Lesbian History Research Articles

Some Liked It and Some Did Not: (Re)Circulating Lesbian Culture Among Queer Generations

Naming oneself, and claiming an identity and a community, depends largely upon how people define and represent themselves, and whether that self-definition and representation is accepted by, or legible to, others who inhabit different social positions based on age, gender, sexuality, and often generation. My aim is neither to rehabilitate the lesbian past or lesbian words for identity, nor to reject the increasingly broad use of the term queer. Rather, as a Generation X lesbian, I contend that lesbian culture, identity, and community continue to have much to offer for other categories of queerness that are similarly “untidy”, contested, or less well-understood by the mainstream. Approaching lesbian history, culture, and identity as dynamic and complex broadens possibilities for who might find connection and belonging in a lesbian past and a queer future. I explore an eclectic lesbian archive with an intergenerational Canadian focus that centers lesbian identity, community, and representation. My analysis supports my assertion that lesbian and queer inheritance flow multi-directionally, across and among people of varied generations and different social locations. I further posit that far from being anachronistic, lesbian, as a term for identity and culture, and as a political project, has ongoing productive potential, vitality, and agility that exceeds generational or linear understandings due to its fundamental grounding in self-definition. (Re)circulating lesbian and queer culture, therefore, functions as intergenerational wealth, community building, and cultural memory, bridging past pleasures, knowledge, and affective attachments with present and future possibilities for living.

Archives and amazons: A Quilters guide to the lesbian archive

This article offers a critical reflection on my creative engagement with the figure of the Amazon in the quilted artworks for my exhibition Archives and Amazons: quilting the lesbian archive which took place at HOME, Manchester in 2021. This exhibition was created in response to archival research at the only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to women, Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), which holds the remnants of the now disbanded Lesbian Archive and Information Centre (LAIC) (1984–1995). I engage specifically with two representations of Amazons, from two very disparate and politically opposed lesbian publications: firstly the illustrated cover of the LAIC newsletter, and a photographic series by the artist Tessa Boffin (1960–1993). Through auto-ethnography I articulate some of the pleasures and complexities in encountering, and re-visioning the Amazons that ride within the remaining fragments of the LAIC collection. I propose the quilt as a reparative strategy for engaging with the Amazon, one that refuses to disassemble and disassociate from the difficulties of lesbian history, re-assembling the pieces through a contemporary lesbian lens.

What Is a Lesbian Document? Platforming Archival Description, Documents, and History in Sweden

As Joanna Drucker (2014) convincingly argues, “Most information visualizations are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation" (p. 10). This article investigates the visuality and built-in argumentations of the Alvin interface for digitized Swedish cultural heritage, focusing on how the platform defines a document and the effects this definition has on the accessibility and interconnectedness of documents related to lesbian and feminist histories. This paper addresses how (failed) systematization and an emphasis on large quantities of documents and metadata breathes new life into outdated historiographies and renders documents and information related to feminist and lesbian histories and connections between these histories invisible. In doing so, platforms reinstitute divisions and stereotypes about feminist and lesbian history criticized by Adrienne Rich in her seminal essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Platform designers must begin to take seriously queer and feminist researchers' emphasis on context and the need to build flexibility, interconnectivity across private/public boundaries, fuzziness, and incompleteness into cultural heritage platforms from the outset.

Flags and fashion: expressions of solidarity through lesbian clothing

The clothes worn by lesbians are rich in meaning. Sometimes, they can help us to understand lesbian history and the social, personal, political, and erotic context of lesbian lives in the past. As LGBTQ communities have grown and the connections between groups within it have become at once stronger and more complicated, the clothes that lesbians (and others) wear can function as narrators. Lesbian fashion can be a tool for solidarity, our ideals worn quite literally on our sleeves. This paper is an analysis of how clothing has been - and is being - used by lesbians to show support for other groups within LGBTQ communities, through a fashion history lens. The focus is on printed t-shirts as well as clothing in different Pride flag colours, which I propose can be understood as a kind of “flagging.” Flagging, here, is a way to understand the intentional choices made by lesbians and other LGBTQ + people when signalling personal identities and intra-community solidarities through dress. When solidarity activism is placed directly onto the lesbian body, it is personal, and can craft specific messages. These messages, constructed from a language of identities, visual culture, and physical garments, are what this paper seeks to examine.

