1. Anti-trans feminist discourse and radical feminism

According to Echols, by the mid-1970s, radical feminist organizations had mostly disappeared, cultural feminism had “eclipsed radical feminism as the dominant tendency within the women’s liberation movement,” and “as a consequence, liberal feminism became the recognized voice of the women’s movement” (1989, 243). The grassroots radical feminist activist organizations and consciousness-raising groups that had proliferated by the late 1960s had either broken up or moved onto their next chapters as cultural movements, self-help programs, women’s collectives, international feminism, academic careers, and underground resistance, among others (Whittier Reference Whittier1995; Dunbar-Ortiz Reference Dunbar-Ortiz2001; Valk Reference Valk2002). Firestone, Millett, and many other radical feminists from the 1960s were deprived of the social space to sustain feminist radicalism in the 1970s, even more so than when the movement had evolved out of post-war American society (J. Freeman 1975; Evans Reference Evans1980, Reference Evans2003; Echols Reference Echols1989; Rosen Reference Rosen2000). Many radical feminists from the 1960s moved around different jobs, some suffered from mental illnesses, and they were gradually forgotten in history. As Susan Faludi writes in her obituary for Firestone, who battled mental health issues in her post-movement life and passed away in 2012, radical women from the 1960s were “unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create” (2013, n.p.).Footnote ¹ Forgotten by contemporary students of feminism and queer and trans studies, the radical feminism and lesbian separatism of the 1960s and 1970s are often deemed as “backward” and “dragging” behind the times, as the radical utopian era of militancy had long passed and had failed to fulfill its promise of feminist revolution (E. Freeman Reference Freeman2000, 728). The liberal feminist politics of institutional reformation and mainstreaming efforts came to fruition and are well defined in the contemporary popular neoliberal narrative of women’s progress. However, the radical feminist politics of women’s liberation are often either forgotten or shunned as reminders of the embarrassment of a failed revolution (Berlant Reference Berlant1994).

The radical feminist invocation of a revolution did not or could not tangibly inhabit the world within the lifetimes of individual feminists, as the tragic case of Shulamith Firestone’s life story illustrates. Nevertheless, to a certain extent,Footnote ² the utopian aspirations for revolutionary futurity transformed into the spatial politics of separatism, in which the political legacies of radical feminism took a tangible form and sustained themselves against the conservative anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s (Taylor and Rupp Reference Taylor and Rupp1993; Whittier Reference Whittier1995). Frustrated and impatient with the slow transition of society, many radical-minded feminists turned to women’s culture and collectives as an alternative and temporary refuge of feminist radicalism, experimenting with the post-patriarchal female community, and often became disappointed with the less-than-ideal experiences of sisterhood (Valk Reference Valk2002). Categorically differentiated from radical feminism, although the border between the two is often blurred or overlapping, cultural feminism refers to both a version of and a diversion from radical feminism that actively endorses and cultivates “female culture” in and through the theory and practice of women’s space. Cultural feminism, in this version, is defined by its “essentialist view of the differences between women and men,” its advocacy for “separatism and institution building,” and the faith it puts in the liberatory potential of “alternative women’s culture” (Taylor and Rupp Reference Taylor and Rupp1993, 32).

Along with this transition to cultural feminist separatism, the early second-wave feminist invocation of “androgynous” society was overshadowed by the politics of sexual differences that delved into the question of the socio-cultural significance of gender-specific identities and cultures. This is exemplified by the works of Nancy Chodorow, Carole Gillian, and Nancy Hartsock (Young Reference Young2002, 412‒413). This ascendance of separatist cultural feminist politics, despite ensuring the survival of radical feminism throughout the era of anti-feminist backlash, also became the basis of feminist antagonism against transgender identity. This antagonism has now returned with full force in the form of anti-trans feminist discourse, equipped with wide-ranging digital network connections and a popularized transnational far-right anti-gender movement (Taylor and Rupp Reference Taylor and Rupp1993; Gamson Reference Gamson1997; Rudy Reference Rudy2001; Morris Reference Morris2005; Hines Reference Hines2017). The recent global emergence of anti-trans feminist discourse has perplexed many feminist scholars as it invokes both feminism and radicalism while popularizing the transphobic discourse of “real women,” which it argued to be the essential and ontological foundation of the feminist movement (Williams Reference Williams2020). Mobilizing against trans women’s rights to access gender-specific spaces, such as toilets, universities, locker rooms, sports teams, and shelters, those who claim to be radical feminist activists against trans rights have generated a popular discourse of transphobia and a particular misconception of radical feminism across the digital community and national borders. In the anti-trans feminist discourse, it becomes the moral and political duty of radical feminists and “real women” to protect the legacies of radical feminism, such as women-only spaces, which are equated with a feminist utopia of sisterhood, autonomy, and safety, by keeping trans women out of these utopian havens. In this narrative, radical feminist politics is deemed to be founded upon the essentialist notion of biological sexes. This subsumes racial, class, and sexual differences under the homogeneous category of white womanhood and materializes the revolutionary narrative of women’s liberation through sex-based women’s rights that secure the binary gender system and cisgender privilege. In the anti-trans feminist discourse, radical feminist politics of a genderless society is carefully reconstructed and misconstrued into a popularized narrative of essentialism in which “gender” becomes “unreal,” as opposed to the “real” sexes of cisgender people, and “harmful” to women. In this version of anti-trans feminist discourse, “gender” is considered a socio-cultural imposition rather than an identity to desire, cultivate, or embody, as indicated by many autobiographical narratives of trans people (Prosser Reference Prosser1998).

