labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
julho/ 2016- junho 2017 /juillet 2016-juin 2017

Concentrating Patriarchy and Power against Lesbians:

Violence, Torture and Shame

Susan Hawthorne

Abstract

Lesbians sit at the crossroads of resistance against many forces of patriarchal power. Representing women who exist outside the sex-class system who simultaneously thumb their noses at the power of patriarchal domination. Every lesbian – no matter her class, ethnicity, religion or age – is a constant reminder that women can do it on their own and therefore is deemed worthy of punishment.

Key-words: lesbians, violence patriarchal domination

Patriarchy is a term at the centre of radical feminist theory, not just because it identifies institutionalised male power, but also because it is key to understanding concepts such as racism, capitalism, poverty, environmental vandalism and the many varieties of violence against women.

My focus in this essay is on the violence perpetrated against lesbians. Violence against women as a sex-class (or 'gendered violence' as it is incorrectly named) has hit the mainstream news in recent years although radical feminists have been discussing the subject for decades. In research on violence against women, lesbians are almost never mentioned although 'transwomen' frequently are.

When a group is hidden in research, it is always a clue to its importance and in this essay I will attempt to show why violence against lesbians is both strategically and theoretically important.

In 2002, I travelled to the 8th World Women's Conference in Kampala, Uganda. Towards the end of the conference there was a session on radical feminism in Africa. It was a great session and during it I asked a question about lesbians. After the session a woman approached me and said her name was Christine. She advised me to be careful talking about lesbians publicly because in Uganda lesbians are tortured. This sentence has taken me on a 15-year research path examining what there is on the subject of lesbians + torture.

In my first efforts online, all that came up was pornography in which 'lesbians' provided titillation for the male gaze.

I then stumbled on an article by Consuelo Rivera Fuentes and Lynda Birke published in 2001 in which they discuss the torture Consuelo suffered under the Pinochet regime in Chile in 1976, an article that puts at the centre the physical and psychological trauma that torture causes.

In the few months between July and December 2002, I decided that this was a subject I could not ignore.

Violence

… no training session prepared me for this intense pain …  my pain … the one I did not choose … all this alienation, this empty vacuum …, my body, my mind, my pain … this is not happening … I am a little speck in the universe … which universe? … the world is not anymore … I am … disintegrating … bit by bit … yell by yell … electrode by electrode … The pain … all this pain here and there, down there in my vagina … the agony … where am I? Where is my I? (Rivera-Fuentes and Birke 2001: 655; italics and ellipses in the original)

One of the defining elements of lesbian existence in a patriarchy is its vulnerability to the demands of secrecy, silence and non-existence. Like other marginalised and oppressed groups, lesbians are often trapped in a “culture of silence” (Freire 1972: 48) and like individuals from other oppressed groups this repression sometimes turns inwards as violence to the self, extending in some instances to suicide. Externally, it might result in a diagnosis by the medical authorities of “being sick”, or in accusations of acting against the will of God by religious authorities, or in corporal or mental punishment through torture extending to execution by state authorities.

Let me draw some parallels between lesbians and other groups who experience political denial. In Argentina where “the disappeared” became an integral part of the fabric of resistance, the ability of the government to define who did and did not exist was part of its strategy of fear (Partnoy 1986; Valenzuela 1985).

In South Africa under Apartheid “black existence was against the law of the invader (Millett 1994: 117). In Afghanistan under the Taliban, women’s existence was similarly denied, tempered only by the burqa which not only hid women from men’s view, but reduced them to the status of a “thing”. Also, consider the way in which prostitutes are both vilified and yet are made an essential part of the masculine military machine (Enloe 1983: 18-45).

Similarly, Indigenous Australians over many generations have suffered from being defined as non-persons (Atkinson 2002: 69). Indeed, Judy Atkinson argues that the result of this has been cultural genocide. By this she means internalised self-hatred and the pervasive sense of worthlessness is amplified to the point where they become both persecutor and persecuted, and even executor (Atkinson 2002: 72).

