Notes onlesbian

Abstract

An attempt to construct a lesbian history, whether it be sociological or art historical, involves con-. fronting silence, erasure, misrepresentation, and prejudice—all of which present formidable obstacles to historical research and writing. How is it possible to reconstruct a story from evidence that is partial, absent, hidden, denied, obfuscated, trivialized, and otherwise suppressed? The traditional methodology of historical research, and by extension the value system used to evaluate the quality of texts written in the name of history, is necessarily overdetermined by a prioritization of primary sources. But what if these primary sources do not exist because governments have not counted or otherwise documented the historical subject(s); or because the social and political persecution of said subject(s) has encouraged them to silence themselves; or because prejudice has enabled families and biographers to destroy documents such as letters and diaries that contain the crucial content that might constitute testimony or evidence? Some lesbian historians understandably believe that more information about lesbians in the past exists than we now know of or have access to and that, therefore, more primary sources and more traditional history is forthcoming. But it might also just as easily be assumed that the availability of written proof of lesbians and lesbianism is significantly less present and existent than lesbians and lesbianism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American history have in fact been.