ABSTRACT
For all women their involvement in Women’s Studies as an academic discipline can be problematized by conflict between the subjectivity validated by the Women’s Movement and the objectivity demanded by the academy, a contradictory positioning which can be distressing. Our lived experience of oppression is the raw material of our academic study, and this can be at the same time powerful and painful, empowering and incapacitating. In the face of this complex intermingling of intellectual rigour and emotion it is to our shared experience, the ‘sisterhood’ of pre-postfeminist days, that we look for support and validation.1 After all, we may remind ourselves, the personal is political. It is at precisely this point that the inadequacy of a romantic belief in the commonality of womankind becomes clear; when we look for shared experience we are confronted by what it has become fashionable to call ‘difference’. In this paper I want to move beyond recognition of differences among women, the liberal pluralist position which feminism seems to have become stuck in, towards a political strategy which enables us to develop something more radical and strategically useful than the vertiginously proliferating identity politics of postmodern chic. The position of ‘difference’ which I have chosen to focus on is lesbianism.2
