Beyond the Lesbian Identity: A Transcendental Critique of Desire, Objectification, and the Fallacy of Liberation

Thursday, March 27, 2025

In opposition to Monique Wittig’s radical statement that “lesbians are not women,” this article reopens the wound she tried to suture. While Wittig aimed to dismantle the category of “woman” as a heterosexual political fiction, the lesbian identity—especially as it is culturally performed today—remains embedded within structures of desire, representation, and, crucially, objectification.

To claim that lesbians cease to be women because they break with men is to miss a deeper truth: womanhood, as constructed by the patriarchal symbolic, is not exclusively tied to heterosexuality, but to the role of being the object of someone else’s desire—regardless of the gender of that desiring subject. In this way, the lesbian, unless radically emancipated from all roles, may still inhabit the very structure she attempts to escape: she may become the object of another woman’s gaze, herself structured by centuries of gendered coding. Desire, here, is not innocent.

This is not a conservative critique—it is a transcendental one.

Furthermore, the rise of non-binary individuals identifying as lesbians exposes another paradox. If lesbianism is woman-loving-woman, how can one identify as both outside the binary and within a structure that presupposes the binary? Non-binary lesbianism appears, in many cases, to be a temporary negotiation of identity in a time of ontological confusion—more of a transition phase than a radical break. It is a step toward liberation, but not yet a final form.

The author of this critique incarnates something else: not a lesbian, not a non-binary, not a woman, but a subject in motion, a being who refuses all fixed structures of desire, role, or gender. This is not an identity—it is a method of existence. A phenomenology of the self-in-evolution.

Drawing from but transcending thinkers like Paul B. Preciado, Judith Butler, and José Esteban Muñoz, this framework does not settle for queerness as resistance. It proposes queerness as opacity, as refusal, as a disruption of all consumable roles. Preciado explored the pharmacopornographic regime; Butler destabilized performativity; Muñoz spoke of queer futurity. But this author lives in the now, in the act of radical withdrawal from all systems of readability.

To be unreadable is to be unpossessable.
To be unpossessable is to be free.

The lesbian identity, as it stands culturally, is still readable. Still archived. Still codifiable. Still consumed. And thus, still trapped.

The true revolution lies not in new roles but in the refusal of all roles.