As Breanne Fahs says, “radical feminism remains one of the most fraught, maligned, and misunderstood segments of the movement” (2024, 479). The current rise of anti-trans feminist discourse illustrates that radical feminism is often in danger of being maligned and misunderstood by the traditionally conservative public and those who would claim a radical feminist identity. Rather than denouncing radical feminism for its “extreme” or “utopian” nature as the conservative anti-feminist rhetoric used to do, anti-trans feminist discourse actively claims radical feminism only to redress radical feminism in an essentialist, simplified, and often popularized trope of transphobia. Herein, women’s reproductive body and sexuality become a moral stronghold for anti-transgender mobilization. This convergence between radical feminism and the anti-trans discourse raises questions about the history of the feminist movement. Did radical feminism cultivate or endorse such essentialist notions of sex, gender, sexuality, body, and reproduction with or without knowing? Alternatively, did cultural feminism, which has historically been adjacent to and contentious with radical feminism throughout the 1960s and 1970s, transform the radical feminist revolutionary desire for a “sexless society” into a more tangible and sustainable form of lesbian separatism, which often materialized in women-only spaces, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival? If so, in what way and context did the cultural feminist trope of women’s oppression break away from the radical feminist narrative of feminist revolution? Does this shift from radical to cultural feminism in the 1970s raise certain agential questions about the utopian nature of radical feminism that invoked the “end” of patriarchy and a temporal crisis in women’s liberation narratives?

To explore these questions, in this article, I revisit radical feminist manifestos from the 1960s and 1970s, including Shulamith Firestone’s The dialectic of sex, the Radicalesbians’ “The woman-identified woman,” and “The fourth world manifesto” by Barbara Burris et al. Through these, I investigate whether and how the radical feminist politics of a “sexless society” and the cultural and lesbian feminist politics of separatism coexisted and vied for distinctive visions of women’s liberation. Written in the context of the post-war American women’s liberation movement and a time of revolution and progress, these textual remains of radical feminism function as the archival evidence and living testimony of the feminist revolution’s radical feminist utopian desires and its gradual transition to the spatial politics of separatism. By treating them as manifestos born out of and against their historical time, I examine the temporal and spatial politics of women’s liberation embedded in these texts.Footnote ³ In the following sections, first, I point to the lived and temporal sentiment of “feminist revolution” collectively shared by many radical feminists in the 1960s, which showcases the feminist temporal politics of “rupture” and “monumental history” (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1981; Felski Reference Felski2002). Resisting the liberal feminist narrative of mainstreaming, radical feminists aspired to break out of the linear progressive time of national history, risking the loss of a livable present and futurity. Second, I examine specific cases of radical, lesbian, and cultural feminist manifestos, namely The dialectic of sex by Shulamith Firestone, “The woman-identified woman” by the Radicalesbians, and “The fourth world manifesto” by Barbara Burris et al. I pay close attention to the shift from revolutionary temporality to spatial refuge, which I argue is both symptomatic and conducive but not necessarily responsible for the rise of the anti-trans feminist discourse in the 1970s. Finally, I delve into the interconnected yet displaced relationship between radical and cultural feminism, which offers critical insights into our understanding of the contemporary anti-trans feminist discourse.

