This article attempts to intervene in the scholarly debate about Monique Wittig’s status as an “anti-identitarian” thinker by highlighting the ways that mathematics appears throughout her oeuvre as a privileged site of pre-linguistic creativity, wherein a form identification seems to remain possible. Whereas Wittig pointed to language as the semiotic system that allows discourse to smuggle heterosexual and masculinist determination into all the identificatory acts of the speaking and writing subject, the counting and numbering subject seems for her to escape a similar critique. I investigate how this distinction structures her novel The Lesbian Body: I apply concepts drawn from mathematics, focusing especially on the concept of homology, to ask under what conditions we can understand Wittig’s lesbian as having, or rather producing through her particular approach to enumeration, an identity. I claim that Wittig gives us an example of how mathematical thinking can bleed into literary thinking in the domain of sex, gender, and identity, without imagining that bleed as dangerous abstraction, a masculinist domination of the affective, or a cheap metaphor. As Wittig’s importance as an author and philosopher undergoes reevaluation, my wager is that it would be useful to attend to her interventions in the way that the Western philosophical canon and the history of mathematics have been entwined.

The aim of this article is to analyze how the organization of the 40th anniversary of a lesbian self-managed space operates as a site of collective memory-making and contributes to the production of a lesbian genealogy, particularly in relation to aging lesbians and intergenerational transmission. It examines how archival practices, oral histories, and intergenerational exchanges contribute to sustaining lesbian existence over time, while revealing the role of social relations of power, particularly age and class, in shaping collective memory. It focuses on the practices and challenges involved in constructing lesbian historical memory and on the broader political significance of such memory work. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research initiated in October 2021, the article argues that community-driven practices, such as archival work, oral histories, and intergenerational discussions, play a central role in constructing lesbian historical memory and in sustaining a continuum of lesbian existence. Founded in the mid-1980s by lesbians seeking an autonomous space, the association has witnessed four decades of lesbian and feminist activism in a context marked by political transition, urban transformation, and the progressive disappearance of lesbian venues. Despite recurrent crises, its self-managed structure has enabled its survival, making the 40th anniversary a pivotal moment for collective reflection on its history. The article shows how this commemorative process foregrounds the political and affective dimensions of memory work, particularly within a space frequented by aging lesbians, a group often marginalized in dominant feminist, lesbian, and queer narratives.

This article argues that Alison Bechdel envisioned a new way of looking at lesbians in her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008). Through simultaneously universalizing lesbian experiences while celebrating the ways in which her characters’ sexualities rendered them different from each other and from the so-called ‘universal’ white male protagonists of much mainstream media, Bechdel created what I term a ‘universalizing’ gaze. This gaze usurped Laura Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’ through presenting lesbian characters, not as sexual objects drawn for the reader’s pleasure, but as aligned with readers: as the sexual subjects of the comic. This technique allowed Bechdel to portray lesbians as sexual people without hyper-sexualizing them, enabling a diverse group of readers to see themselves represented in the strip.

Members of the Feminary Collective—Eleanor Holland (b. 1948), Helen Langa (b. 1945), Mab Segrest (b. 1949), and Cris South (b. 1950)—convened for a roundtable on July 10, 2024, to discuss the legacy of Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-2023) and her work with the Durham, North Carolina, collective. First published as the Research Triangle Women’s Liberation Newsletter in 1969, Feminary was rebranded first as Feminary Newsletter, then as a journal—Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South Emphasizing the Lesbian Vision—in 1978. Holland, Langa, Pratt, Segrest, and South participated in the publication of Feminary from the mid-seventies until the collective’s end in 1982. This roundtable discussion covers the social, political, historical, and personal contexts in which Feminary developed. Participants detail the emotional, intellectual, and physical labor involved in journal production, alongside the collective’s political goals and common themes in various journal issues. Reflecting on their lives after Feminary, participants comment on the journal’s lasting impact on them individually, as well as its cultural interventions. Peppered throughout the conversation are anecdotes and meditations on Pratt’s poetry and her influence on roundtable participants, Feminary, and 20th and 21st-century U.S. social justice struggles.

For several decades, there have been scholars across the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) contributing to the formulation of lesbian thought, yet these seem to rarely have been in conversation with one another, never collectively interrogating questions on what it means to write lesbian histories from the region relationally, enabling a mutual legibility across these disparate contributions. This is not simply to account for similarities or differences of queer womanhoods across the region but to reflect on the complexities of the region itself whose very “regionality” remains contested and volatile. CEE is a region whose common experiences and shared history were also often forcibly imposed, making its unity a gelatinous conceptualisation. This special issue is one of the ways hoped to bring some of these voices together. Focusing on queer women from the region, beginning to speak collectively, we have carefully been able to access different modes of history making, those based on collectivity, feeling, speculation, oral histories, and histories that becomes palpable not primarily through authoritative texts but through the accumulation of affect.

