SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

slurs. However, racism receives comparatively little overt attention in Oates’s novel. Only a few
passages discuss Foxfire’s exclusively white membership. 2 Oates’s treatment of gender, sexual,
and economic oppression are much more evident. Oates’s comparative silence in terms of racial
assumptions contrasts markedly with Set It Off, a contrast I shall examine more deeply below.
To explain more fully why I see Oates’s and Gray’s works as representations of lesbian
feminist separatism, I should discuss exactly what that term means—both its historical definition
and the ways that I am altering historical meaning for this study. In her book Sep-a-ra-tism and
Women’s Community, Dana Shugar argues that lesbian feminist separatism evolved from, and is
therefore always connected with, radical feminism, a movement that defines sexism as the
“primary contradiction” and therefore calls for separation from all men. Lesbian feminism grew
out of similar discontent, this time with the compulsory heterosexuality that saturated even the
women’s movement. Shugar writes that
because of their heavy involvement in the newly emerging gay/lesbian rights
movement as well as the feminist movement . . . lesbians began to develop
politicized definitions of lesbianism simultaneous to and in concert with the
development of radical feminism. The oppression experienced by lesbians as
women and as members of a sexual minority, however, gave many lesbians an
affinity to radical feminism even long before radical feminism openly addressed
the issue of lesbianism. Both the compelling ideologies they found within radical
feminism and the hostility many experienced from heterosexual feminists urged
lesbians to forge the creation of lesbian feminism and . . . lesbian separatism. (24)
This passage suggests that radical feminism and lesbian feminism are related but not necessarily
synonymous; it also establishes the historical basis for Oates’s construction of female characters
who reject, and are rejected by, the novel’s other oppressed women and at least the most
aggressive representatives of its heterosexual community. 3
Shugar further argues that both radical and lesbian feminisms depend upon female
community; therefore, members of either affiliation would likely have some kind of separatist
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