SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

female gangs’ appropriation of traditionally masculine, capitalist methodology critiques the
seductive but problematic choice to use the dominant culture’s oppressive methods as a means of
resistance. This approach reveals to the reader the patriarchal power structures of this fictional
society and redistributes some of that power to the female characters, but it also inverts those
original paradigms without actually revising the key problem of oppression. Both Oates and
Gray therefore represent aggressive lesbian feminist separatism as a hopeful, sympathetic, but
ultimately unstable system of resistance.
Before discussing Oates’s and Gray’s specific representations of lesbian feminist
separatism, I should first establish the theoretical framework that informs my reading. In
Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Chris Weedon identifies three types of feminist
resistance to patriarchy:
Liberal feminism aims to achieve full equality of opportunity in all spheres of life
without radically transforming the present social and political system. The
realization of its aims, however, will mean the transformation of the sexual
division of labour and of contemporary norms of femininity and masculinity . . .
Radical feminism envisages a new social order in which women will not be
subordinated to men, and femininity and femaleness will not be debased and
devalued . . . For socialist feminists, patriarchy, as a social system, is integrally
tied in with class and racial oppressions and can only be abolished through a full
transformation of the social system. Socialist feminism does not envisage a true
and natural femaleness, but sees gender as socially produced and historically
changing. (4)
Weedon goes on to discuss the concept of poststructuralist feminism, a type of feminist thought
and discourse that embraces the inherent contradictions in concepts such as “femininity” and
“feminism.” Poststructuralist feminism does not depend on labels such as “radical” and
“socialist” but sees such concepts as always in flux, always in negotiation. On one level, these
texts are negotiations in feminist thought and praxis in which the tenets of feminist separatism
are first explored and then critically interrogated.
27