2. Living ahead of time and forgotten in history: radical feminist history

Utopian futurity rarely occurs in time or survives its own historical time, as it aims to rupture the linearity of modern progressive history rather than assimilate with it (Osborne Reference Osborne1995; Bloch Reference Bloch and Anthony2000; Koselleck Reference Koselleck2002). Neither women’s time nor feminist historiography is synchronized with modern historical time, as they evolve around, against, and beside the trajectory of linear, accumulative, or reproductive time and often implode the linearity of modern historical time from within and without (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1981; Felski Reference Felski2002; Grosz Reference Grosz2002; Scott Reference Scott2011; Browne Reference Browne2014). Born out of the urgency of women’s liberation and built for revolutionary militancy, radical feminism in the 1960s and 1970s aspired to a utopian history that boldly embraced the apocalyptic ending of the old world. It called for a complete and irrevocable severance from the history of heteronormative patriarchy. Such revolutionary zeal led radical feminists to refuse incremental change and pursue the utopian transformation of the existing worlds. In the 1960s, the revolution appeared both immanent and imminent in the eyes of many US radicals (Evans Reference Evans2003; Elliott Reference Elliott2008). Evans, a member of a socialist feminist group in the 1960s and a contemporary feminist historian, points to the radicals’ “exhilarating” experience of “history-making” in the 1960s and 1970s, amidst the rising apocalyptic sentiment of the Cold War era and the liberal hegemony of the post-war US empire. She recollects:

Reflecting the accelerating temporality of US radicalism in the late 1960s, radical feminist politics imagined a clean break and a new beginning for women’s history. For radical feminists, whose sexual politics called for the abolition of patriarchy and sexism, this also signified the death of femininity and sex roles, which they dubbed a cultural and symbolic death of “women” as a socio-cultural construct.

As conveyed by the claim of radicalism, radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s viewed their politics as distinct from that of the previous generation of the suffragist movement and their contemporaries of liberal and socialist feminists. In searching for a usable history, radical feminists unearthed the buried past of the feminist suffragist movement to find that their foremothers’ revolutionary journey had ended incompletely, given that their agenda only narrowly focused on institutional reform and left more radical matters of sexual politics unaddressed (Firestone 1970). Learning that the first revolution of the feminist movement came to “compromise basic principles for political expediency,” radical feminists such as Shulamith Firestone urged their fellow feminists not to repeat the same mistake (Reference Firestone1968a, 7). Eschewing the “compromise” of the previous generation of the feminist movement, radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s strived to find and eradicate the “root” cause of women’s oppression, as opposed to the liberal feminist goal of mainstreaming. They insisted on the ultimate and fundamental priority of “sex” in feminist politics rather than allowing for equal significance of race and class, as their contemporary women of color and socialist feminists endeavored (Jaggar Reference Jaggar1983). Radical feminist politics maintained an unapologetic stance regarding the centrality of “sex” as the category of oppression and resistance. It redefined women as a sex class—a collective that shares a common experience of sexual oppression and a common goal, namely the abolition of the sex-caste system—and mobilized grassroots level collective actions, such as consciousness-raising sessions, guerrilla actions, and mass protests (Echols Reference Echols1989). The radical feminist narrative of women’s liberation accordingly invoked the revolutionary future of a “sexless society” under which the sex class is completely eradicated and sexual differences are either rendered socially moot or, conversely, gain full cultural recognition.

Radical feminist writers such as Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Amatniek, Jane Alpert, Dana Densmore, and Roxanne Dunbar set out to find the root—the ultimate cause—of women’s oppression. A key theorist Atkinson recollects that the search for a theory of feminist revolution was daunting and counterintuitive, as it went against the existing notion of sex as a “natural,” “universal,” and trans-historical essence of human life:

In their efforts to find a world before and without patriarchal oppression, radical feminists searched for the histories of matriarchy, revisiting the Amazonian myth originally popularized by thinkers such as J. J. Bachofen, Friedrich Engels, and Erich Fromm (Wright Reference Wright2004, 127). Through their intellectual and epistemological explorations, many radical feminist thinkers came to the novel and critical conclusion that femininity, heterosexuality, family, and reproduction were not the inherent outcomes of human nature but a complex system of oppression built through history and culture.

