On The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

Analyzing the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s Womyn-Born-Womyn Policy

The birth of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival began in 1976 by Lisa Vogel, her sister Kristie, and Mary Kindig, of the We Want the Music Collective. The festival is a place of community, creativity, and performance. As the title suggests, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) is not for everybody. There is a strict “womyn-born-womyn” (WBW) policy that the festival has adhered to, although that seems to be changing. “Womyn-born-womyn” refers to people who were born and raised as girls and who currently identify as women. In 1991 or 1992 (both dates are cited more than once), a transwoman was asked to leave the festival after having previously purchased her ticket at the ticket booth. Because this woman was not a womyn-born-womyn, her ticket was refunded and she had to leave the festival. However, a lot of criticism has remained in the wake. Furthermore, in 2001, preoperative MTFs attended the festival. While at the festival, they (like everyone else in attendance) made use of the public shower areas. Needless to say, it was noticed that these women were not womyn-born-womyn. This has caused an outcry in criticism of, and in support for, the womyn-born-womyn policy at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, as well as other organizations and events that maintain a womyn-born-womyn policy (see the Trans Inclusion Policy Manual for Women’s Organisations, 2002). Other questions still remain, such as: what is a “woman?” does being a “woman” necessitate the “ownership” of female reproductive organs? how can feminists who want to do away with gender make space for feminists whose gender is crucial to their identities? Are both types of orientations toward gender accepted as “feminist?” how can we learn to work together through our differences? is separatism useful this day and age? Many of these questions were raised last winter at the discussion of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s womyn-born-womyn policy by myself and other members of the radical reading group I belong to in Hartford, Connecticut (the Area Radical Reading Group of Hartford, or ARRGH!). In this paper I want to address the issues surrounding a womyn-born-womyn policy and try to answer some of the questions posed, as I have been thinking about this specific issue for many months now.

The Festival claims that the womyn-born-womyn policy is necessary to create a community that is safe for women, but that also, by virtue of having a womyn-born-womyn policy, the festival creates a space where women can be free from other restraints that men place on them in regular spaces that are not first most about safety, but about agency and ability (not to imply that these terms are not connected to notions of safe space or safety in general). For the time being, I will cast aside the notion of problematizing what is meant by “women” or “men” in this statement, as there are other issues at hand. On the Festival’s website, it is stated that: “One of the beauties and challenges of our community is its diversity. We create a village each year made up of womyn from other countries, different cultures, classes, religious heritages, physical abilities, lifestyles and ages” (MWMF official website). No where on the website did I see mention of the womyn-born-womyn policy, but that could be due to recent changes in policy at the MWMF (I will explain these recent changes later on in the paper). What sticks out to me is that the authors of this website outwardly accept diversity as a good tenet of the festival while at the same time embracing exclusionary practices, and I see these two phenomena as slightly out of line at best, while remaining transphobic at worst.

One of the warning flags that a womyn-born-womyn policy is almost impossible to enforce without “panty-checks” is that recurring question of what it means to be a woman. The womyn-born-womyn policy clearly states that it means one was born and raised a girl, has lived her life as a woman, and now identifies still as a woman. Furthermore, it seems as though the MWMF shies away from checking festival goers’ genitals because the people checking (I will hereafter refer to them as “security”) will undoubtedly need to check massive numbers of lesbian (or straight, bi, whatever) womyn-born-womyn that appear butch, or maybe a little “too butch.” This would obviously not go over well at the festival. However, there are more questions raised under this notion. What if a person who was born and raised as a girl child, then self-identified as a woman, recently decided that she more so self-identifies as a man? What if absolutely nothing else changed, at least physically, than her own self-identification? If she attended the festival all prior years, would she then have to “confess” that she no longer identifies in the same way when she attends this year’s festival? What about how others identify us, does that also count toward our status as women or men (or something else all together)? What if I was extremely butch, the butchest of the butch, and I acted like a socialized male? I still have my female reproductive genitals, and I may refer to myself as a butch lesbian and a woman, but wouldn’t it seem as though I would be excluded from the festival if it were up to the security at MWMF (if their exclusion is presumed to be consistent and that the category of “woman” isn’t dependent on genitals)? Moreover, what does it mean to be socialized as a male? Aren’t different men socialized differently? Aren’t we forgetting about intersectionality here? Also, some people view identity as nonstatic, as always in flux. Then how can a womyn-born-womyn policy even apply to these people who have postmodern identities that are shaped (and constrained, I guess) by multiple intersubjectivities? I was born and raised a woman, so what if I “live” my life as other womyn-born-womyn do, but reject the notion of “identifying” as a woman now? What if I don’t identify in that sense at all, or furthermore, what if my identity is constantly changing? Do I get to attend the festival some years and not others? Doesn’t this seem ridiculous?

