Reclaiming Lesbian Pride

[Apocalipstic]

Originally Posted by Martina

One of the reasons gender studies started investigating masculinity -- and this was at least twenty years ago -- was that the masculine and the male were considered the baseline, the ur gender, the the model of humanness. There needed to be an historical and cross-cultural understanding of how masculinity and maleness were constructed IN ORDER to destabilize the binary, in order to understand that the idea of male identity, especially in psychoanalysis and medicine, was not a stable social fact.

To the untrained eye it looks like it stuck there.

[Martina]

What's missing is a social movement. That's what we're longing for. And it's not coming out of women's studies or gender studies departments. Nor should it.

Women's Studies departments were built out of a social movement, but they are now parts of academic institutions. Students may start social movements, but their professors never will.