All the above political circumstances are relatively recognised in mainstream political analysis. But lesbians remain largely unrecognised when it comes to suffering the trauma of disappearance and denial. Under patriarchy, lesbian existence is denied, or made illegal. Lesbians appear when the political atmosphere is open, and disappear again during times of repression or backlash. Like indigenous peoples whose culture has been denied, and who through long political activism have built sustaining social myths and pride in their communities, lesbian feminist activists since the late 1960s have been engaged in a similar process.

But I still hear people say there is no such thing as lesbian culture. Like black existence under Apartheid, lesbian existence inside the enemy territory of patriarchy is an affront to the ideology of hypermasculinity. When conformity becomes the norm, when masculine power is entrenched, and when governments sanction human rights abuses or use torture, lesbians are always among the victims.

Silence

So why is it that lesbians are so rarely mentioned in the literature on torture? A clue lies in the following statement from a Peruvian lesbian:

“When I speak of my right to my own culture and language as an indigenous woman, everyone agrees to my self-determination. But when I speak of my other identity, my lesbian identity, my right to love, to determine my own sexuality, no one wants to listen “(ILIS Newsletter 1994:13).

It is this distancing of political support from others, who may well deem themselves progressive, that is a feature of lesbian existence. Lesbians have supported, fought for, with and alongside a host of other people for political rights, but when on the rare occasions lesbians ask for support we find that “Only other dykes are proud of dykes” (Hanscombe 1992).

In the late 1990s Amnesty International conducted research into the torture of lesbians. Unfortunately, their research has the following shortcomings: either lesbians who are tortured appear in small ways in between the research on gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals (Amnesty International, 1997) or lesbians are mentioned in even tinier ways in between the research on women (Amnesty International, 2001). In other words, the research on lesbians falls into the category of being 'footnoted and sidelined' (Hawthorne 2011a).

The reluctance to speak openly about the torture of lesbians is given several justifications, some of which can be found in the neglect or the invisibility of the torture of lesbians. One reason put forward is that there will be further reprisals against the lesbian who is imprisoned or a victim of torture. Secondly, there is the issue of public sentiment. It is said to be difficult to drum up public sympathy for a lesbian who is tortured. But these arguments are well known to feminists who countered similar resistance to discussions around the sexual abuse of children.

In the long run, public awareness is still better than a veil of silence. Kate Millett has said that “Torture is an index of unfreedom” (1994: 307). It appears we have a long way to go in creating freedom for lesbians. It is perhaps even the case that the practice of torture on lesbians is the litmus test of social freedom. While any lesbian is tortured, and no one really cares, society is implicated and complicit in this violence.

The emphasis on silence cannot be overstated. Lesbians have long been subjected to silence, to denial, to non-existence within the dominant heterosexual discourse. Lesbians who are tortured face multiple layers of silence. First there is the silence surrounding lesbian existence. Second, in quite a few jurisdictions there is legal silence: punishment is not formally meted out but occurs on an informal basis instead, sometimes inflicted by the state, sometimes by members of the woman’s family or by the community. When this occurs it is often difficult to have the punishment recognised as a violation of the lesbian’s human rights and as an instance of torture.

In such circumstances the torturer can continue with impunity because “no one will ever know, no one will ever hear you, no one will ever find out” (Millett 1994: 300). The scream of the lesbian tortured in families, in prisons, in mental asylums remains unheard. She may call out to others in her pain, but she cannot be heard because no one is listening. Few dare to listen. Almost no one speaks out. And I would add that almost no one cares about her torture, because she dares to be a lesbian.

The Nature of Attacks against Lesbians

There are many different kinds of violations of lesbians ranging from subtle social humiliations, disparagements and simple invisibility through to rape, torture and murder. They are perpetrated by families, communities, formal institutions and states, the vast majority go unreported or if reported the reasons are fudged and the lesbian at the centre is made invisible as a lesbian.

Religious authorities are among the perpetrators. Nazanin, an Iranian lesbian says,

“The punishment for lesbians is most definitely execution. Before execution they are raped, which is a mental torment worse than death “(Nazanin in Parsi 2007: 4). 