Other issues that the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival raises have to with what feminism is, where feminism is going, and who exactly is a feminist. I do not mean whatsoever to imply that these questions can be fully answered, as I know plenty of liberal, cultural, lesbian separatist, marxist, and radical feminists that have extremely different notions of what it means to be a feminist than I do, but I will try to tackle the important points of conflict as well as I can. I also do not mean to imply that there is one actual way of being a feminist, or that we all agree on where feminism is headed, or if it even still exists. But I will say this: feminists can and must work with the trans community because as far as I am concerned, they are us and we are them. I am aware of the different politics involved in this sticky subject, and some feminists even claim that the politics of transactivists is detrimental to feminist activism, but I intend to express why it is important for this site of contention to take up some form of coalition politics, as we are more alike than we are different, and I believe we must find a way to treat each other with respect even if we don’t find a common meeting ground (although I hope that we can!).

After doing research, I have realized that it is safe to say for this paper (as I have not read all the nuanced theories on this subject) that there seems to be a distinct schism between transactivists and radical feminist activists (that’s a given). Much of this disagreement in theory is huddled around the notion of gender and what to do with it. Radical feminists have long advocated for the repeal of gender– for gender dissolution. These radical feminists theorize gender as the source of their oppression, as the source of their domination by men (see any classic radical feminist theorist: Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan or Catherine MacKinnon, to name a few). Whereas on the other side of the coin, some transpeople perceive gender as crucial to their identity (Sweeney, 2004, 81). Kate Bornstein (1994), a widely read and quoted transwoman, writes, “The key to doing away with gender is the ability to freely move into and out of existing gender roles” (Bornstein, 122). This notion is not accepted by most radical feminist theorists, as it is a postmodern take on gender which seems to always have differing theories than radical feminism which can be understood as definitely not postmodern. In this postmodern take on gender, it can be argued that it is possible for transgendered females to live as women with or without hormones or sex reassignment surgery (SRS) (MacKenzie, 1994, 1). Judith Butler (2004) writes, “The feminist framework that takes the structural domination of women as the starting point from which all other analyses of gender must proceed imperils its own viability by refusing to countenance the various ways that gender emerges as a political issue, bearing a specific set of social and physical risks” (Butler, 9). Meaning that gender, as viewed through a postmodern lens, is not only about gender as a “blueprint” for the relationship between the dominators and the dominated (Sweeney, 77), but it is also a set of binary behaviors that are influenced by other behaviors and must not be only seen in the context of “oppressor/oppressed.” When we view gender in this more nuanced way of a site capable of transformative action, we see that perhaps we don’t have to dissolute gender, but instead we can perform gender differently; we can change what gender means.

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival claims that one of the main reasons for implementing a womyn-born-womyn policy is to create a safe space for women; to “protect” or shield women (or in the same light, that the women are protecting themselves) from men’s violence. However, male violence is surely not the only form of violence that a woman may experience. And furthermore, not only women experience male violence. On the first note, most theorists nowadays have shed the notion of a unified sisterhood; we have rejected the monolithic female experience (well, most of us leastwise). In this sense, we must understand that a woman of color may view white skin as a trigger of violence in the similar light that a white woman may view a biological male (of any skin color, I presume) as a trigger of violence. The white skin that a woman of color is weary of may be worn by a woman, and these two women may be together at the festival. How do we account for this? Do we simply say, “Well, this is a lesbian feminist separatist festival, and others can start a separatist festival based upon skin color (”race”)? Is having as many separatist movements as there are identities a progressive and transformative political praxis? I will try to answer these questions throughout this paper, but I want to quote a response on the Eminism.org Michigan/Trans Controversy Archive to the statement, “Women who are survivors of abuse would be traumatized or triggered if they see people or body parts that look like men’s while being on the land.” The last sentence of the response is as follows: “If the festival insists on removing certain group [sic] of women because of their genital structure or other physical characteristics reminiscent of male violence and domination, it should also tell white women to peel off their skin.” This reference to race can also backfire among transactivists, as it did in radical feminist Karla Mantilla’s (2000) response to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s womyn-born-womyn policy. She writes:

How superficial, individualistic, and simplistic it would be for me, as a white american raised by a white family, to come to feel that I was really a black person inside, to change my skin color and other features to begin passing as black, and to demand to enter people of color space! In that case we could clearly see how outrageous such a demand would be. Being black in the United States (and elsewhere) is so much more than a matter of adopting skin color. It is an insult and the mark of privilege to miss that point so entirely. This situation is exactly analogous to mtfs trying to gain access to Michigan (3).