Ti-Grace Atkinson, for instance, acclaimed revolutionary self-destruction as a necessary step of women’s liberation in her essay “Radical feminism,” asserting that “to improve their condition, those individuals who are today defined as women must eradicate their own definition. Women must, in a sense, commit suicide … we must create, as no other group in history has been forced to do, from the very beginning” (1969, 83). In a related and similar vein of thinking, Kathie Amatniek, a member of the New York Radical Women and Redstockings, wrote a piece titled “Funeral oration for the burial of traditional womanhood” (Reference Amatniek1964). In it, she announced the death of “the grand old lady,” referring to the culture of conventional womanhood and the “maternal” pacifist women who marched in the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a protest against war in Washington, DC, in 1968. Firestone, also active in the radical feminist activism scene in the 1960s, similarly denounced the event as “powerless,” as it did not break out of the gendered notion of sexual difference, namely women’s maternity and passivity (Firestone Reference Firestone1968b, 18‒19). Against this “maternal” strand of feminism, the New York Radical Women agitated for “women power” that did not originate from motherhood or any other kind of traditional womanhood but from a “new” womanhood and sisterhood.

Furthermore, many radical feminists felt that such a drastic global transformation was immanent and impending. Upon hearing the news of the women’s liberation movement, Dana Densmore, one of the founding members of the New York-based radical feminist organization, Cell 16, recollects in her memoir, “Reality shifted, I felt myself to be in a new world. … Having heard the word, ‘women’s liberation,’ I knew that for me, there was no going back” (2007, 71‒72). She stopped attending what she calls “resistance dinners” and solely committed to the women’s liberation movement as she believed it was the most radical of all. Among the many radical feminist groups of the time, she further notes, “we … seemed the most wholeheartedly ready to overturn and sacrifice everything, the old coherence, and whatever conveniences or privileges it might be offering us, all our systems of getting along in the man’s world, our very lives” (84). Reflecting the felt sentiment of urgency, Cell 16 did not care to properly date the first volume of their magazine, No More Fun and Games, or publish any contact addresses. With the feminist revolution fast approaching, calendar time was rendered meaningless, as it was going to happen “in the next two or three or five years” rather than “go on for twenty, fifty, a hundred years” (87). Reflective of the zeal of the movement, Densmore recollects that the group did not “foresee an orderly future that would in turn become history” but saw themselves “on the verge of a great upheaval … like the anticipation of the end of the world for early Christians” (2007, 80). As Rita Felski delineates, feminist theories utilize multiple modes of time, including “time as redemption, time as regression, time as repetition, and time as rupture” (2002, 21). Time as redemption is based on the faith of progress, in which the feminist goals of equality and liberation will arrive in time. This is a progressive and future-oriented time in which feminism invests in the utopian dream of a post-patriarchal society. Time as regression stems from a nostalgic attachment to the lost paradise, which was often imagined as a pre-patriarchal society where women were unfettered by male dominance. Time as repetition manifests in the reproductive sexuality of the female body and the cultural notion attached to the bodily practice of reproduction. Time as rupture strives to break out of all three previous modes of temporality and cause friction with history by bringing “radically new” things into the world, even if the new inevitably needs mediation from the old (Felski Reference Felski2002, 27). The radical feminism of the 1960s and 1970s strived to rupture out of the liberal, progressive, and linear temporality of mainstream American society. In doing so, it inadvertently resorted to the reproductive time of female bodies, as in the case of lesbian separatism and the cultural feminist practice of women’s spaces. Deprived of the livable present and near future, as the revolutionary transformation of society did not arrive as immediately as they had anticipated and felt, radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s turned to women’s shared identity and culture, materializing a post-patriarchal society in a spatial form of women-only spaces.

