Conflicting Concepts of Self and The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
Authors: Ware Ianto 
Published: October 2020

In 1991 the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival evicted two female identified transsexual attendees on the grounds that they violated its women only policy of admittance. The Festival, established in 1976 and now the largest of its kind, turned into a "microcosm of the conflicts that have plagued the women's movement" (Rubin 18) and revived widespread debate about the place of trans and non-standard gender performances in feminist activism. A pro-trans event, aptly named Camp Trans, was held outside the Festival's gates with the aim of inciting greater interest in the area. The Festival's founder and on going organiser, Lisa Vogel, responded with a statement in 2001 claiming the "intention is for the Festival to be for womyn-born womyn, meaning people who were born and have lived their entire life experience as female" (Vogel 2000). This resulted in the exclusion of not only trans individuals, but also a plethora of non-conventional gender identities. Bitter debate ensued, revealing the Festival's role not just in appealing to a defined, recognisable demographic, but in constructing and maintaining an entire category of identity.
My initial encounters with the Festival occurred through independent media and the internet. It become particularly widely debated after artists from the Queer orientated Mr Lady record label (most famously Le Tigre, fronted by riot grrl icon Kathleen Hanna) confirmed that they would perform at the event, despite knowledge of the anti-trans policy. Perhaps the most poignant reflection came from Ciara Xyerra's 2001 zine A Renegade's Handbook To Love And Sabotage. She comments that the Festival's intent was to provide "not only just a 'safe space' for women, but specifically for 'womyn born womyn.'"

[…] this essentialist logic is […] flawed in that it assumes every "womyn born womyn" was socialized in exactly the same way, that differences regarding race, class, ability, personal history, have no bearing on how a woman perceives herself as a woman […](69).

Certainly the revised womyn born womyn label is a problematic way of dealing with the situation. The standard woman is assumed not to encounter trans issues, at least not in a way that impacts on her sense of gendered self.
This issue provokes comparisons to the race debates that wreaked havoc through US feminism in early eighties. The sentiments of the Camp Trans protest echo Audre Lorde's 1984 criticism that:

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define women in terms of their experience alone, then women of Color become 'other', the outsider whose experience is too alien to comprehend (632).

In retrospect what remains most striking about the race debates is how incredibly poorly they were handled. The period is marked by a tendency towards splinter and separatist groups, evident in the writing of people like bell hooks and Mary Daly. Communication between various factions collapsed amid accusations of racism and ignorance of the wider struggle, leaving ruptures still visible today. (Gubar 884-890)
The emphasis has shifted from presumed racial background to presumed biological characteristics, but at its core this is the same argument about which performances of self are given legitimacy, and which are passed off as outside the interests of the feminist community. Indeed the Festival's anti-trans policy can also be traced back to the early 1980's, stemming from clashes between separatists and post-operative transsexuals entering feminist activism.
In both instances there has been an assumption that the majority of members within the community experience the world from a common perspective, a collective sense of self at the core of the movement, outlining its wider agenda. I am reminded of Gayatri Spivak's comment that "We take the explanations we produce to be the grounds of our action; they are endowed with coherence in terms of our explanation of self" (In Other Worlds 104). Conflict arises when internal factions find their concerns being overlooked, and begin questioning exactly whose experience is taken as the model for the collective self. There is a tendency towards viewing this as a threat to the movement's solidarity. In an effort to maintain wider group cohesion, divergent voices are often dealt with by claiming they arise from entirely different strains of selfhood. New identities, or at the least hyphenated subcategories, proliferate under "the essentialist's claim that there must be an ultimate (that is, comprehensive), complete, consistent, coherent set of types" (Spinosa and Dreyfus 72). These redefinitions explain and dispel difference without actually addressing it.
It would be naive to assume this sort of essentialism exists only for the Festival and older activist methodology. While Queer theory has certainly given us new tools for understanding the issues, its practical application does not necessarily avoid "knitting out more fashionably an otherwise reconstructed […] essentialism" (Jagose). As people like Martha Nussbaum and Benita Parry have argued, if somewhat problematically, there is a fine line between fluidity and dissolution. Activist and liberal scepticism towards deconstructive methodology contains an at least reasonably justified trepidation towards tinkering with political communities which have proved historically successful. The unfortunate revival of the 'old school' activism versus 'new school' theory attitude, itself founded on an essentialist belief in a single, correct ideological stance, has further complicated matters.
Festival attendee Janel Smith, writing for one of the bastions of 'old school' activism, Off Our Backs, voiced activist scepticism when commenting that post structuralism is "an entire movement and theory […] designed to debunk these 'myths' about gender and racial identity." She continues:

We often make sense of other people by categorizing them into labels and boxes that we ourselves feel comfortable with. Dominant discourse tends to dismiss this process as inherently negative, one that limits people and their understanding of self and projected identity (17).