She goes on to explain why the families are silent about the rape and execution of their daughters. It is, “to save face for the families involved … it is a cause for disgrace” (Nazanin in Parsi 2007: 4). Rape, torture, silence, shame and hatred all combine so that no one ever hears of the violations of lesbians’ human rights. The torture of lesbians is invisible; it’s like it doesn’t exist. Like lesbians don’t exist.

Individuals are among those who attack lesbians. In 1995, Tsitsi Tiripano, a lesbian activist and member of GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe) was attacked at the Zimbabwe Book Fair (Tiripano 2000; Smith, 2000). Since then many people in Zimbabwe have been attacked. But who protested for Tsitsi Tiripano in 1995?

I would suggest that when lesbians become victims of attack, they are a signal. They are the canaries in the mine. And if the perpetrators get away with it, then other attacks will follow. So we need to be protesting every attack on lesbians, because it is a sign of hatred in the social system. If lesbians are not protected, then people who don’t fit some other social dimension will not be safe from attack either. Keep your sister lesbian safe and watch the effect it has on society.

It is a huge challenge because as one Zimbabwean woman said:

“How can we expect our black lesbian sisters to find their voice in our society when they cannot even speak for themselves within their own families” (Amnesty International, 1998).

In Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s Tina Machida was violated at the instigation of her parents in an effort to ‘cure’ her of her lesbian existence. She writes:

“They locked me in a room and brought him every day to rape me so I would fall pregnant and be forced to marry him. They did this to me until I was pregnant’”.

 On September 29, 2004, FannyAnn Eddy a lesbian activist from Sierra Leone was found dead.[1] She had been working in the offices of the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Association (Human Rights Watch, 4 October 2004, cited in Morgan and Wieringa 2005, 20). A few months before her death she made the following plea to the UN Commission on Human Rights[2]:

“Silence creates vulnerability. You, members of the Commission on Human Rights, can break the silence. You can acknowledge that we exist, throughout Africa and on every continent, and that human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity are committed every day. You can help us combat those violations and achieve our full rights and freedoms, in every society, including my beloved Sierra Leone “.(Eddy 2004).

Lesbians are attacked even when there are constitutional protections. In South Africa, there is constitutional protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In spite of this, lesbians experience the same kind of invisibilisation and marginalisation (see Morgan and Wieringa 2005).

On 8 July 2007, two South African lesbian activists, Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Masooa, were murdered (Pers.Comm. 2007). To the question, Is law the answer? I say it is not enough.

Lesbians are frequently invisible in campaigns for refugees. In 2007, when Iranian lesbian, Pegah Emambakhsh was about to be deported from Britain there was an email campaign that stayed her deportation (URGENT, 2007), but at that time lesbian refugees had not even hit the radar of refugee activists.[3]

In late 2010, I received an email about Millicent Gaika, a South African lesbian who had been subjected to ‘corrective rape’ on 2 April 2010 by a man she knew.[4] The image of her bruised face and body as well as her recounting of what had happened to her, created the momentum for a global campaign against ‘corrective rape’.  It’s an abusive term that refers to the rape and battery of lesbians to cure them of lesbian existence. The man who raped, beat and attempted to strangle Millicent Gaika said this:

“I know you are a lesbian. You are not a man, you think you are, but I am going to show you, you are a woman. I am going to make you pregnant. I am going to kill you.”

Millicent Gaika is not the first South African lesbian to be attacked in this way. In 2008, Eudy Simeland, a star of the South African women’s football team, was gang raped and murdered.

In 2009, in an interview Zakhe Sowello from Soweto, Johannesburg, said,

“Every day I am told that they are going to kill me, that they are going to rape me and after they rape me I'll become a girl … When you are raped you have a lot of evidence on your body. But when we try and report these crimes nothing happens, and then you see the boys who raped you walking free on the street.” (Moses, 2010; Kelly, 2009).

More than 140,000 people signed the petition to uphold the constitutional rights of lesbians to state protection. But the list of victims of violence is not new. So while I am pleased to know that finally these violations are coming to light, it’s been a long wait.