The sentiments of temporal acceleration and apocalyptic revolution shared among the radical feminist activists of the 1960s and 1970s differed from the previous generation’s feminist politics of institutional reformation and caused intense psychocultural frictions with the liberal, progressive, and linear time of post-war American mainstream society. As Julia Kristeva delineates in her essay “Women’s time,” the post-1968 generation of the feminist movement pursued a “cyclical or monumental temporality of marginal movement” in their rejection of the linear temporality of national progress; this is in contrast to the previous generation of the suffragist movement that “aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history” (1981, 18, 20). In its invocation of the nonlinear temporality of women’s liberation, the young generation of feminists probed into the task of recovering the lost voice of women’s “intra subjectivity and corporeal experience left mute by the culture in the past” in their collective journey for women’s culture and language (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1981, 19). In doing so, they cultivated a politics of sexual differences, in which women at the collective and individual levels demanded the “recognition of an irreducible identity, without an equal in the opposite sex,” refusing the “logic of identification” that was adopted by the first generation of feminist activism (19). In other words, the quest of the post-1968 feminist movement was driven more by the politics of “difference and specificity” than of “equality” (21). More importantly, in their question of difference and specificity, she asserts, “Sexual difference—which, at once, biological, physiological, and relative to reproduction—is translated by and translates a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning” (21, emphasis in the original). Invoking and asserting sexual differences, the post-1968 generation of feminist politics found its version of “countersociety” from the “female society” that became “the only refuge for fulfillment” where “all real or fantasized possibilities for jouissance” were retained and sustained (27). Radical, lesbian, and cultural feminist manifestos from the 1960s and 1970s, as I examine below, attest to this utopian aspiration for women’s liberation and the seemingly indefinite deference of the feminist revolution incurred upon the political psyche of radical women, who felt trapped in the patriarchal world. As the temporal horizon of the feminist revolution rapidly faded away with rising conservative backlash, radical women and feminists sought political refuge from the cultural feminist trope and the practice of the women’s space, as it offered an exclusionary yet livable community. In what follows, I closely examine the historical shift from the radical feminist dream of revolutionary futurity to the cultural feminist vision of utopian space. This is accomplished through a careful and reflective reading of the radical, lesbian, and cultural feminist manifestos composed by Shulamith Firestone, Radicalesbians, and Barbara Burris, among others.

3. From revolutionary time to spatial refuge: The dialectic of sex, “The woman-identified woman,” and “The fourth world manifesto”

The radical feminist politics of women’s liberation intellectually culminated in The dialectic of sex (1970), written by Firestone, an essential member of post-war US radical feminism, who suddenly “disappeared” from the movement (Echols Reference Echols1989, 195; Faludi Reference Faludi2013).Footnote ⁴ Often considered a polemical mixture of vanguard radicalism and technological determinism, The dialectic of sex inspired radical feminist activism in Firestone’s time and a new generation of feminist science fiction writing and cyberfeminism. Although the book is often praised for inciting a revolutionary vision of a sexless society, it is criticized for its short-sighted, if not misguided, optimism and trust regarding technology, near-phobic hostility toward motherhood and pregnancy, seemingly essentialist understanding of sex, and explicit subsumption of race by sex, among other issues (Merck and Sandford Reference Merck and Sandford2010). Written at a time of technological progress and political turbulence and recognizing the mutually constitutive and contentious relations between nature and culture, Firestone’s manifesto weaves a dialectic narrative of the feminist sexual revolution (1970, 172‒73).

Firestone opens The dialectic of sex with a statement that the “sex class is so deep as to be invisible” and, accordingly, “for feminist revolution, we shall need an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx–Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution” (4). Firmly believing in the possibility of a feminist revolution and the need for its own comprehensive theory, Firestone set out “to develop a materialist view of history based on sex itself” (7). Building upon and critically appropriating theories of Marx, Engels, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir, Firestone finds that “unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality” (8). However, it does not prevent the feminist revolution because human nature is flexible and “adaptable to something” such as environmental conditions (9). Throughout her work, Firestone expresses an optimistic view of the future of the feminist revolution, which she believes requires “not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself” so that “genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally” (11). In her view, the goal of new feminism, or “the second wave of the most important revolution in history,” is not just to revive a “political movement for social equality” but to “overthrow the oldest, most rigid class or caste system in existence, the class system based on sex” (13). By seizing, through the feminist revolution, control of the emergent biotechnology that would free women from “the tyranny of reproduction,” Firestone envisions that the institution of the biological family would meet its slow death and that “the tyranny of the biological family would be broken” (11). This would set both women and children free from patriarchal power. In the future society of a cybernetic community in which the sex distinction will be extinct, Firestone speculates that all members will have “economic independence and self-determination,” women and children will be integrated into the larger society, and love and sexuality will be freely chosen and exercised, including the disregard for the incest taboo (213‒16). Anticipating the shock her book may generate, Firestone called her proposal “dangerously utopian” yet “concrete” (203).

