How Lavender Jane Loved Women: Re-figuring Identity-based Life/Stylism in 1970s Lesbian Feminism

Abstract

This paper explores the innovative, elaborate means devised by lesbian feminists in the 1970s to fashion a distinctive politics of life/style and identity formation. This involves attention to the diverse features that came to signify the manufacture of Lesbian Nation in Toronto: clothing, living arrangements, vegetarianism, downward mobility, sexual democracy. Lesbian activists challenged the trappings of patriarchal artifice that produced heterosexual femininity, and devised a platform that was anti-sty le at the same time, that they advanced the radical specificity of “out” (in contrast to closeted) lesbian identity. Interviews with 32 lesbian feminists who were active in feminist, lesbian, gay and left movements in the 1970s form the basis of this study. A central contradiction is the attempt made by movement activists to expand membership while regulating the enactment of politically and morally correct modes of lesbian feminist behaviour. The paper concludes with reflection on the shifts and tensions that surround “queer” life/styles and anti-heterosexist strategies in the mid-1990s.