal pamphlet “Love your Enemy?” argues that “there is a very special importance attached to sexuality under male supremacy when every sexual reference, every sexual joke, every sexual image serves to remind a woman of her invaded centre…” Penetration, specifically, carries strong symbolic significance in reinforcing the power of men on top of its physically invasive component. Even non-penetrative heterosexual sex still contains that roleplay of power and powerlessness to a political lesbian. There is no loophole that will allow women to keep loving men ethically – the demands of political lesbianism are Kantian maxims. Sonomi loved Sakura’s mom to the point of viewing her pairing off with a man as a betrayal. It’s very easy to see it as an ideological betrayal on top of the personal one.The elephant in the room is, of course, the third-wave notion that femaleness and maleness are not inherently tied to genitalia. After all, to the shock and chagrin of many a radical feminist, some women have penises. Is their sex inherently heteropatriarchal? What about men who don’t have penises? Do they have a get-out-of-jail-free card from this whole mess? What about nonbinary people, who have been completely ruled out of this conversation so far? In arguing a biological model of oppression, political lesbians will need to be able to answer for all of this. Most of them respond by biting the bullet and doubling down on their original positions. They claim that trans women are just scheming men in dresses, that trans men are gender traitors who want to abandon their fellow women in pursuit of male privilege, and that nonbinary people are simply confused. It is through this reasoning that so many political lesbians grew up to be trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Many former members of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, such as Julie Bindel, have gradually pivoted from arguing for women’s rights on all fronts to single-mindedly becoming obsessed with making sure that trans people are forcibly excluded from all gendered spaces. Not only is it depressing to see so many radical feminists fall down this pathway, it’s terrifying to watch as TERFs gain more and more of a media foothold as they start to team up with their enemies, the religious right, over their shared hatred of transgender existence. shut the fuck up, terfIt’s a depressing turn of events! Still, even knowing that the movement is rooted in transphobia, can political lesbianism be salvaged? The idea of women’s-only-spaces as a place for comfort, safety, and liberation still feels powerful and immediately understandable and implementable. Though the mainstream LGBT+ movement gained widespread acceptance through advocating that there was nothing they could do about their sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality is still a real thing for many women and spaces to help recognize that would be very useful. Of course, the definition of a woman is going to have to broaden to be trans-inclusive, and as recent efforts to amend the Gender Recognition Act in the UK have shown, this is very difficult in the current TERFy political climate. But I don’t think that every bit of political lesbian ideology needs to be shelved or trashed. As future waves of feminism start reigniting and reconciling various second-wave and third-wave conflicts, I’d estimate that political lesbianism is going to get a fair reevaluation amongst mainstream feminists sometime within the next decade, with the bad parts hopefully cut and the strong parts returned to public consciousness.pretend kero-chan is giving this lecture okSo where does this leave Tomoyo’s mom? uhhhhhhhhhhhTomoyo’s mom manages to achieve the lesbian separatist ideal of a life lived without men, but she only manages to do so by taking advantage of her vast wealth to set up her own miniature state of sorts. However, this totally goes against the radical feminist principles of grassroots organizing and class consciousness. In achieving the physical goals of political lesbianism, Sonomi has completely missed the symbolic goals of the ideology and is actually reinforcing heteropatriarchal power structures. With her vast concentrated wealth and vertical power hierarchy over her guards and maids, Sonomi is reproducing the very male supremacy power structures that radical feminists work to fight against. Though she may fancy herself a political lesbian, she probably would not be welcomed by any of them.Also her hairstyle is still kind of bad. terf bangs, lol
Dec 14, 2019 • Subscribe
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