Though often accused of essentializing biological sexes and resorting to technological determinism, Firestone’s vision of the feminist revolution was deeply embedded in the dialectic dynamics of the body, society, and technology (Fisken Reference Fisken, Merck and Sanford2010). Firestone was possibly inspired by the newly available technologies of birth control and artificial insemination along with the human genome project. Nevertheless, her idea of the feminist revolution did not solely resort to technological advancement but insisted on the importance of socio-cultural means to control and appropriate the technology at hand, proposing a dialectic relationship between the technological and social and between the biological and cultural (Franklin Reference Franklin, Merck and Sanford2010). Although technological advancements shed light on new possibilities for non-biological reproduction, Firestone cautions that they cannot guarantee women’s liberation unless properly appropriated by the feminist revolution. Viewing the feminist cultural revolution in heterosexual romance, child-rearing, and women’s sexuality as imperative to women’s liberation and the fundamental transformation of human society for a labor-less, family-less, and sexless future, Firestone stated:

In present-day society, where the cybernetic automation of human labor and the biotechnological modification of sex or gender are more familiar and commonplace, Firestone’s abolitionist view of sex and family remains a provocative and enigmatic proposition.

Although digital technology renders human labor virtual or immaterial, the digital revolution still disproportionally benefits the Western white middle-class family while exploiting the not-so-immaterial, precarious, and self-exploitative labor of the non-Western “cybertariat” (Huws Reference Huws2003). Likewise, advancements in biomedical technologies of human reproduction, such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy, are usually in service to those with legal and financial means, leaving dispossessed minorities in vulnerable positions where their bodies and reproductive sexualities are utilized by the transnational biocapital industry (Banerjee Reference Banerjee2014; Vora Reference Vora2015). Intersecting disparities of gender, class, sexuality, and nationality operate in the contemporary landscape of digital labor and biomedical practices, forging yet another domain of classification by biopower and sexual politics. The contemporary iteration of the cybernetic community that Firestone envisioned in The dialectic of sex does not necessarily negate her radical insight but enhances it, bringing to the fore her emphasis on the dialectic between the social and the technological and the importance of the socio-cultural control of technologies. Applying the lens of dialectic politics to both sex and history and admitting the flexibility of “organic” revolution, Firestone articulates the undetermined nature of feminist revolution, leaving the future horizon of revolution open.

Although Firestone’s scenario of the feminist revolution did not materialize in a tangible and livable form, the lesbian and cultural feminist politics of separatism offered a real-life possibility of a post-patriarchal, if not sexless, society in the form of a women-only space. Emerging with force at the breakdown of radical feminism, cultural feminism “held out the possibility that women could build a culture, a space, uncontained by patriarchy” (Echols Reference Echols1989, 245). Although both radical and cultural feminism commonly hold onto the essentialist notion of sexual differences, cultural feminism differs from radical feminism in the celebratory hailing of women’s culture and space as the ultimate domain of women’s liberation (Willis Reference Willis1984). However, importantly, the lesbian and cultural feminist practice of separatism did not necessarily emerge “after” radical feminism, but they coexisted from the inception of the women’s liberation movement, causing ideological conflicts and diversification within the movement (Echols Reference Echols1989). Accordingly, cultural feminist women’s collectives were less of an aberration from radical feminism and more a logical outcome of its revolutionary politics that did not come to fruition as soon as was hoped.

Women’s collectives actualized radical feminist politics by carrying out the promise of women’s liberation in a spatial, tangible, and present manner. Consequently, cultural feminism brought about a radical feminist vision of a sexless society in the form of a temporary refuge, preserving the radical feminist political legacy through the conservative 1980s and beyond (Taylor and Rupp Reference Taylor and Rupp1993; Whittier Reference Whittier1995). The radical feminist turn to separatist politics was first signaled in the manifesto “The woman-identified woman,” written in 1970 by the Radicalesbians, a group that included Rita Mae Brown, a former member of the Liberal Feminist National Organization for Women. Brown had been purged out of leadership by Betty Friedan, a notorious and controversial figure in the post-war American women’s movement who worried that radical feminist sexual politics might derail its course. Consequently, Brown and other lesbian feminists coauthored the Radicalesbians manifesto and distributed it at the Second Congress to United Women in protest against the liberal feminist politics of mainstreaming (Echols Reference Echols1989; Rosen Reference Rosen2000). The manifesto opens with a poignant question, “What is a lesbian?” Both rejecting and redefining the definition of “lesbian” as a sexual category, the text answers that:

Redefining lesbianism as a political praxis of sisterhood and a separatist lifestyle, the Radicalesbians manifesto calls for a cultural feminist politics of self-care and collective identity. Rather than refusing the category of sex or invoking the death of “woman” as once done by Atkinson, Amatniek, and Firestone, “The woman-identified woman” argues that this identity could and should be the shared foundational grounds of feminist resistance to patriarchal society. For this to occur, they also note that women must find their way to their authentic selves and the truest form of identification in solidarity with their sisters, as the closure of the manifesto asserts:

