The extent to which socio-political experience defines what it means to be a woman has always been a contested aspect of feminist debate. The heterosexual feminist Betty Friedan notoriously referred to lesbians within the movement as the ‘Lavender Menace’, whose ‘mannish’ qualities – making them not-quite-women – were a risk to the success of feminism. While this was obvious homophobia, in 1978 even the lesbian radical feminist Monique Wittig argued that the socially constructed understanding of ‘woman’ is so bound up with compulsory heterosexuality that it necessarily excludes lesbians: it
...more
