Lesbian Activism Research Articles

“Stop AIDS Evictions!”

The early AIDS epidemic in New York City revealed the intersection of two long-term crises impacting gay and lesbian tenants in the city: a critical lack of affordable housing and homophobic discrimination in private and public housing provision. People with AIDS and their family members faced tenant harassment, eviction, and structural homophobia in New York State's rent regulations. This article's microhistory of the eviction of Michael Brown, a rent-regulated tenant in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, highlights how activists brought knowledge acquired in the traditional tenant movement into new gay and lesbian organizations. This collaboration was a result of Chelsea's history as a center of both militant tenant organizing and neighborhood-based gay and lesbian activism. In Chelsea, gay and lesbian residents joined the housing movement as low-income tenants, while also participating in neighborhood activism reflecting their concerns as gay and lesbian residents. Michael Brown's eviction case brought these two local organizing traditions into direct collaboration. This article builds on scholarship revealing the political agency of tenants and recent literature on housing and care during the AIDS epidemic by situating gay and lesbian advocacy for housing during the early AIDS crisis within a long trajectory of New York City tenant activism.

Book Review: Patrick McDonagh: Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973-93

Book Review: Patrick McDonagh: <i>Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973-93</i>

The intimacy of the procedure: Writing, lesbian, south as practices of the self

This is the first published English-language translation of the Argentinian lesbian activist writer val flores. This experimental essay thinks lesbian as a procedure of dissidence that exposes the guts of a way of doing: no longer sexual identity, but rather the body’s always unfinished writing, a writing as practice of the self, which babbles and mutters, a writing of not-doing as a vitalist affirmation. flores proposes that to write about making (oneself) a south lesbian writing, about the ways in which we (dis)organize life, language, body, writing, activism, love, sex, city, fucking, is to venture to write about the ways in which neocolonial power and its processes of subjection are constituted and break down in the cellular tissue of our own subjectivities. In this way lesbian writing may be a contingent and larval epistemic space in which to glimpse other forms of sensibility – political, affective, linguistic, sexual, and cultural.

An intimate procedure: translating val flores

This translator’s note prefaces my translation of the essay “The Intimacy of the Procedure: Writing, lesbian, south as practices of the self” by the Argentine lesbian activist and writer val flores. I comment on flores’s writing from the perspective of translating it, attending to the corporeality of her language, its imbrication with lesbian writing across languages and continents, and her tactics of citation, as well as providing some context for her first-time anglophone readers. I then dialogue with the text to think about translation itself as an “intimate procedure”: an act of (self-)transformation and desire; the work of bridging worlds and tongues; and a kind of queer or feminized labor rendered invisible in a colonial imagination. I offer lesbian, anticolonial translation as part of literature's possibilities and erotics.

From criminal radicalism to gay and lesbian lobbyism: a transnational approach to the Scandinavian homophile movement, 1948–1971

ABSTRACT This article describes and analyzes the development of the three Scandinavian national associations for homo- and bisexuals from their founding in 1948 through 1971. This is the first time these associations are analysed as a transnational network rather than nationally divided entities. Using documentary evidence from the national archives of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as well as other archives, this article establishes the development of the Scandinavian movement based on primary evidence, and is thus able to correct, nuance, and expand upon the ‘oral traditions’ that have been the standard in Scandinavian historiography in this field. The article argues that the transnational angle on the movement brings out new perspectives and offers a new periodization of homophile or gay and lesbian activist history. It concludes that the Scandinavian movements cannot be fitted into the typical American timeline of gay and lesbian activism, and thus opens the question of how European LGBT history differs from those in the United States.

Rummaging in the Attic: Queer Memories and Enduring Activism in the Attic Press/Róisín Conroy Collection

ABSTRACT: This hybrid narrative-historical essay relates the legacy of late-twentieth-century Irish women’s activism as it is documented through the Attic Press/Róisín Conroy Collection (RCC) housed at University College Cork, Ireland. While much of the historical discussion about this era of women’s activism focuses on the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, in this essay, the author makes the case that the RCC actively presences Irish lesbian women’s activism. The essay highlights specific items in the archive which particularly emphasize the more mundane tasks required to power an enduring social justice movement because these actions are often overlooked in preference for the more obvious public-facing elements of activism. Throughout the piece, the author reflects on her position as an activist and scholar from outside of Ireland in relation to the archive and more recent demonstrations of Irish feminist activism. Ultimately, the history of Irish women’s and lesbian activism as documented by the RCC reminds readers of the need for collaboration and collective rage, thought, and pain. In the post-COVID-19 era, activists will be re-visioning the way they connect, share, care, and fight for justice.

