Separatism and Needs: a Critique of the Attempt to overcome Sexual and Gender Norms

This paper examines lesbian separatism as a feminist practice of liberation, focusing on the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group and its critique of heterosexuality and male-dominated social relations. It asks whether liberation from socially shaped desires requires a separation from the structures and relationships through which these desires are produced. Drawing on the group’s writings, contemporary feminist debates, and theoretical perspectives from Theodor W. Adorno and Judith Butler, the paper explores the relationship between gender, desire, social practice, and the formation of needs. It argues that separation can serve as a critical practice for questioning internalized and socially imposed desires. However, separation should not be understood primarily as physical or ontological division between women and men, but as a way of creating distance from coercive social relations and making genuinely autonomous forms of desire possible.