The ascendance of political lesbianism signified a shift from the revolutionary and abolitionist politics of radical feminism to the spatial and cultural politics of separatism, in which women’s shared experiences of suffering and victimization foregrounded the political imperativeness of women-only spaces. Letting go of the temporal politics of revolution, women’s bodies, sexualities, and identities become the central grounds of cultural feminist politics as the material and spatial domains of women’s oppression, in which women’s culture and consciousness are cultivated and free from male violence and patriarchal power.

“The fourth world manifesto,” authored by a group of women’s liberationists from Detroit—Barbara Burris, Kathy Barry, Terry Moore, Joann DeLor, Joann Parent, and Cate Stadelman—is often considered as marking the shift from radical to cultural feminism. This manifesto constructs a monolithic and ahistorical theory of women’s oppression, defining and equating women with “the colonized” and men with “the colonizer.” Notably, this manifesto was originally drafted in response to the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference held in Toronto in 1971 and then revised and published in Notes from the third year (Echols Reference Echols1989, 245). Although the initial motivation of this manifesto was to call out the conference organizers’ political appropriation of the women’s liberation movement in the event’s titling, the manifesto went further, effectively establishing a thesis of cultural feminist politics, in part by reversing the New Left politics of anti-imperialism and refusing to acknowledge the racial privilege of white women’s homogenizing narratives of women’s culture.

In response to the call for women’s participation in anti-imperialist politics, such as the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference held in Toronto in 1971, the manifesto redefined “imperialism” as male oppression over female culture and bodies, effectively erasing the racial and colonial privilege of white feminism out of the feminist movement. As the manifesto states, “[W]e find it self-evident that women are a colonized group who have never—anywhere—been allowed self-determination. Therefore, all women who fight against their own oppression (colonized status) as females under male domination are anti-imperialists by definition” (238). For this reason, it implies that women in an anti-war and anti-imperialist movement, such as those who organized the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference, are living under a false consciousness because they have not “developed a perspective on how women are a colonized group in relation to men all over the world, in all classes and races, including the Third World” (240). This is apparent in the way “women have been excluded from contributing to the art, philosophy, and science of all national cultures” (251). It argues that, as much as women are erased from the dominant history and culture, they are also exempt from the history of violence, including wars. This is because “war is a male institution” and “women, who have nothing to say about running the country or fighting in the war, will never end war except by attacking and ending male domination and the sex roles where men learn their war mentality” (241). Accordingly, “the Female Liberation Movement must cut across all (male-imposed) class, race, and national lines; any false identification of women with privileges that are really male (such as whiteness or class) will be fatal to our movement” (245). The manifesto suggests that women, regardless of their class, nationality, sexuality, or race, are a unified group of powerless victims historically oppressed by the “male culture” that put women in the position of “the colonized.” Accordingly, the manifesto closes with the statement, “We identify with all women of all races, classes, and countries all over the world. The female culture is the Fourth World” (262). This reaffirms the universal and homogenizing identity of women, foreclosing the possibility of race and class as an integral locus of feminist resistance.

In exempting women from the history of war and violence, the manifesto endows them with trans-historical victimhood, exclusively defined by gender oppression, and extricates all women equally and unequivocally from the political burdens of racism, capitalism, and colonialism. It states that not only do women remain uniformly oppressed but they were also “the first group to be oppressed and subordinated as a caste,” long before black people were enslaved, and that women’s oppression exists across cultural and geopolitical borders (260, 244). For that reason, “traveling to different countries” is offered as “the best way for any woman to find out the truth of this statement” that “the repression of female culture is only a question of degree all over the world; the underlying reality is basically the same” (252). The authors claim that cultural differences across borders “are the superficialities that cover up the fundamental similarity of all national cultures the world over … the split between male culture and female culture” (249). The only “cultures,” the authors imply, are the male and female culture.

