Second-wave American feminists of the seventies imagined a utopian feminist world where the patriarchy was dead and, for some, so were men. It was at this time that the project for political lesbianism began; maybe heterosexual women could choose to become lesbians, in the name of feminism, and rid themselves of any love for their oppressors.

This assumes that being a lesbian is a “woman-identified woman who does not fuck men,” but says nothing about wanting to be with other women and explicitly does not mandate sexual activity with women.1 In most conversations with lesbians on how they view their sexuality, women are centered rather than men; lesbians are attracted to, or desire, women and are not interested in men. Does that mean some Political Lesbians would be more accurately described as celibate? The question of political lesbianism’s viability is a question of desire’s source and its ability to be shaped. In this essay, I will explore the potentially contradictory accounts of desire provided by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Amia Srinivasan in The Right to Sex, and Andrea Long Chu in “On Liking Women” and other conversations. Throughout, I will consider the extent to which our desires and sexualities can be willfully changed and whether I—a cisgender heterosexual woman living in predominantly queer spaces—could actually dump my nice boyfriend tomorrow to become a lesbian to match my politics.

Within The History of Sexuality, Foucault discusses sexuality as a product of disciplinary power. He challenges the belief that the Victorians were sexually repressed and discourse on sexuality was silenced by illustrating a preoccupation with sex, sexuality, and confessing details of this “secret” to figures of authority for regulatory purposes. Foucault never explicitly says sexual desire is constructed by social, cultural, and historical factors, but he does seem to believe this with his discussion of power relations. In “Part IV: The Deployment of Sexuality,” he discusses the methods of regulating sex through analysis of sex, women, children, and men; more importantly, he claims here that knowledge and sexuality are produced rather than repressed in this process. Foucault writes: “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It [sexuality] is the name that can be given to a historical construct…”² Sexuality being produced over time can be seen with the invention of “homosexuals” and then later “heterosexuals” as a result of disciplinary power categorizing people using an abnormal/normal distinction. In an earlier section of The History of Sexuality, Foucault notes that, “The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life…. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.”² Thus, the sexual act of sodomy became a type of sexuality and this “was everywhere present in [an individual]: at the root of all [their] actions…”² With the invention of ‘perverted’ sexualities, the norm is also created—therefore the heterosexual didn’t exist prior to the categorization of the homosexual as a species separate from the norm.

Describing sexuality as a product of power is a bold argument against the then widely-held belief that sexuality was repressed and was something that needed to be liberated. Foucault argues that what we understand as sexuality, which is produced by mechanisms of power, could not exist outside this power relation. Returning to the example above, there would be no sexual identities if there was not a power structure that required individuals to identify themselves as “normal” (where sex is only procreative) and “abnormal”.

Foucault makes the same point about our conception of freedom. There is no authentic or natural sexuality (or freedom) outside of a power relation. Without the power relation, there would be no rule to struggle against or conform to; without the category of abnormal sexuality, there is no normal sexuality. One could free themselves from one set of norms but there must be a new power relation that replaces it;³ a new power relation is what the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists were inadvertently advocating for in their case against heterosexuality. Many women could find more instances of pleasure and empowerment within lesbian norms, meaning “liberation” has been achieved. However, many women could find the opposite to be true. For the women who would not find political lesbianism “liberating,” this project is not very different from conversion therapy (which is both notoriously problematic and unsuccessful).

But if Foucault describes our sexualities as being shaped by social, cultural, and historical factors rather than being innate, why is it so difficult to change them? Sexuality politically positions every individual—meaning being a lesbian can have attached political acts—but there don’t seem to be any more Political Lesbians today. The question is whether this project or any other project that pushes for shaping desire to align with politics should begin again; the two contemporary feminist thinkers, Amia Srinivasan and Andrea Long Chu, disagree on the matter.

In her book, The Right To Sex, Srinivasan implies that since “the very idea of fixed sexual preference is political, not metaphysical” there is a strong case that we have “a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires.”⁴ Srinivasan hopes to problematize the foundations of desire by asking that we interrogate what social, cultural, and historical factors have determined our sexual preferences. Srinivasan writes, “As a matter of good politics, we treat preferences of others as sacred: we are rightly wary of speaking of what people really want, or what some idealized version of them would want,”⁴ to say that her point isn’t about telling people what to want but asking: “Why is that what you desire?” For Srinivasan, there is a moral and political demand to, at least individually, acknowledge problematic roots of a desire and at most move away from them. The core of her point is found when she says, “There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to what they want, but personal preferences—NO DICKS, NO FEMS, NO FATS, NO BLACKS, NO ARABS, NO RICE, NO SPICE, MASC-FOR-MASC—are rarely just personal.”⁴ Preferences are very often prejudices in disguise, or similarly they could easily be connected to a fetish for a certain kind of person. Prejudice can be unlearned and as Srinivasan claims, “our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills—not automatically, but not impossibly either.”⁴

