Intersectional dialogues - a politics of possibility?

Abstract

In this short piece I hope to draw attention to the location of class within debates over lesbian feminism and queer theory, acknowledging some intellectual legacies, departures and points of intersection. My thoughts in constructing this paper on the relevancies – or otherwise – of lesbian feminism today, and the potential erasures and enduring legacies of and within this, were one of panic and inspiration: could I effectively capture a moment then? An endurance now? And a possible gap in-between the past and the present, embodied in the generations of older and younger lesbian feminists? Rather uncomfortably, I realized my own hesitancy itself relied on various caricatures of feminism, often depicted as naively universal, exclusionary and rather dated – the ‘in-fighting’ between ‘branches’ of feminism represented as fractious, immature and unsophisticated, to be moved away from via more advanced and complex theorization. In relation to sexuality, queer theory now sets much of the agenda, frequently positioned as grappling with such complexity while sidelining feminist concerns with the materiality of sexuality and the continued structucturing presence of heterosexism. The ‘battles’ between queer and lesbian feminism are marked by key contestations and where some have declared the ‘queer disappearance’ of lesbians as a political erasure (Jeffreys, 2003), others have pointed to the opening up of possibilities, queer or otherwise (Roseneil, 2000). Again, however, the risk in easy replacement is the dismissal of complications (both ‘past’ and ‘present’) where gains and intersections are lost in invested struggles and misrepresentation, in declaring whose side you are on (Jagose, 2009; Taylor et al., 2010).