They contend that female culture has long been negated and silenced by the dominant “male culture” but shall be reclaimed and recovered: “We are proud of the female principle and will not deny it to gain our freedom. It is only by asserting the long-suppressed and ridiculed female principle that a truly human society will come about. … when the female principle and culture is no longer suppressed and male domination is ended forever” (262). Perhaps not surprisingly, the manifesto turns to the body, foregrounding this as the ultimate and almost eternal “territory” of female subjection, as “Women, set apart by physical differences between them[selves] and men, were the first colonized group. And the territory colonized was and remains our women’s bodies” (247). In this metaphor for women’s bodies as the geopolitical domain of imperialism, the manifesto deploys the anti-colonial nationalist rhetoric of native women’s sexuality as the symbolic frontier of colonial conquest. Using the same logic as this bodily ground of women’s oppression and the omnipresence of male culture, the authors argue that an escape from the subject position of the colonized is impossible because the very location of subjectivity is women’s corporeal bodies. Wherever she goes, she “is” still a woman and, by definition, oppressed, so long as a “woman” is defined by her sexed body, inescapable by any means. For this reason, the manifesto concludes, “We cannot, like James Baldwin, even temporarily escape from our caste role to Paris or another country. It is everywhere; there is no place to escape” (252).

Reckoning with the universal reality of male dominance, cultural feminist manifestos such as “The fourth world manifesto” search for an alternative space, namely the Fourth World. This name also happened to be claimed by the then-emerging Indigenous movement in its effort to mark the uniqueness of white settler colonialism, which was related to but distinctive from the imperial colonialism in the Third World. The alternative spaces aim to construct a universal, totalistic, and monolithic narrative of women’s liberation (Wu Reference Wu2018, 713). Women’s culture and history materialized in a spatial form of female collectives that were often equated with female sexualities and reproductive bodies. Consequently, they became the ultimate foreground of the feminist struggle and the temporary refuge of feminist radical utopianism by providing radical-minded women with a livable place and the possibility to inhabit the present.

4. Lessons from the past

Revisiting three manifestos of radical, cultural, and lesbian feminist movements from the 1960s and 1970s, I have delineated the political shift within radical utopian politics from the temporal politics of revolutionary futurity to the spatial politics of women’s collectives. Written at a time of vibrant feminist radicalism, these manifestos reveal the contemporaneous revolutionary zeal and the felt sense of frustration and impatience. Yearning for the revolutionary futurity of a sexless society, radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s envisioned and aspired for a revolutionary temporality of the feminist movement, which would transform the fundamental conditions of women’s lives, including the psychosocial possibilities of becoming women. Such a sense of temporal acceleration and the urgence of the impending feminist revolution, shared and enunciated by the radical feminists of the time, draw critical attention toward the intricate and often difficult relationship between historical time and feminist politics. This is because it also pertains to the psychological tension and agential crisis that may have emerged from the intense experiences of the feminist revolution. The radical feminist revolutionary yearning, which did not or could not materialize in time, reconfigured into the lesbian and cultural feminist practice of women’s collective, in which radical-minded women could find a livable space and time.

I posit that, considering the recent rise of anti-trans feminist discourse that claims transphobia as a radical feminist politics, feminist history offers a valuable lesson to contemporary students of feminist, queer, and trans studies. The shift from revolutionary temporality to spatial utopia in the late 1960s was indicative and symptomatic of both the radical utopianism shared by radical, lesbian, and cultural feminism and the agential crisis it caused in the political psyche of feminist activists. Although radical feminist, revolutionary politics aspired to break out of the linear or progressive time of the nation-state and the liberal feminist project of mainstreaming, it also encountered certain agential difficulties that most utopian radicals almost inevitably shared. One could argue that the future of a sexless society invoked by Firestone failed to materialize in time, not because sex is essential but because it is almost always mediated and regulated by socio-cultural orders. The lesbian and cultural feminist practice of separatism, in place of radical feminism, provided a temporary yet tangible place to inhabit the utopian desires of a post-patriarchal sexless society at the cost of congealing essentialist, universal, and homogeneous notions of sex and women in the name of feminist radicalism.

Regarding the recent discursive tethering of anti-trans discourse to radical feminism, which is not unprecedented in feminist history, the radical feminism of the 1960s and 1970s aspired to break out of the hegemonic order of essentialism and the gender binary at the cost of risking a livable time and space. The radical, lesbian, and cultural feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, while working side by side and often challenging each other, strived to build a theory and practice of women’s liberation through the temporal invocation of revolutionary futurity and the spatial practice of separatism. By reading these textual remnants of radical, lesbian, and cultural feminism, I conclude that we can learn useful lessons regarding the feminist movement, in which the feminist agency of revolution and resistance unfolds through the temporal and spatial imagination.