Realizing Love and Justice: Lesbian Ethics in the Upper and Lower Case

Abstract

This essay examines two tendencies in lesbian ethics as differing visions of community, as well as contrasting views of the relationship between the erotic and the ethical. In addition to considering those authors who make explicit claims about lesbian ethics, this paper reflects on the works of some lesbians whose works are less frequently attended to in discussions about lesbian ethics, including lesbians writing from the perspectives of theology and of literature.

In Defense of a Worldly Separatism

“…In their essay, “Realizing Love and Justice: Lesbian Ethics In The Upper and Lower Case,” Kathleen Martindale and Martha Saunders guide us through varied writings in lesbian ethics and, by categorizing these as either upper or lower case, they distinguish a lesbian ethics which focuses on lesbian identity and lesbian community from a lesbian ethics which is “worldly”—an ethics which emphasizes the “interrelation of different forms of oppression and the connections among all the oppressed” (Martindale and Saunders 1992, 158).…”

“…I limit my commentary to the opposition posited by Martindale and Saunders between all instances of separatism, lesbian or otherwise, and worldliness even though there are other questions raised for me by their essay. I also question, for example, how relating sexuality and eroticism is linked with a passion for justice; how a call for “right relation” in which “people are empowered to experience one another as intrinsically valuable, irreplaceable earth creatures, sources of joy and love and respect in relation to one another” (Heyward in Martindale and Saunders 1992, 159) is distinguishable as an ethics of justice from an ethics of care; and how lesbian “yearning to be involved … in each other's sounds and glances and bodies and feelings” (Heyward in Martindale and Saunders 1992, 160) might translate into social change.…”

“…According to Martindale and Saunders, lesbian separatism “begins and ends with an unproblematized notion of lesbian identity” and is concerned primarily with “establishment and maintenance of community boundaries” (Martindale and Saunders 1992, 153). Lesbian separatism, they write, is like other sectarian movements which have arisen to protest against injustice and like those other separatist movements lesbian separatists's “solution to injustice [is] not to change the world but to withdraw from it and improve themselves instead” (Martindale and Saunders 1992, 153). Accordingly, lesbian separatists “abandon all moral responsibility for anyone other than their own members” (Martindale and Saunders 1992, 154).…”

“…Lesbian separatism, they write, is like other sectarian movements which have arisen to protest against injustice and like those other separatist movements lesbian separatists's “solution to injustice [is] not to change the world but to withdraw from it and improve themselves instead” (Martindale and Saunders 1992, 153). Accordingly, lesbian separatists “abandon all moral responsibility for anyone other than their own members” (Martindale and Saunders 1992, 154).…”

“…Relying on Marilyn Frye's essay on separatism, Card argues that “retreating from affective to formal relations might count as separating from heteroreality without separating from ‘the world’“(Card 1988, 127). While Martindale and Saunders claim that lesbian separatists “abandon all moral responsibility for anyone other than their own members” (Martindale and Saunders 1992, 154), elsewhere Claudia Card critiques the preoccupation of feminist ethics with an ethics of care and calls for “an ethic that applies to our relations with people with whom we are connected only by relations of cause and effect as well as to our relations with those who are connected by personal and potential encounters” (Card 1990, 105, her emphasis). I have taken up this call for a feminist ethics for strangers in my own work (Shogan 1992), while retaining separatism as a potent political strategy.…”