South Africa is the only country in the world to constitutionally protect the rights of people based on sexual orientation. I think this has been a critical factor in the success of this campaign, although I think it took enormous courage on the part of Millicent Gaika, to present this as a breach of the South African constitution.

How is it possible that violence against lesbians is such a non-headline? Because, although petitions have now been signed by a lot of individuals around the world, it has rarely hit the metropolitan media. If you search for Millicent Gaika, the reports mostly come from activists and bloggers.[5]

Is corrective rape a new occurrence? No, it is not. Here are some other documented examples that I have found in the literature over the last almost decade of research.

An unnamed lesbian refugee from Iran says of her experience:

“In Kashan they tied me to a car and pulled me across the ground. What should I say, who should I say it to? … Why doesn’t anyone listen to us? Where is this ‘human rights’?”(Darya and Baran 2007: 2; see Hawthorne, 2005).

Lesbians are disregarded as needing help. In 2007, when gay congressman Jared Polis visited Iraq and Jordan to see for himself the situation of gays, lesbians and transgenders he had this conversation with a Jordanian woman.

“The otherwise personable and even liberal Iraqis and Jordanians with whom I talked, found homosexuality extremely unpleasant to even talk about.  Faiza, an Iraqi refugee who is helping to organize empowerment programs for women in Jordan and Iraq, was dismayed when I told her I was looking to work with a relief agency to help gays and lesbians. ‘Why they help lesbians? Widows and orphans need help, and they help lesbian???’ she said in broken English”. (Polis: 2007).

Lesbians are at risk from other oppressed individuals. In many places – documented in Uganda, Russia, Romania and USA – when lesbians are imprisoned or incarcerated in mental institutions they run the risk of being raped. They are raped (a) by the guards, and (b) by their fellow inmates in mixed prisons or institutions (there is a similar threat to heterosexual women, but the rape of lesbians is punishment for not wanting sex with men).

Where are the campaigns for lesbians’ human rights? I recently wrote to Amnesty International protesting their use in a campaign against child execution of a photograph of two teenage boys executed in Iraq. I protested the fact that there was no acknowledgement that the boys were executed for their sexual orientation. I also asked what Amnesty was doing for the human rights of lesbians. Although they are one of the few organisations that carry out research on the torture of lesbians, I am concerned at the ongoing invisibility of lesbians.

In the Amnesty campaign against violence against women, the assumption is that all women are heterosexual. In the Amnesty publication about human rights of gays, lesbians and transgenders, the research is heavily reliant on information about gay men and transgenders. Lesbians remain a sideline. I am still waiting for an answer to my questions.

In a recent conversation with two well-educated adults when I mentioned I was writing this paper, they said “but aren’t lesbians’ human rights the same as the human rights of all people and of women”. I said “yes, lesbians suffer torture, rape, and murder but there are no campaigns for lesbians’ human rights”.

When a group of people is so systematically excluded, even by those who hold progressive views, one has to wonder what is going on. What is at the root of this silence, of this invisibility, of this negative space?

A lesbian life, whether lived in silence or in outspoken rebelliousness, remains a challenge to the male-dominated, male-defined political and social system. Lesbians are like escapees. Even those who present as business women or mothers of growing children or as Unitarian ministers or some other acceptable face of the straight capitalist white-dominated, patriarchal society, create a ripple, a whisper: these women can do it on their own. They don’t need men.

In April 2006, speaking about violence perpetrated against lesbians and unhusbanded heterosexual women at a conference in South Africa (Hawthorne 2006b) I was asked by a man in the audience why I was such a man hater. At another conference in the USA, when I protested that sadomasochism was an appropriation of the suffering of the victims of torture, I was ostracised.

To name perpetrators of violence, to challenge those who imitate violence and call it exciting is apparently not on. When sadistic imitations of lynching are carried out, do they deserve to be reprimanded, charged and punished? Most people in this society think they do. When soldiers dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods were photographed behind Aboriginal soldiers in 2004, this was recognised as a clear case of racism and those involved were reprimanded (AAP 2004). Put women in place of the black soldiers and it is regarded as simply a sexual buzz? (Hawthorne 2011b; Hawthorne 2006a; Clarke 2004, Jeffreys 1993; 2003).

