“Today, the line separating feminism and lesbianism is not really a line but a curve. It is my view that although lesbians are included in the feminist discourse, feminists will have difficulty rewiring their priorities to the lesbian slant.”
About four years ago, I imagined that there was an existing support group for gays and lesbians in Davao City even though I was not curious enough to check the facts. It started when I was invited to attend a cultural event, a film screening of gay and lesbian short films and documentaries, hosted by an LGBT network rooted in Manila. I immediately assumed that there must be a Davao-based community in existence that raised the gay and lesbian flag, no matter how obscure they were to most part of the constituency. I said national functions could not have achieved such a respectable number of audiences without the support of involved locals. I likewise assumed that if a local group did exist, it was a group that claimed to be representing gays and lesbians as I deduced from the mixed genres the screenings offered. For one, there was a local promotional arm to the event and they were notably gay. Looking back now, I don’t recall any lesbian ‘faces’.
The problem that I had is that I imagined it because it must exist in order to have a local public representative, which I would like. Otherwise, if the group never existed, then the movement must have existed only at the capital and had no local contributors. The truth is, for that particular event there was some collaboration between the national LGBT and some local organizations composed of gays who presented themselves as allies to the lesbian cause. Reason, I suspect, why I was told that this was a gay and lesbian event. At that time, I never wondered what, really, is a lesbian cause. Now I want to know: Were there indeed lesbians who rallied behind the cause? Or was there a presumption of the cause because of the concession that lesbians exist and they too should have a cause? What, by the way, is the cause all about?
In the city level, there is a gender desk under the Mayor’s office mandated to address gender issues through local policy. I have never heard of it until now. Same goes for a lesbian advocacy group called Link and that it never came to be or stayed long because the lesbians behind it were more preoccupied with socio-economic dilemmas and family survival issues. I am vaguely mapping out the events leading up to what we ourselves were about to do a few months ago: organizing our very own lesbian group. And the past implies that for a long time, the lesbians within the locale had been quite mute about the “lesbian cause”, so that they were for the most part clustered with the gays, thanks to the existing LGBT consortium and other forums like the feminist movement.
In order to create a discourse on lesbianism from the lesbians themselves, certain alliances seemed inevitable and crucial, but must undergo scrutiny. One has to do with differentiating feminism from lesbianism, as the two have been used interchangeably in the tenets of bodily autonomy, sex politics, and gender debates. In the film, “If These Walls Could Talk, 2”, the character played by Michelle Williams was in constant dispute with her feminist sisters who were in the beginnings of third wave feminism and who deemed that her (Williams) push for lesbian visibility ought to be sidetracked for purportedly more important feminist agenda. That was in 1972. Today, the line separating feminism and lesbianism is not really a line but a curve. It is my view that although lesbians are included in the feminist discourse (note: especially and only if these lesbians identify themselves as women), feminists will have difficulty rewiring their priorities to the lesbian slant, unless they too are lesbians or have lesbian experiences. In order to identify with an advocacy, it ought to be personal. And the stronger your feelings are about the issue from your gut to your fingertips, the more you are able to defend it. Each person has a narrative that positions them where they stand, therefore, all voices are different. It is not really a question of what is the legitimate view but instead it is the personal history or narrative of the person expressing a view that affects the outcome of the message. The curve illustration I have purports that a margin is too strictly defined for the nature of possibility of the feminist-lesbian alliance, whereas in reality, feminists and lesbians can be sympathetic to shared life experiences in a roundabout way, without necessarily owning the narrative of the other.
The structure of the LGBT movement from the international, to the national, has yet to be digested by the local. The movement is deliberately fashioned to make the minority visible and convince others until it create a critical mass that will affect negotiations at the human rights level.
Starting out our own micro-cell of lesbians in Davao, the LGBT movement seems overwhelming and at times hegemonizing, in terms of discursive behaviour and in its tendency to cluster or “sweep” us under its wing. It is curious how independent micro-cell lesbian groups, such as the one we are organizing here, are subsumed under the LGBT identity just by virtue of the non-heterosexual “bigger collective”. One reason is that the concept of minority had always been examined in the context of democratic precepts and state entities, and that it is democratically possible to fight or deflect various forms of oppression when non-heterosexuals stand together. The distinctions within the LGBT tend to blur from there. However, it is understood that this bigger alliance is only good in resisting heterosexual hegemony. But once the identities behind the LGBT movement are each singled out, the unique individual struggles and inherent conflicting interests will unravel. For now however, suffice it to say that it is possible and most expedient to unite gays or straights with lesbians where their principles and sentiments intersect.
Finally, how come lesbians take so long to get organized? One speculation we discussed was that the majority of lesbians in our area are characteristically non-political, and perhaps, that the more politicized or at least the socially conscious lesbians are a little concentrated among the bourgeosie and the petty bourgeois, particularly professionals and university students exposed to feminist education. We realise, of course, that non-political urban poor lesbians deserve as much representation as the noisy bourgeois. One lesson I have learned from the national LGBT, take for example, the party list Ang Ladlad (The Obvious), is that its leaders are keen on communicating to multi-sector representatives – from the lower-class tomboys who drive jeepneys for a living, to the out socialites and celebrities-. This inclusive but non-partisan approach to their movement empowered Ang Ladlad in the electoral level because like I mentioned earlier, micro-struggles are assumed and subsumed under an even larger purpose that the party is fighting for.
Going back to the locale, a lot of energy needed to be channelled into awareness campaigns because the premise of any lesbian organization is to provide a “space” for lesbians. For our group, there was a loose, intuitive, and somewhat casual way in which the core women were selected. It is the first time I have heard that a lesbian group was being forged by a mix of lesbians, straights, and in-betweens. The point is that whoever or whatever group started out this our so-called lesbian organization can only anticipate it taking a life of its own, or growing beyond its heterogeneous membership.
How can lesbian voices be heard? At the moment, however, it is only practical to gather people who are supportive of the issue and have the energy to ignite the discursive machine. There are still a lot of lesbians that need to be reached and linked up with so that they too can be part of the negotiation. Once they are found, and once we have them with us, the plot will thicken and the discursive wave will eventually break the silence.
There is a tendency for any growing movement to privilege certain discourses and to obscure some others in the process of negotiation. If it is a lesbian space we aspire to, then our organization will have to eventually grow into that.
Kim Loraine Castillo
Tumba Lata 