La Caldosa: Afro-Lesbian Space-Making and Transnational Politics in Havana

This essay tells the story of a caldosa (both a stew and the gathering where it is served) hosted in 2016 by a network of Black lesbian activists in Havana, Cuba, that took place on the morning after the Pulse massacre in Orlando, Florida. The author explores the caldosa as both an example of and a metaphor for the transnational, coalitional, and space-making politics of Black lesbian activists in the island. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and a participatory mapping project, the author shows how the work of making caldosa connects the local practice of space-making to a hemispheric and anticipatory Black lesbian politic. The essay builds on previous work on Black lesbian feminism in Cuba and provides insight into the type of activism that was happening in the island in the mid-2010s, which laid the groundwork for the growth in Afro-feminist and Afro-queer activism in the following years.

Emergence of LGBT Movements in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Estonia

ABSTRACT In this article, we study the emergence of gay, lesbian and trans community organizing in 1989–1994 in Estonia. During the post-Soviet transition period, issues of human rights and democracy were actively debated both in Estonia and internationally. Using the fragmentary material that we have gathered from media, archives and interviews, we try to reconstruct a narrative of events and public debate on AIDS, homosexuality, and gender transitions in Soviet Estonia that led to the formation of the LGBT community. We frame this homosexual and transgender emancipation with Juri Lotman’s model of explosion that allows us to view how in specific historical circumstances seemingly opposing discourses of national emancipation and LGBT emancipation could emerge without conflict. The international community of LGBT organizations supported the first Estonian activists by funding their training, large-scale activities and community building. While the transition period saw a discursive explosion that opened the public debate to sexual and gender minorities, the new Estonian political elite dismissed these minorities as alien to their nation-building project. In the second half of the 1990s gay and lesbian activism was professionalized, and trans advocacy achieved an official legal gender recognition regulation.

Patrick McDonagh. Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973–93.

The Republic of Ireland has witnessed vast social reforms in the twenty-first century, including decriminalization of abortion, the extension of civil marriage to same-sex couples, and a reformation of divorce legislation. For perhaps the first time in the history of the Irish State, the country has shed its conservative Catholic image to become a leader in civil rights. Recent histories of modern Ireland have begun to document the root of activist movements that have led to such social reforms, including now Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973–93 by Patrick McDonagh. Prior to this publication, historical accounts of gay and lesbian activism in Ireland preceding the decriminalization of male homosexual activity in 1993 were sadly lacking. Yet the records of individuals and organizations were readily available for public consultation. In 2007, Senator David Norris, an Irish civil rights campaigner and a central figure in the decriminalization bill, donated his personal archive to the National Library of Ireland. The following year the National LGBT Federation made the pertinent decision to donate the Irish Queer Archive (Cartlann Aerach na hÉireann), also to the National Library of Ireland. That collection of material is vast, including the records of many central LGBT organizations and the personal papers of gay rights activists in Ireland. McDonagh is perhaps the first historian to fully use these manuscript collections, and the result is a detailed and engaging account of the gay rights movement in Ireland. McDonagh has also incorporated oral interviews to great effect, including interviews taken specifically for this research as well as accessing the records of Edmund Lynch, who has been conducting interviews with Irish LGBT individuals since 2013.