In 1976 in Chile when Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes was tortured by the Pinochet regime the torturers verbally tormented her. If only she would do what is best for her, she would not have to suffer. In fact, he, the torturer, will help her by raping her, by showing her what a real man can do for her, how what she needs is ‘a good fuck, from real men’. The same justification as that given by Millicent Gaika’s rapist.

Shame takes on a huge shape for lesbians. Even the most political of lesbians suffers from shame. It comes in many guises: as silence within families as Nazanin and Tina Machida note; when lesbians put their needs last in political campaigns, that too is shame because who will support a political campaign if lesbians are its leaders, so just keep quiet until the revolution is over.

Oppression and shame

The oppression of lesbians is based on our sexuality and on our sex. It is a given in patriarchal societies that women not be able to have any freedom around sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure (and here I am not speaking about pornography – that is men’s idea) is so totally unthinkable in some instances that the idea of two women deciding to be sexually intimate, to have a sexual and emotional relationship is enough to send them straight to hell. Such women should feel shame. If they don’t then they are pressured to feel ashamed. As a result some lesbians commit suicide, including double suicides. Such women should be called unnatural.

It is obvious that women would only do such a thing if they were desperate, hence the line: All she needs is a good fuck. And out of that all the above human rights abuses flow: corrective rape; gang rape; torture; forced marriage; forced pregnancy; diagnosis of madness; diagnosis of neglect of children; punishments such as beatings and murder. And if none of the above works, pull out the camera and turn lesbians into porn stars. Hetrosexualise lesbian sex, and sell it to men.

The problem of invisibility of lesbians occurs regularly around the world, including in activist circles. In India, for example, the word lesbian was omitted from the glossary of an otherwise useful handbook, A Guide to Your Rights: Legal Handbook for Sexual Minorities in India (Sangini Trust, 2005)

The glossary does include bisexual, homosexual and transgender. I point out, however, that this is not exclusive to Indian organisations, since the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in the USA in 2005 had precisely the same kind of omission from its list of keywords for conference presentations. The keyword list included Sexuality, the Body, Identity, Homosexuality and Transgender, but not Lesbian. Many Australian women’s and gay organisations habitually leave out lesbians. This is about shame.

Like Judas, people and organisations deny their association with lesbians.

What is the relationship between the social and cultural development of women and men and the bodily experiences of women and men? Lesbians are not only marginalised physically and politically, but also because of a kind of inclusivity that continues to screen out lesbian existence. I am referring here to the invisibilising that happens under the rubric of terms such as queer, sexual minorities, LGBTI, transgender, same sex, homosexual, diverse sexualities and non-conforming sexualities.

There is a need to be able to speak about sexuality in broad fora, as suggested by these terms, but there remains the continuing need to highlight the ways in which different sexualities defy the hegemonic ideology. Lesbians resist the dominant hegemonic position in multiple ways – some of which are specific to lesbians and not LGBTI as a group (each of whom has their own specific forms of resistance, sometimes in conflict with one another). I suggest that marginalisation occurs whenever an all-encompassing term is used.

The Lesbian Body in Patriarchy

"The body remembers again and again … and again … The body remembers and pain becomes a part of our dreams and of our nightmares because we don’t have a valve to release them in any other way. The body wishes to be a body again, to have a mind … the body wants a soul "(Rivera-Fuentes and Birke 2001, 657; italics and ellipses in original).

Among the difficulties experienced by anyone subjected to torture is how to convey the experience of pain inside the body. Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), argues that pain in itself “is language destroying” (1985, 19). For a lesbian this is doubly difficult because the heteronormative discourse of society is not open to understanding the utterances of lesbians.

It is hard enough to get people to empathise with and understand a person from another culture, another political regime, an unknown country. Add to that the prospect of lesbian existence and lesbian culture, and the difficulty of the task is amplified still more. Here I am intentionally speaking as if the reader is a heterosexual. For the lesbian reader, the experience is likely to be very different.