The criticism of dominant academic discourse is worth consideration. If it "is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak" (Foucault 130), we need to be acutely aware of the way we act within culture, and wary of any movement which claims to fully recognise and transcend its boundaries. Our treatment of identity needs to "avoid the mistake of slipping between 'no absolute truth' and 'absolutely no truth,'" as Felicity Newman, Tracey Summerfield and Reece Plunkett suggest.
From the alternate perspective, Aviva Rubin argues "our activism is characterized by seemingly incompatible inclinations to generalize and to particularize" (17). She writes that the Festival's attempt to develop a "theoretical 'she'" with which we "identify sameness – she shares our politics, our goals, our place" is fundamentally flawed as "the notion collapses when confronted with the differences we've deliberately ignored" (8).
This leaves the situation double bound. A standard sense of gendered self provides unity and a workable common agenda, but comes into conflict with the identities it has excluded from its definition. The unified self combats repression, but, as Judith Butler so aptly puts it, "exclusion operates prior to repression" (71). However there are certainly areas of common ground. Rubin's "plea for grey", or an area "between absolutes," (20) is remarkably similar to Smith's endeavour to exist "somewhere in-between butch and femme" (14). Yet, for the Festival, that difference was enough to cause a gap between those who found it "an atmosphere of unparalleled safety" (Smith 13) and the pro-trans attendees who felt they needed "an escort to get out safely after darkness fell" (Wilchins 2000). As these relative similarities exist, it is disappointing to see that the arising differences have met with such aggressively negative reactions. Given the unlikeliness of everyone agreeing on a definitive understanding in the near future, it would seem beneficial to shift the focus away from searches for correct identities and ideologies, and develop new approaches to the debates themselves.
I am again reminded of a comment from Gayatri Spivak, this time from her 1992 essay "More on Power/Knowledge". She comments that "if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to do only those things with that something which are possible within and by arrangement of those lines" (151). This is as true for our concepts of self as it is for any other issue. If we cannot reach outside of the structures of culture to find more universally true categories, or expect an ideological stance to present entirely new and more correct understandings, how we handle the arising debate is of major importance. Homi Bhabha's comment that "our political references and priorities […] are not there in some primordial, naturalistic sense" (26) does not necessarily render them null and void. There is a difference between needing to debate an identity or ideology, and needing to discard or reinvent it. Instead of looking for a true model of self or a correct ideology, the problem becomes looking at the cultural structure we have, trying to "recognise it as best one can and, through one's necessarily inadequate interpretation, to work to change it" (Spivak 1988 120).
From this perspective the conflict that emerges from the Festival is as important as the possibilities for final resolution. Rather than treating differences as immediate problems and being "shocked, disappointed and instantly sidetracked into seeking resolution" (Rubin 20), it seems possible to consider the debate important in its own right. In practice this would mean keeping the lines of communication between the various factions open, and treating debate as an integral and on going process, rather than an unwelcome confrontation to be settled as quickly and quietly as possible.
The commitment of the Camp Trans protesters to "workshops to educate festival goers" (Wilchins 2000), and their modest success, indicates that maintaining ongoing debate is a workable and productive approach. On the other hand Vogel's unwillingness to talk to the Camp Trans group is perhaps as open to criticism as her definitions of gender identity. Surely if a definitive concept of self cannot be settled upon easily, the lines of communication between Camp Trans and the Festival can at least be expected to keep the search from stagnating.
The role the Festival has served as "a locus of political and cultural debate" (Delany) combined with its relatively successful negotiations of class and race issues indicates that it can play this role successfully. Although the womyn born womyn policy might not have changed, it is difficult to imagine many other platforms on which trans related debates could occur on such a large scale. In light of this it does not seem unrealistic to think of the debate as beneficial in ensuring continued rethinking of the issues, and not just as part of some potential revision or creation of identities which will hopefully be completed some time in the future.

References

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Delany, Anngel. "Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates 25 years of controversy."
Gay.Com (2002) May 10th, 2002. http://content.gay.com/people/women_spac...
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Gubar, Susan. "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry 24.4 (1998): 878-903.
Jagose, Annamarie. "Queer Theory." Australian Humanities Review 4 (1996) http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archiv... (28-6-02).
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Smith, Janel. "Identity Crisis: Fuches Rise up and Unite." Off Our Backs 30.9 (2000): 13-20.
Spinosa, Charles and Hubert Dreyfus. "Two Kinds of Antiessentialism and Their Consequences." Critical Inquiry 22.4 (1996) 735-764.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravority. In Other Worlds. London: Routledge, 1988.
---, "More On Power/Knowledge." The Spivak Reader. Ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean. New York: Routledge, 1996: 141-174.
Vogel, Lisa. "Official Statement of Policy by MWMF." (2000).http://www.camptrans.com/press/2000_mwmf... (30-6-2002).
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Xyerra, Ciara. A Renegades Handbook to Love and Sabotage 4. Madford: Independently Published, 2001.

Links

http://www.camptrans.com/
http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.html
http://www.camptrans.com/stories/interview.html
http://www.camptrans.com/press/2000_mwmf.html
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-Dec-1996/jagose.html
http://content.gay.com/people/women_space/michigan_000807.html

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Ware, Ianto. (2002) Conflicting Concepts of Self and The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Ware.html &gt ([your date of access]).