Novel Approaches to Lesbian History by Linda Garber (review)

Novel Approaches to Lesbian History by Linda Garber (review)

Novel Approaches to Lesbian History

“People require a past in order to live in the present and imagine a future” (166). Although Linda Garber’s study ends with this assertion, the statement represents the core thesis developed in her study of lesbian historical fiction. Garber’s analysis is grounded in thorough and detailed scholarship, using a wide range of theoretical, historical, literary, and primary critical sources to ground her reading of the literary works. In addition to referencing the scholarship, Garber illustrates the text’s key topics with both literary and popular fictional texts. This inclusion of popular fiction stands out as an important aspect of Garber’s discussion; integrating popular genres, since they are read more widely, gives Garber the ability to raise and examine her key questions of how history is used to provide lesbian readers a sense of a connection to the past. Such novels, by providing stories that actively place lesbians into specific historical periods, allow such readers to feel a sense of “validation,” that their lives have always been part of the world (3). Using fiction highlights one of Garber’s main questions about the historical record of lesbian lives: how can the accuracy of historical records be judged when lesbians have often been left out of such material, either deliberately or not?

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...

Lesbian Knitting: From Self-Sufficiency to Self-Representation

“Lesbian” and “knitting” are two words which are not often placed together, and yet lesbian knitting has a rich history and an even richer present. This article is an exploration of knitting as a form of lesbian self-sufficiency and self-representation over the past 50 years. It is split into two sections: the first examines the symbol-laden knitwear created by lesbians in the 1980s, as well as knitting within lesbian communities and subcultures such as the landdyke movement and the recent online phenomenon of cottagecore. The second section is an analysis of the personal practice of lesbian knitting and how the craft can take on specific meanings when done by lesbian hands. This section focuses particular attention on how knitting is related to butch lesbian identity and considers where it fits within a lineage of butch lesbian meaning-making. This article aims to begin a dialogue about lesbian knitting practices and lesbian knitting history that does not currently exist, and hopes to prompt further discussion on the topic in the future.

Reimagining queer female histories through fandom

Carol (2015), a film directed by Todd Haynes that is set in the 1950s, has quickly become a cult classic among queer audiences and has garnered industry prestige. By accepting the vision of queer female pasts that they have been presented with, fans of Carol use fandom to further shape this history, ensuring that at its core are ideas and practices that center queer connection, sensuality, and visibility. By using this vision of the past, fans not only create a community in the present but also, through this collective reconstruction, connect with lesbian history.

Queering American Military History

Abstract This historiographical article examines the state of the field of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (lgbtq) history in the United States military. It examines the field’s foundations and legacies from women’s history and the history of gender and sexuality as well as three threads that run through the field: sexuality and gender; sexuality, state control and citizenship; and sexuality and lived experience. The essay also explores interdisciplinary and theoretical connections and suggests areas for future research. The article argues that uncovering, centring, and mainstreaming lgbtq history – that is queering military history – is central to the broader field of military history because it relates to questions of power and the organisation of sexuality and gender performance and identity.

Changes and challenges of the archives: researching early-twentieth century lesbianism in United States prisons during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT “Changes and Challenges of the Archives” is based on a still-in-progress master’s thesis that I will complete by May 2021 at Sarah Lawrence College. The purpose of this article is not to come to any conclusions about the challenges of researching lesbian history during the COVID-19 pandemic but, rather, to explore how these world circumstances have further complicated the labor required of a lesbian historian. Many elements of this thesis and research are still in flux, including my investigation of the role race played in creating and developing a sexually deviant, criminalized definition of lesbian(ism). My ultimate hope is that this paper provides some valuable knowledge for my queer historian comrades and sparks a dialogue that can benefit historians who are continuing their research through debilitating circumstances.