Within heterosexual discourse the lesbian epitomises the body untrammeled. The lesbian body is a body out of control in a heteropatriarchal sense; that is, it is ungoverned by heteropatriarchal rules. For the torturer, the prisoner’s body has also become a body out of control, and this lack of control is shown each time pain is inflicted.

" Elaine Scarry writes of the prisoner’s lack of control, and the way in which responsibility for it is deflected back to the prisoner so that the confession 'will be understood by others, is an act of self-betrayal' ” (1985, 47).

There is an element here of wondering just why it is that sexual orientation was for so long considered outside the ambit of UN Human Rights rules and why lesbian refugees still struggle so hard to be recognised, heard, and acknowledged as “genuine” refugees (Hawthorne, 2005).

It is about the self-betrayal of the body. If lesbian existence is a choice, so the argument goes, then the lesbian can just as easily choose not to be a lesbian.[6] The problem is that her body betrays her. Her speech as a lesbian is taken to be a self-betrayal. The situation is read this way, rather than as a problem of patriarchy and oppression. It is an instance of what Mary Daly names “reversal,” in which the victim is perceived to be the one at fault, rather than the perpetrator.

The torturer, through this process, dispenses all culpability, all responsibility for the pain inflicted on the tortured person. His conscience is clear. It is all her fault. If only she would do what is best for her, she would not have to suffer. In fact, he will help her by raping her, by showing her what a real man can do for her, how what she needs is “a good fuck, from real men” (Rivera-Fuentes and Birke 2001, 656). This psychological stance, I suggest, is the source of the proliferation of male sexual fantasy about the torture of lesbians.

To summarise my argument: The prisoner of torture is considered out of control; the lesbian is considered out of control. The tortured lesbian is therefore doubly out of control (and in a society where lesbians are defined as mentally ill, triply out of control). Since she is so clearly out of control, anything that happens to her is her fault because if she chose to behave differently, she would not be tortured.

The torturer/male sexual fantasist/pornographer is therefore able to abandon all sense of responsibility for his actions and for his beliefs about lesbians. It is in her interest that he torture her, rape her, show her just how good he is. Or, as Elaine Scarry writes, “Every weapon has two ends. In converting the other person’s pain into his own power, the torturer experiences the entire occurrence exclusively from the nonvulnerable end of the weapon” (1985, 59).

Monique Wittig, in her extraordinary essay “One is Not Born a Woman,” writes:

"Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation (“forced residence,” domestic corvée, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual" (Wittig 1992, 20).

This confronting challenge to patriarchal “naturalism” is a clue to the reason behind lesbians being so forcefully punished under patriarchy. The very existence of lesbians is a challenge to the property rights of men as a group. It challenges the assumption that there is something natural about the categories of women and men, and it suggests that there is an alternative to those naturalised categories. It challenges men’s proprietorial ownership of the category women, in a way that is reminiscent of the challenge posed by Native Land Rights of indigenous peoples.

For indigenous peoples the land is not owned, it is maintained by responsible activities, many of which are deemed sacred. The collective maintenance of land does not strip indigenous peoples of human rights.

In a similar way, lesbians who want to live lives unencumbered by heterosexual servitude, unencumbered by alternating violence and kindness by the dominant group, do not give up their human rights, do not give up a wish to be respected. Indeed, those lesbians who use this as a model for their lives could well provide a model of freedom for all people. By this I mean the ability to move freely, love whomever one wants, laugh and walk in ways that denote joie de vivre.

biography

Susan Hawthorne is Adjunct Professor at James Cook University, Townsville and co-founder with Renate Klein of Spinifex Press. Among her publications are Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Bio/diversity (2002), Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing (2014) as well as poetry collections The Butterfly Effect (2005) Cow (2011), Lupa and Lamb (2014). She has written poetry, performance scripts and academic papers on the subject of lesbians who are tortured. Dark Matters: A novel will be published in late 2017.

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