Karla Mantilla is a radical feminist who seems to believe that radical feminists are concerned about how gender is played out in the “mind” and that transpeople simply adorn the opposite sex’s mannerisms, clothing, speech, and style to “become” the coveted gender. Mantilla and other radical feminists have claimed that transpeople seem to understand gender as something they do to the “outside” of their bodies while not addressing their male privilege on the “inside.” Mantilla (2000) writes, “One of the political problems that I see with the whole notion of transgender politics is the idea that by changing one’s appearance, presentation, or body, one can change one’s gender.”

Firstly, most transpeople will tell you that they do feel gender in the inside, and that they are trying to align their outside bodies with the gender that they feel on the inside of their bodies (see Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, 1993). So in this sense, MTFs are not simply “men” trying to be “women”– it is of course in no way that simplistic. Not to make it seems as though all transwomen have the same experience with gender/body/sexuality (of course they don’t), but it seems safe to say that MTFs probably have not been able to participate in average male privilege from birth, as they are markedly “different” than the normative male (before and after transition, if that is even a completely identifiable phenomenon, as I am assuming some MTFs may not be able to pinpoint their transitions, especially nonoperative MTFs). Furthermore, if Mantilla and other radical feminists are trying to progress from normative male thought patterns and behavior, then they should also be aware that they are assuming a normative Cartesian mind/body split that seems to have been a root cause of sexism (not to mention speciesism) in late modernity.

Moving on from that notion however, the above quote also begs the question Can we analogously align sexism with racism? Is it smart and progressive (or feminist) to do so? I don’t have the answers to these questions for this paper, but I still think they are important to posture, at any rate. But I do think that referring to racism and sexism as analogous precludes an intersectional analysis of racism and sexism because it treats them both as free standing and separate phenomena.

Sweeney (2004) writes, “Given the lengths trans-women go to in order to have their ‘right’ to be recognized as ‘real’ women acknowledged, and thus, present femininity as appealing, the goals of feminists and trans-women are antithetical” (Sweeney, 80). I originally (last winter) agreed with this statement, but I have since then read different theories that have nuanced my understanding of transpolitics. For instance, it is almost too easy to say, “Transwomen grow their hair to look more feminine, change their behaviors, and all together seem to embrace the femininity that radical and other feminists have been trying to cast off for the last half century.” And indeed, it was easy to write that. However, this is not the end all on the subject, and I believe transpolitics are much murkier and complex than this notion.

Radical feminists also note that womyn-born-womyn aren’t given the option of opting out of femininity (Sweeney, 2004, 79). Sweeney goes on to state, “This tension between a trans-woman’s ‘right’ to femininity, and the systematic marginalization that results from being feminine in society, is neither addressed nor resolved” (Sweeney, 2004, 79). Attending last year’s University of Connecticut Transgender Health and Legal Conference, I was in the presence of numerous MTFs. Many of them were adorned with miniskirts and high-heels. I can’t deny that running through my head was the idea of “What’s so empowering about a miniskirt anyway?” and the notion of understanding high-heels as similar and connected to Chinese foot-binding, as high-heels seem like one among many of the harmful beauty practices in the West (see Sheila Jeffrey’s Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Beauty Practices in the West, 2005). But it’s a mistake to first assume that all MTFs dress and act in this way, and furthermore that their adornment of such feminine clothing is a conscious effort to support femininity. If what Kate Bornstein (1994) puts forth is that we can (and will) only transgress gender roles if they become fluid, then the adornment of feminine clothing needs to be analyzed in a more complex manner. That is not to say that all nuanced analyses will agree, but at least the theories can support themselves in a stronger fashion.

Sweeney (2004) furthermore states, “The fact that trans-women can be recognized as women demonstrates that men have the power to define what ‘woman’ is. And that women are powerless to define their sex outside of male definitions” (Sweeney, 82, italics mine). I think she is still making the mistake of referring to transwomen as men in this statement. This is a mistake firstly because it takes away transwomens’ agency to call themselves and identify as “women” and be rightly accepted and identified as such by others. And on top of that, Sweeney doesn’t do much justice to the question I posed early on in this essay– questions such as “What is a ‘woman’ anyway?”.