TRANS FEMINISTIČKE KOALICIJE NA POSTJUGOSLOVENSKOM PROSTORU: KA FEMINISTIČKOJ RADIKALNOJ SOLIDARNOSTI

The conflict between trans-inclusive and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) has recently erupted in the post-Yugoslav space, adding to the urgency of embracing trans-feminism. In order to forge the ground for such feminist orientation, this paper interweaves two theoretical reflections: the subject of feminism, and the historical lesbian experience of becoming ‘included’ with/in it. Beginning with the idea that, similarly to trans, it also took time and effort for lesbianity (see discussion on this concept in the article) to be recognised as a ‘legitimate’ subject of feminist emancipation, I extend Wittig’s negation of lesbian womanhood to trans women. With this in mind, I argue that feminist radical solidarity requires an open-ended, liminal conception of gender. I then draw upon nine interviews with seven cis-gender, one non-binary, and one genderqueer lesbian activist from the post-Yugoslav space to explore the ways in which they endeavoured to bring about feminist radical solidarity in their activist engagement. I conclude that solidarity, rather than normative inclusion that we, lesbians, fought for as feminists, should eventually be put at the service of trans-feminism. In this manner, trans-feminism can become an integral part of women studies, trans women can be recognised as subjects of feminism, and trans persons embraced as our political and personal allies. Keywords: feminism, lesbian activism, solidarity, TERF, post-Yugoslav space

“Second-Class Citizens”: The Mobilization of the French Homosexual Movement for the “Right to Difference” (1979–1982)

While the French constitution of 1791 abolished the crime of sodomy, the 19th century nevertheless allowed the political power and the bourgeoisie to repress homosexuality thanks to a broad legal arsenal. In 1942, Philippe Pétain explicitly reintroduced the criminalisation of homosexual relations into French law. Some years later, an amendment adopted in 1960 considered homosexuality a “social plague”, like tuberculosis or alcoholism. French homosexuals remained what they had always been: second-class citizens. The homosexual movement that emerged in the 1970s was mostly revolutionary and very few were interested in legalist demands. Many of activist came from extreme left-wing organisations; for them it was more a question of fighting for the revolution than attempting to become citizens like the others. With the end of the 1970s, the revolutionary horizon vanished and the French homosexual movement, in a quest for popularization, evolved its paradigms to fight against repression. This article retraces and discusses the evolution of homosexual mobilisation in the early 1980s, when gay and lesbian activists reconfigured the French homosexual movement from the perspective of claiming a “right to difference” and ending their status as “second-class citizens”.

Review: Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism, by Allyson P. Brantley

Review: <i>Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism</i>, by Allyson P. Brantley

Getting the Queer Word Out: Word is Out and 16mm Distribution as Gay and Lesbian Activism

Cet article retrace la distribution en 16mm du film Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (Mariposa Film Group, 1977, États-Unis) à travers le Canada entre 1977 et 1985. Il contribue au corpus croissant de travaux sur la distribution de films en se penchant sur celle des films gais et lesbiens durant cette période. En s’appuyant sur des journaux numérisés ainsi que sur la correspondance et la documentation en archives, l’auteur démontre que la distribution en 16mm de Word is Out dépendait de son intermédialité avec d’autres médias et technologies de communication, notamment le film en 35mm, la télévision, les grands journaux et les revues gaies, qui étaient tous cruciaux pour former un contre-public discursif. L’analyse de ces connexions intermédiales élargit notre compréhension des façons complexes par lesquelles les militants gais et militantes lesbiennes ont utilisé le film pour créer des communautés et élargir leur mouvement.

Gay and lesbian activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973–93. By Patrick McDonagh. Pp 219. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. £76.50.

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Geschlecht und Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Queer/Feminismen zwischen Widerstand, Subversion, und Solidarität ed. by Verena Sperk et al.

