sophiaserpentia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophiaserpentia) wrote2008-04-30 12:11 pm
sophiaserpentia) wrote2008-04-30 12:11 pm
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hmm, now here's an interesting one.
The people of Lesbos want gay women to stop calling themselves Lesbians.
Yes, i can illustrate the problem by imagining a Big Gay Sketch in my mind's eye: a man on a flight from Athens tells a US Customs Agent that he's a Lesbian; hilarity ensues. Gee, how funny.
The use of the term to refer to homosexual women dates to the Victorian era. It was, like so many other Victorian terms, a euphemism designed to hide what could not be talked about. It was adopted alongside the now archaic term sapphist; both refer to Sappho, the ancient resident of Lesbos who wrote love poems to women.
It is not the only geographic name which has been appropriated to describe women who live as partners; see for example the term "Boston marriage," which dates to roughly the same time period. (Hmm, someone on my friend's list wrote about this term in the last week, but i don't remember who, sorry.)
Since the political lesbian movement of the 1970's, the term "lesbian" has been cemented in our cultural consciousness, so much so that the term "gay" has come in many contexts to be seen as exclusively referring to men. But, just as 'transwoman' is not a real word but a composite term made of a norm + a modifier, 'gay woman' is not a real word; but neither is 'lesbian,' being an appropriated geographical term (still being used by the people who live there today) and is more of a moralistic erasure. It is more like the heteronormative imposition of a big "CENSORED" bar than a word itself. It is another example of the dominant culture using language as a weapon to deny identity; and we queer folk have made do with the modifiers and erasures given us, but we have yet to have actual words for who it is that we are.
Yes, i can illustrate the problem by imagining a Big Gay Sketch in my mind's eye: a man on a flight from Athens tells a US Customs Agent that he's a Lesbian; hilarity ensues. Gee, how funny.
The use of the term to refer to homosexual women dates to the Victorian era. It was, like so many other Victorian terms, a euphemism designed to hide what could not be talked about. It was adopted alongside the now archaic term sapphist; both refer to Sappho, the ancient resident of Lesbos who wrote love poems to women.
It is not the only geographic name which has been appropriated to describe women who live as partners; see for example the term "Boston marriage," which dates to roughly the same time period. (Hmm, someone on my friend's list wrote about this term in the last week, but i don't remember who, sorry.)
Since the political lesbian movement of the 1970's, the term "lesbian" has been cemented in our cultural consciousness, so much so that the term "gay" has come in many contexts to be seen as exclusively referring to men. But, just as 'transwoman' is not a real word but a composite term made of a norm + a modifier, 'gay woman' is not a real word; but neither is 'lesbian,' being an appropriated geographical term (still being used by the people who live there today) and is more of a moralistic erasure. It is more like the heteronormative imposition of a big "CENSORED" bar than a word itself. It is another example of the dominant culture using language as a weapon to deny identity; and we queer folk have made do with the modifiers and erasures given us, but we have yet to have actual words for who it is that we are.
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Well, it's not very catchy, is it? Plus it's very clinical sounding. And it doesn't really solve the underlying problem, in that the term "homosexual woman" may be a description for who it is that gay women are, but it's not really a name.
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I don't know what we should do in terms of linguistics. Your debate brings to mind the "woman" ("man with a womb") quandry. At this point, we may have to start making up entirely new words as we rework our languages - and I do mean plural. First one that pops up for me is "femme" (French, means woman as well as wife, which is an interesting dual definition whereby a woman doesn't exist outside of a married couple from an etymological sense).