Srinivasan does not detail how one can change their desires but if they could I imagine it could be a process not unlike Butler’s explanation of gender as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the coda, Srinivasan recounts the experience of a man who “had to work, deliberately and consciously” to find his fat husband sexy because as he says, “while we cannot alter what does and does not turn us on, we can on the other hand displace what might be getting in the way of erotic excitement and on the other teach ourselves to eroticize what is happening in in front of us during sex.”⁴ Returning to Butler, the similarity lies in the possibility that reiterative actions could recode desires. Srinivasan asks whether this is an act of discipline or of love, but I wonder if it is a power struggle between conflicting desires. The man wants to unlearn his internalized fatphobia and find his husband attractive because he loves him, and he also finds thinness desirable as Western beauty standards idolize thinness. Similarly but on a smaller scale, I used to imagine my ‘perfect guy’ as around six feet tall (another conventional beauty standard for men) but the guy I’m actually dating is only a few inches taller than me. In this situation, I don’t believe I changed my desire for a taller partner; there are just other things I care about more, and the beauty standard for men was not entirely effective in shaping my desire. Moreover, moving past that desire was not politically motivated. I argue in both of these instances that the desire to be with a specific person wins out over any desire for a certain physical quality, and the losing desire becomes dormant.

The problem with Srinivasan’s argument is both her unwillingness to explicitly argue we have a responsibility to change our desires and her belief in desires being set free. She says she is not arguing for a disciplining of desire, explaining: “When I wrote that ‘desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself,’ I was not imagining a desire regulated by the demands of justice, but a desire set free from the binds of injustice.”⁴ Yet, according to the Foucaldian conception of desire and power, Srinivasan is simply wrong. There cannot be a desire that chooses for itself and is set free from this power relation. The power relation will always exist as this produces desire, and so, the discipline of one set of politics is replaced with another. To reiterate, desires and sexuality will always be the subject of discipline as they are the product of external social and political factors.

To argue there is a secret, hidden desire free from power is exactly to tell someone they don’t know what they really want. This is where, in her piece “On Liking Women,” Andrea Long Chu responds that the true lesson of political lesbianism as a failed project is “that nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle…The day we begin to qualify [desire] by the righteousness of its political content is the day we begin to prescribe some desires and prohibit others, That way lies moralism only.”⁵ Even if someone doesn’t know what they really want, it is not a moral responsibility to tell them so. What I mean is best illustrated by the pervasiveness of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet); a woman may learn about comphet and realize the ways she hasn’t allowed herself to pursue desires she already had (being with other women in this example), but as the example of political lesbianism shows, one can’t tell a heterosexual woman that comphet is the only reason she’s interested in men. That second step, the moralizing, is one of the false assumptions of political lesbianism because it assumes that comphet is the only determinant of heterosexuality in women. It is in this example that I find value in Srinivasan’s interrogation because a pre-existing, but dormant, desire could be smothered by social messaging. By challenging the power relations shaping our own desires, they can resurface and be disciplined by a new set of power relations. However, it is not the place of others to moralize and impose their own politics in the name of saving people from their desires produced by oppressive standards. As Andrea Long Chu said in an interview, “Everyone should be allowed to want things that are bad for them.”⁶

Most non-incels agree that there cannot be a right to sex, yet the desire to moralize and shape our constructed sexualities still exists. If we can reconcile the two, I argue the way is through changing the social factors that shape our desires rather than the desires themselves. If systems of oppression are dismantled, they’re less likely to make their way into the bedroom, or rather the desires that do will not be reflective of these historical power relations. In interviewing Chu, Anastasia Berg says,

It’s very hard for me to imagine a society in which an individual’s desires do not include and exclude, or follow different gradations. Whatever people find attractive today they might find completely unattractive in a hundred years, but they will always find something attractive and something unattractive, and that's essential to desire, that's not just a function of a political system that works on unjust hierarchies.⁶

Chu adds, “I do think there’s sort of preferential nature to desire, period…. You can’t want everything. It wouldn’t be wanting it if it was everything.”⁶ The political problem that arises with desire is not its preferential nature. The problem is when those preferences follow the lines of prejudices because of social messaging that pushes for everyone to agree that “This is ugly, this is undesirable.” If non-normative bodies are no longer stigmatized on a societal scale, it will no longer be so unthinkable to find them sexually attractive. The goal is not a right to sex or a right to be desired but to remove oppressive norms from society knowing there will be a positive effect on the construction of sexuality. This is all to say, there must be justice in the way we desire and are desired; in a just world, the only thing stopping that person from going out with you is that they’re not that into you.

In my case, the answer is not political lesbianism or feminist separatism. I may occasionally indulge in a few misandrist jokes, but I love the men in my life. Foucault’s theory of power relations serves as a personal reminder that part of dismantling heteronormative expectations of myself requires the creation of new expectations; those new expectations should not be building the same system of forced desire. In my life, the goal is to separate my authentic desire from the subliminal effects of comphet. The Leeds Revolutionary Feminists say “Being a heterosexual feminist is like being in the resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe where in the daytime you blow up a bridge, in the evening you rush to repair it,” but they don’t understand that my goal is to build a better bridge together. This remains my most viable political action as it remains aligned with my desires and does not attempt to change something that can’t. I often feel like I am intentionally leaning into my identity and also the fun I can find by playing it up or letting it be. In reality, it’s not much of a conscious decision. I can’t choose what I want but I can choose how I want it.

1. “Political Lesbianism: A Case for Heterosexuality,” Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, 1979.

2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, 1976.

3. “Michel Foucault,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

4. Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex, 2021.

5. Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women,” 2018.

6. Andrea Long Chu and Anastasia Berg, “Wanting Bad Things,” 2018.