Through newly discovered archival sources, including love letters, police records, hospital files and censuses, this article tracks the love story of two young women, Flora and Agnes, a same-sex couple at the turn of the nineteenth century, working in the sex trade. Their story takes us through police arrest, forced hospitalisation and leisure spaces such as dance halls. Historically, Flora and Agnes represent the many sex workers, who engaged in same-sex relations. It has been estimated that as many as 25% of women selling sex in European metropoles were in sapphic relationships, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The article describes the historical entanglement of sapphic love and sex work and provides example of how sapphic love and sapphic communities could provide solidarity and emotional support for sex workers, as well as enable class mobility and fertilised conditions for collective resistance towards authorities. Differently from male same-sex activities, female same-sex engagements were not criminalised in countries like Britain, Germany and Denmark. However, young women, like Flora and Agnes, were heavily surveilled by police and medical doctors, due to contemporary aims to control venereal diseases. We employ the notion of a “disobedient archive” to explore the ways in which historically marginalised subjects, such as young, working class, sapphic sex workers, contested structures of control, power, violence and confinement. Here, we pay attention to everyday acts and practices that challenged oppressive or disciplinary forces, as well as to failed or unsuccessful attempts of resistance. This permits a reading of the archive as a record of struggle and resistance, documenting previously silenced subjects’ assertions of presence and agency against institutional control and erasure.

This article investigates female homoeroticism encoded in cinematic form. I read two Polish films, In Custody/Nadzór (dir. Wiesław Saniewski, 1983) and By Touch/Przez Dotyk (dir. Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, 1985) to explore the new forms of femininity I call ‘proto-queer’. ‘Proto-queer’ is used here to conceptualize the figure of woman bearing a gendered and sexual instability that carries the hallmarks of what subsequently has become known as queerness. At the historical moment of state socialism, these fledgling forms of queer femininity were neither fully developed nor clearly legible. Yet, their distinctly Polish and socialist inflections allow us to view them as precursors to transgressions that would only later be more recognizable within a queer interpretive framework. The analysis of sexual or erotic otherness in the context of isolation and social exclusion around which both films develop foregrounds the affective power of shame and its transformative abilities. I demonstrate how shame and humiliation are both de-constituting and foundational in relation to sexual identity. I analyze how cinematic articulations of proto-queer intimacies generate a reimagined understanding of female homoeroticism in socialist Poland and how this study contributes to the literature on queerness and its representation more generally.

This article explores how oral historians might more fully engage the sensory and affective dimensions of queer memory by centering the body as an archival site within the interview encounter. Drawing on the Pussy Palace Oral History Project—a public history initiative documenting Toronto’s trans-inclusive lesbian bathhouse events and the 2000 police raid that followed—we introduce somatic elicitation, a contemplative interview technique designed to surface embodied memory. Rooted in arts-based facilitation and developed to access what Paula Hamilton calls “subliminal histories,” the method relies on breathwork, inward attention, and five-sense cueing to interrupt narrative flow and prompt body-based recollection. We argue that somatic elicitation invites narrators to remember not only what happened but how it felt—producing interview material that is sensorily dense, emotionally layered, and grounded in first-person perception. The article situates this technique within queer and radical public history, the history of the senses, and existing practices of sensory elicitation, reflecting on its implications for archival theory, affect studies, and the politics of embodied recordmaking. Through three analytical frames—Attunements, Atmosphere, and Asynchrony—we examine how narrators responded to the technique and what it made newly perceptible about Toronto’s queer erotic life at the turn of the millennium. Ultimately, we propose somatic elicitation as a method for listening queerly: one that honors ephemeral experience, amplifies embodied knowledge, and expands what can be surfaced, recorded, and remembered within queer oral history.

This paper examines lesbianity (i.e., a less pathological term in Slavic languages than lesbianism) and the politicisation of lesbianity in socialist Slovenia during the “democratisation” processes in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The cumulative effect of various developments led to the first collective lesbian public self-representation (such as the media pamphlet “We Love Women”), and subsequently to the establishment of the group Lesbian Lilit (LL) in 1987. This paper traces lesbian organising in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia through interactions with the Yugoslav new feminist scene and the Slovene gay movement until 1993, when the squatting of the emptied Yugoslav army complex Metelkova in Ljubljana took place. The alliance of lesbian activism with more established feminist and gay political activist organising allows an examination of lesbianity through what I call “in-betweenness”. Finally, the paper accounts for the missed – and still missing – chance for establishment of the Yugoslav Lesbian Socialist Party.

Historians have long argued that queer women in urban spaces received a level of legal and social tolerance or impunity toward their same sex relationships. This article argues that queer women were not arrested on charges of homosexuality or sodomy, but on charges of public indecency, “crimes of lewdness,” distribution of immoral literature, or prostitution. The use of sex work archives such as the Committee of Fourteen allows scholars to uncover more intersectional lesbian narratives by focusing on those who were most heavily impacted by vice and penal reform. Some historians have laid scholarly foundations by noting the queer subcultures within cooperative housing buildings in cities such as Chicago and New York. However, few historians have used the rich archive built around surveilling female sex workers to identify under-represented lesbian subcultures in this period. While white and upper-class queer women may have been able to live together without raising concerns or accusations of sexual misconduct, the existing social and judicial attitudes toward Black and working-class immigrant women’s sexuality meant that their same-sex relationships made them a greater target than their white counterparts. While sex work provided means for queer women of any race to support themselves outside of a marriage to a man, Black queer women were disproportionately prosecuted. By understanding the history of early twentieth century sex work and lesbian communities as inextricable, scholars can uncover narratives of working class, Black queer women who have been systematically erased from the historical record.