Reviewed by: Geschlecht und Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Queer/Feminismen zwischen Widerstand, Subversion, und Solidarität ed. by Verena Sperk et al. Simone Pfleger Verena Sperk, Sandra Altenberger, Katharina Lux, and Tanja Vogler, editors. Geschlecht und Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Queer/Feminismen zwischen Widerstand, Subversion, und Solidarität. transcript Verlag, 2020. 218 pp. Paper, €40. Inspired by Sara Ahmed's call to embrace living a feminist life in her book of the same name and to face injustices as a collective, Geschlecht und Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Queer/Feminismen zwischen Widerstand, Subversion, und Solidarität (Shifting gender and gender relations: Queer/Feminisms and resistance, subversion, and solidarity), with its nine contributions, addresses sociohistorical and cultural phenomena and discursive interventions into contemporary feminist theory and activism. Underscoring that gender and gender relations are not only the object of research but are categories that are constantly in flux and transforming, the editors argue for the separation of feminist and queer analyses in order to avoid the latter being subsumed within the former. They call for resistance, subversion, and solidarity as modes of feminist critique to offer multiperspectival approaches to gender and gender relations by engaging feminist critiques of subjectivity, queer theorizing and its politics, postcolonial theory, body studies, mad studies, and intersectionality. Eliah Lüthi's contribution engages with trans* and mad studies in order to argue for an examination of the depathologization of trans* individuals and the repeated and ongoing practices of exclusion of certain trans* bodies. Arguing that norms are defined through and rely on an Other that serves as the referential counterpart, Lüthi considers changes in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the European International Classification for Diseases since the mid-1970s, emphasizing that trans* as a category has undergone processes of pathologization, its subsequent depathologization, and repathologization. [End Page 127] In her contribution, Tanja Voglers examines the relationship between the queer politics of Christopher Street Day (CSD) and the memory culture linked to the Stonewall riots. Relying on discourse analysis of texts and images, she underscores how the Stonewall riots are considered the starting point of gay and lesbian activism by many activists as well as academics. However, this particular construction of a whitewashed gay and lesbian history eclipses the fact that queer activism and organizing predates Stonewall and that race played a significant role in the riots of the 1960s but is often overlooked in mainstream discourses. Using LesMigraS as an example of an organization that positions itself in critical opposition to the CSD celebrations in Germany, Voglers emphasizes how certain groups are unable to participate in CSD because they do not see themselves represented in the program yet wish to feel more welcome (again). Andrea Urthaler turns to the feminist movement in Southern Tyrol in her article and shows that it has existed since the 1970s. She argues that the movement needs to be interrogated in relation to space, gender, and power, and draws a connection between private and public places and spaces. Urthaler points out that the feminist movement contributed to the creation of women's shelters, archives, libraries, and so on, and thus caused significant changes to some spaces in the city of Bozen. Verena Sperk focuses on the harmful potential of humor and laughter and the normalization of injurious language. However, she argues, humor can also be understood as a mode of transformation, since it holds the potential for resistance and feminist intervention. Using the stand-up show Nanette by Hannah Gatsby as an example, Sperk underscores that comedy can walk a fine line between being demeaning and having the power to unsettle hegemonic structures. The volume's final contribution, by Alexa Baumgartner, examines the Austrian avant-garde architecture movement of the 1960s and 1970s and asks how certain avant-garde buildings have the capacity to deconstruct gender relations. Leaning on contemporary posthumanist and queer feminist theories, she underscores that architecture offers the possibility to rethink bodies in relation to the materiality of buildings, but she cautions that many of the installations do not call into question traditional gender dynamics such as heteronormativity. Overall, the volume is a valuable contribution to feminist and queer scholarship and touches upon a variety of...

Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights By Kanika Batra

Reviewed by: Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights by Kanika Batra Carli Coetzee Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights KANIKA BATRA Routledge, 2022. ISBN 9780367772109 paper. Kanika Batra's ambitious monograph Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics Counterpublics, Human Rights makes an intervention in a number of fields, complicating and nuancing existing conversations. It has been awarded the Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures prize, a collaboration with the National Women's Studies Association. The argument of the book is that postcolonial studies as a field of inquiry will be richer if it pays attention to feminist and LGBTQ print media for what they reveal about the located histories of gender and sexuality. The archive on which Batra draws is mainly pre-digital, and it is a salutary reminder that despite the optimistic belief that the internet contains all knowledge, there are important and vital archives that remain outside of these networked knowledge systems. Batra locates her archive in three distinct but linked Global South contexts, which allows her to think comparatively across spaces, but also to map common ground. This is an important methodological component of the work, and one that is hugely inspirational for those scholars and activists exploring the kind of Global South solidarities that are possible. The book is invested in the formation of feminist and queer organizational and print networks, and Batra shows how these networks have played a vital role in the direction taken by feminist-queer activism in more recent years. The archive of magazines and newsletters shows, she argues, the modes through which postcolonial feminist and queer activists created regional, national, and transnational alliances. The materiality of the archives, and the state in which she is able to encounter and access them, adds an additional layer to her smart and engaged analysis. Through the reflections on and analyses of these archives, Batra builds for the reader a lens through which to examine and question hegemonic discourses such as the heterosexual bias in transnational feminist thinking. Her reading of the archive is intent on the activists' search for common ground, but her keen eye is able to detect the nuanced disagreements, responses, and debates through which this commonality is found, made, and remade. The argument of the book loops forwards and backwards, asking probing questions about the forms of activism that have flourished or withered and about [End Page 150] how the print archives that form her primary source materials can be used to help us understand the formation of publics and counter-publics. She uses the evocative and useful phrase of "semi-remembered counter-publics," an injunction to activists and scholars to reenter these archives in order to generate questions that will in turn reconvene counter-publics who resist hegemonic models. The book has a three-part structure, each of the three sections geographically centered, and collectively mapping transnational feminist and queer "worldmaking and world-shifting" practices and activities. Part 1 is titled "Abeng, Challenging Depravation," and its focus is on Jamaica. The two linked chapters develop an argument that illustrates that while there are continuities between women's gay and lesbian activism, these continuities do not always guarantee harmonious solidarity. Part 2, "Azadi, Emerging Freedoms," moves the focus to India, and this section includes as one of its highlights: a nuanced and extremely useful discussion of the over-used (and often misused) concept "subaltern." In this section Batra challenges the charge, which has often been made, that Indian gay and lesbian identities are imitations of Western lifestyles. In the contextual attention to a term such as subaltern, and in the mapping of Indian LGBTQ+ and feminist histories in India, the scholarship shows an immersion into the located histories of these forms of activism and an ability to see both continuities and change across time. In section 3, called "Amandla, Embodying Power," Batra focuses on South Africa and develops one of her main arguments, namely that these networks do not mimic but instead pose a challenge to Euro-American definitions of terms such as "queer" and that the networks call for specificity in the development of such terminologies. This is an important point as it helps us to formulate responses to universalizing assumptions about...

Bojan Bilić, Marija Radoman (eds.), Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space: Sisterhood and Unity

Bojan Bilić, Marija Radoman (eds.), Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space: Sisterhood and Unity

Getting the Hell Over Manhattan

Getting the Hell Over Manhattan

Towards trans-feminist coalitions in the post-Yugoslav space: Building feminist radical solidarities

The conflict between trans-inclusive and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) has recently erupted in the post-Yugoslav space, adding to the urgency of embracing trans-feminism. In order to forge the ground for such a feminist orientation, this paper interweaves two theoretical reflections: the subject of feminism, and the historical lesbian experience of becoming ‘included’ with/in it. Beginning with the idea that, similarly to trans, it also took time and effort for lesbianity (see discussion on this concept in the article) to be recognised as a ‘legitimate’ subject of feminist emancipation, I extend Wittig's negation of lesbian womanhood to trans women. With this in mind, I argue that feminist radical solidarity requires an open-ended, liminal conception of gender. I then draw upon nine interviews with predominantly cis-gender lesbian activists from the post-Yugoslav space to explore the ways in which they endeavoured to bring about feminist radical solidarity in their activist engagement. I conclude that solidarity rather than normative inclusion that we, lesbians, fought for as feminists, should eventually be put at the service of trans-feminism. Like that, trans-feminism can become an integral part of women studies, trans women can be recognised as subjects of feminism, and trans persons embraced as our political and personal allies.

Leaving a Mark and Passing the Torch: Intended Legacies of Older Lesbian and Gay Spanish Activists

ABSTRACT Aging paradigms should entail all individuals. More research on older LGBT+ adults is needed since the literature has been mainly built on heteronormative and cisgender standards. The creation and shaping of the kind of legacy an individual would like to leave behind when he/she dies is key in aging well. This study explores the intended legacies of older lesbian and gay adults (50+ years old) who were activists in social movements in Spain. Eighteen participants (12 gay men) participated in a semi-structured interview on their intended legacies. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the interviews. The main findings showed that all participants reported intended legacies: i) personal, to transmit their lived knowledge and to be remembered as good and committed persons; ii) broader, to contribute to LGBT+ rights, and to a better society; iii) composite, the desire that younger generations recognize their contributions, and to know they helped to protect new generations. The participants in this study lived a life of intense involvement in social movements, and currently their intended legacies involve leaving a mark and passing the torch to younger generations. This understanding will help us to develop adequate practices that promote well-being in older LGBT+ adults.