Judith Butler has been theorizing gender for a long time now. She is trained in the history of philosophy but writes prolifically on gender relations from a postmodern perspective. She has questioned the notion of what it means to “be” a “woman” or a “man” (Butler, Undoing Gender, 2004). She has also posed the notion that the continuum that states that sex causes gender, which causes desire, must be broken up. In this sense, she is saying that we create a sex binary as much as we create a gender binary. Sex is usually seen as “natural” among most feminists. Gender is seen as the construction that is placed upon the natural sex, either male or female (or intersex). Butler is problematizing the naturalness of sex and theorizes that sex is as constructed as gender is. This comes into play in the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival when we try to analyze what it means to be a “woman.” Also, the MWMF’s womyn-born-womyn policy deeply comes into question when we have started problematizing what exactly is a “woman.”

For instance, Butler writes this line in her 2004 book Undoing Gender: “There may be women who love women, who even love what we might call ‘femininity,’ but who cannot find a way to understand their own love through the category of women or as a permutation of femininity. Butch desire may, as some say, be experienced as part of ‘women’s desire,’ but it can also be experienced, that is, named and interpreted, as a kind of masculinity, one that is not to be found in men” (Butler, 197). Would this butch lesbian be allowed entry into the MWMF? We can see here that the notions of femininity and that of being a “woman” are not fully understood, not to mention an agreed upon phenomena.

And furthermore, seen as a rejoinder to Sweeney’s quote about men defining what a “woman” is, as she says MTFs do when they “act” or “dress” like women, Butler (2004) writes, “Similarly, the transsexual desire to become a man or a woman is not to be dismissed as a simple desire to conform to established identity categories. As Kate Bornstein points out, it can be a desire for transformation itself, a pursuit of identity as a transformative exercise, an example of desire itself as a transformative activity” (Butler, 2004, 8). So when a biomale decides to transform into a transgendered female, she is not simply adorning an already fabricated femininity, but defining herself where she so chooses. How can we so easily say this is just upholding normative femininity? The constraining and unencompassing gender binary of women/men can also be a place of transformation: “It is important not only to understand how the terms of gender are instituted, naturalized, and established as presuppositional but to trace the moments where the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged, where the coherence of the categories are put into question, and where the very social life of gender turns out to be malleable and transformable” (Butler, 2004, 216). Theorizing gender as malleable and witnessing its transformative effects, gender can thus be viewed as an “edge” (see Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, 1987). An edge refers to a place where transformation can and must take place, less we all perish. Butler (2004) writes:

Feminism is about the social transformation of gender relations. Probably we could agree on that, even if “gender” is not the preferred word for some. And yet the question of the relationship between feminism and social transformation opens up onto a difficult terrain. It should be obvious, one would think, but something makes it obscure. Those of us to whom this question is posed are asked to make clear what we already assume, but which is not at all to be taken for granted. We may imagine social transformation differently. We may have an idea of the world as it would be, or should be, transformed by feminism. We may have very different ideas of what social transformation is, or what qualifies as a transformative exercise (204).

Transformation is exactly what feminism needs to be focused on. Transformation not only in the sense of how a gender is performed or related to other genders, but also transformation in the sense of how feminists of all sorts relate to each other and those groups/activisms that they see as “other.” Butler (2004) writes, “That feminism has always countered violence against women, sexual and nonsexual, ought to serve as a basis for alliance with these other movements, since phobic violence against bodies is part of what joins antihomophobic, antiracist, feminist, trans, and intersex activism” (Butler, 9).

There are many reasons that transactivists and radical feminists activists should work together, or at least try to. First off, Darke and Cope (the authors of the Trans Inclusion Policy Manual for Women’s Organisations, 2002) put forth the notion that women’s liberation will require more than “just” women (quoted in Sweeney, 83). And furthermore, they also put forth the opinion that “the oppression of trans-women is a concern for all women” (quoted in Sweeney, 83). It could be argued that the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is a lesbian separatist festival that doesn’t aim to “oppress” transwomen, but merely provide a venue for self identified “wimmin-loving” womyn-born-womyn to associate with other self identified “wimmin-loving” womyn-born-womyn. However, the womyn-born-womyn policy at Michigan is not an isolated separatist action, but an adherence to the notion that MTFs are not women at all (or enough so?). Given that the two debating notions of gender (that of radical feminists, and that of transactivists) are very different in theory, they should try to inhabit a space of agreement in practice at least. It is my opinion that the queer notion of fluid identities, Butler’s postmodern notion of gender performativity, and Kate Bornstein’s notion of gender play being transformative in and of itself has more potential for progress, growth, and social transformation than that of the radical feminist notion of eradicating gender (as it is only seen as a relationship between the dominating and the dominated). It is also my belief that coalition politics is the place where we need to find ourselves in this global world, and if a theory of the oppressed doesn’t lend itself to work with others who are oppressed, then that theory needs to be nuanced, and in failure of that, it needs to be left behind. I should note that I think feminism can be (and is being) transformed, not left behind. Butler (2004) writes:

Anzaldua asks us to consider that the source of our capacity for social transformation is to be found precisely in our capacity to mediate between worlds, to engage in cultural translation, and to undergo, through the experience of language and community, the diverse set of cultural connections that make us who we are…

She is asking us to stay at the edge of what we know, to put our own epistemological certainties into question, and through that risk and openness to another way of knowing and living in the world to expand our capacity to imagine the human. She is asking us to be able to work in coalitions across differences that will make a more inclusive movement…

The unitary subject is the one who knows already what is, who enters the conversation the same way as it exits, who fails to put its own epistemological certainties at risk in the encounter with the other, and so stays in place, guards its place, and becomes an emblem for property and territory, refusing self-transformation, ironically, in the name of the subject… ( Butler, 228, italics in original).

Gloria Anzaldua’s work in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and her essay in This Bridge We Call Home (2002) is not the only work I’ve been reading lately that mentions coalition building, as I have also been studying the Zapatistas. A zine by R.J. Maccani (2006) that ARRGH! read last month was an attempt (and a good one at that) to explain the Zapatistas’ postmodern revolution. Maccani writes, “The Zapatistas reach out to many and all ‘different’ people to join them in struggle, not only to workers, but to the indigenous, farmers, the unemployed, women, youth, queer folks, in short, all those who, in one manner or another, experience exclusion” (Maccani, 5). He also writes of his activism in the Cincinnati Zapatista Coalition (CZC), “It was our responsibility to find the face of rebel America, to listen to its voice, to link its struggles” (Maccani, 13). He is referring specifically to a Zapatista inspired U.S. collective, but I think we can find a good lesson in his work, and that is basically the necessity to link struggles of the oppressed. He ends his zine with “something like a poem,” one of the lines being to recognize the need to have a “Movement that addresses conflict and contradiction not with punitive but transformative justice (Maccani, 18).

I am still left with questions. Don’t wimmin-loving self-identified womyn-born-womyn have the “right” to meet, play, learn, and love together in a space they have etched out of normative America for a long weekend? And conversely, don’t transwomen and trans activists have a “right” to protest this? I think these questions may be too simplistic and too broad at the same time. Too simplistic in the sense that yes, of course wimmin-loving self-identified womyn-born-womyn should be able to come together in their own space, but does that separatism also play out in their politics, in a way that precludes coalition building? There are more questions than just that of the festival’s policies, but also when the festival goers leave, how are their politics played out in praxis? As well, these questions are too broad also in the sense that separatism is itself a complex and murky subject that I haven’t even begun to tackle in this paper. I will end this paper with two quotes from different sides of the womyn-born-womyn policy debate:

In particular, the work of radical feminists in establishing a connection between violence against women and the social construction of masculinity has been valuable to the feminist vision of a future without gender. The notion that men can compromise a woman’s right to women-only space, and indeed, that “gender” is something can (sic) be appropriated at will, will only dilute these goals (Sweeney, 2004, 85, italics mine)

As a rape survivor, I understand the need for safe space together– free from sexist harassment and potential violence. But fear of gender variance also can’t be allowed to deceptively cloak itself as a women’s safety issue (Feinberg, 1996, 116).

References

Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

______. 2002. “now let us shift…the path of conocimiento…inner work, public acts.” Pp. 540-578 in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, edited by Gloria E. Anzaldua and Analouise Keating. NY: Routledge.

Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. NY: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. NY: Routledge.

Darke, Julie, and Allison Cope. 2002. Trans Inclusion Policy Manual for Women’s Organisations. Vancouver: Trans Alliance Society.

Eminism.Org website on MWMF: http://eminism.org/michigan/faq-debate.html

Feinberg, Leslie. 1993. Stone Butch Blues. Los Angeles, CA: Firebrand Books.

______. 1996. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Jeffreys, Sheila. 2005. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. NY: Routledge.

Maccani, R.J. 2006. “What Does the Sixth Declaration of the Zapatistas Have to do with You?” Available online at: http://www.lefttun.org/files/intergalactic.pdf) (Downloaded 03May08).

MacKenzie, Gordene. 1994. Transgender Nation. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Mantilla, Karla. 2000. “Men in Ewes’ Clothing: The Stealth Politics of the Transgender Movement”. Originally in Off Our Backs Apr 2000, downloaded from: http://questioningtransgender.org/stealth.html

Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival Official Website: http://www.michfest.com/

Sweeney, Belinda. 2004, “Trans-ending women’s rights: The politics of trans-inclusion in the age of gender.” Women’s Studies International Forum 27: 75-88.