Thanks for clarifying. And sorry for being so slow replying. I plead the need to think and my usual health issues.

I had pretty much come to the conclusion that radicals could only be either entirely theoretical or working towards revolution. I hadn't actually thought of the separatist lesbian utopia, but actually that makes a lot of sense and I suspect is the world view a lot of radicals in fact are falling back on, whether they realise it or not.

So, subsidiary question:
radicalism is the vision which both motivates it and critiques it.
Do you think liberal feminists can in fact take their theories from radicals and still maintain their full ability to negotiate? The thing that has struck me about this empowered/disempowered binary is that it really undermines someone's ability to talk with (i.e. negotiate with) the empowered because it also breeds contempt and dislike for the power. And while many people can have respect for someone who disagrees with them, it is very rare indeed to respect someone who has no respect for your position in society.

Oddly enough this even holds true if the power is something you've only been granted by the very person being disrespectful of it - if I say 'you are more powerful than me because you were given a rubber toy dog as a child, and I despise you for it' you are going to be in no mood to listen to my criticisms of why you shouldn't have been given a toy dog, or why everyone should have been given one, even though up until that moment you had never given a moment's thought to your toy dog.

So radicalism poisons its own waters. The question is, does it also poison other people's? Can one take lessons from radicalism about what the world's problems are and still find a new way to actually solve them? Or should one turn away from radicalism as an intellectually fascinating but ultimately fruitless cul-de-sac and look for something entirely different?

I'd probably agree that liberal feminism is a little too law-happy, to the detriment of enacting cultural change
And of course the danger of that is that if you manage to impose a law before the culture of society at large is ready for it, it will backfire far worse than any radical ranting on their soap box. Liberals have the potential to do more good, but they also have the potential to do more harm.

I'm not sure. I've been fumbling around thinking about this sort of thing for, what, two or three years now? And I sort of have the swirly shape of an understanding at the back of my brain but I can't bring it into proper focus. It is something to do with cultural expression, and negotiation not confrontation but negotiation without people even knowing they are being negotiated with. I kind of take Torchwood as my shiny example because I think that has done a brilliant job of negotiating for alternative sexualities, yet maybe that is just from my angle of looking at it. I know I've seen people who really didn't get 'the point' about sexuality in Torchwood. So maybe that isn't entirely the answer either.

I know a lot of things it's not - it's not confrontation, or expressing ones frustrations, or criticising other people's output, or doing anything to enforce, police or rely on the boundary between X and Y - but as you know, it is very easy indeed to criticise what other people are doing :D What I need to do is find some way to bring my own ideas into focus and work out what they actually are in detail so I can start applying them properly.