The Sonnet Is Not a Luxury

The Sonnet Is Not a Luxury Lisa L. Moore (bio) “I went to Catholic schools, you see,” said Audre Lorde. “Now smartness was not as important as being good, and I was really bad.” In the 1996 documentary Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, the poet recounted a series of schoolgirl crimes, but the one she knew would really shock us was the story of her first published poem. Eyebrow raised, lip curled, hands imitating the disapproving gestures of the nuns, Lorde performed the irony of claiming a very traditional verse form, the sonnet, as the height of bad-girl bravura: I learned about sonnets by reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s love sonnets and loving them and deciding I was going to try. . . . I was editor of my high school magazine and I wrote a poem about love. And . . . the faculty advisor said it was a bad sonnet. And I really knew that it was a good one. But I knew that she didn’t like it because of the things that I said in it. So I sent it off to Seventeen magazine and they bought it. And I made more money from that one poem than I made for the next ten years. Audre Lorde’s poems, usually associated with the directly political and confessional open forms of second-wave feminist poetry and the vernacular and confrontational styles of the Black Arts Movement, have been overlooked as part the history of the sonnet. Indeed, although Lorde’s poems are “widely anthologized, honored by numerous awards, and praised by contemporary poets,” they have “received little critical attention.” Lorde’s perhaps unexpected interest in the sonnet challenges critics to “look to the insides of archives and bodies of work themselves in their original contexts” when reading Black poetry. [End Page 248] Elizabeth Alexander cautions us against reading such poems “just as we receive them . . . with the hard-to-avoid periodizing, tidying-up impulses of the presents in which they are made.” Lorde’s first publication, which does not appear in any of her collections, is a poem I do not want to see lost to history, or dismissed as juvenilia. Alexander reminds us: “it is testimony, or the text itself, that takes us inside the black interior, a moment, a movement.” Lorde’s first published poem takes us inside the Black interior of the modern sonnet, its revision, rejection, and revival. As part of the work of what I call elsewhere “a lesbian history of the sonnet,” this essay centers the queer, Black, and feminist energies of this compact, powerful, and explosive form. Lorde’s first published poem, entitled “Spring,” was attributed to “Audrey Lorde” in the popular fashion periodical Seventeen in April 1951. It began: “I am afraid of spring; there is no peace here, / The agony of growing things is in my veins.” Appearing as it does in a fashion magazine with, that month, a pink cover showing a white boy and girl holding hands, the poem surprised with its emphasis on death, burial, a speaker sobbing with fear. In the biographical statement that appeared on the same page of the magazine, “Audrey Lorde” described herself as a collector of “folk songs . . . and old books.” She mentioned a special “prize” from her “searches through Fourth Avenue bookshops,” “an ancient and yellowed copy of the romantic Poets.” Just a few months past 17 years old herself, Lorde was already developing a complex sense of the multiple sources of her poetic vocation. Describing her interest in “folk songs,” “Audrey” claimed membership not only in the Greenwich Village beatnik scene she was already exploring with sister Hunter High School student and future Beat poet Diane di Prima, but also the blues and folk vernacular traditions brought into the literary mainstream by Langston Hughes and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance, whom Lorde knew through her participation in the Harlem Writers Guild. Finally, she claimed lineage from the English Romantic poets, a bold assertion for a young woman [End Page 249] who, in this bio in a mainstream, white-dominated magazine, did not explicitly claim her identity as Black. The first African American teens to be identified...

Saúde de Mulheres Lésbicas e Bissexuais: Política, Movimento e Heteronormatividade

Este artigo objetiva discutir as políticas públicas de saúde voltadas para as mulheres lésbicas e bissexuais no Brasil, em diálogo com as demandas apresentadas pelo movimento em sua história. Percorremos brevemente o histórico de consolidação do movimento lésbico e resgatamos as políticas públicas voltadas para cuidado em saúde dessas mulheres. A partir das análises dos quinze documentos selecionados, buscamos compreender quais os discursos reproduzidos em suas elaborações e seus efeitos nas práticas de cuidado em saúde, e identificamos uma série de entraves em suas efetivas implementações. Refletimos sobre o processo de precarização dos corpos de mulheres lésbicas e bissexuais e as heteronormatividades reproduzidas nesse percurso de luta por direitos, produzindo uma série de invisibilidades dentro do movimento, como a invisibilidade de mulheres bissexuais e de mulheres negras. A análise documental e as mudanças recentes na política brasileira apontam para a necessidade de reformulação no cuidado oferecido a essas mulheres e criação de formas de resistência para manutenção dos direitos conquistados.

(Same)‐sex in the city: Urbanisation and LGBTI rights expansion

AbstractDespite the notable successes of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) activism in the region, individual European countries have varied considerably in the extent and speed with which they have adopted legislation to recognise the rights of their LGBTI citizens. Scholars have often turned to modernisation theory to explain these variable outcomes and argue that high levels of national wealth are an important factor in the success of LGBTI movements. Although the correlation between modernity, economic development and tolerance of LGBTI lifestyles is often treated as a truism in the literature, scholars have paid less attention to the precise mechanisms by which the complex processes associated with modernisation facilitate policy change. Drawing on the classic works of both modernisation theory and gay and lesbian history, we examine a less explored route by which modernisation leads to the expansion of LGBTI rights. Specifically, we posit that urbanisation facilitates the adoption of rights policies by strengthening LGBTI movements and enhancing their political effectiveness. To test this proposition, we use event history analysis and an original dataset that contains measures for institutional, cultural, economic and movement variables, as well as measures of urbanisation in 44 European countries between 1980 and 2015. Our findings support the contention that urbanisation has a strong effect on the formation of LGBTI movement organisations as well as the speed with which European states adopt both same‐sex union and anti‐discrimination legislation. The relationship between urbanisation and rights expansion persists even after controlling for a country's level of wealth, religious adherence and the influence of European institutions and norms.

Reading and Remembering Butch-Femme Worlds

This essay examines the practice of building a syllabus that centers butch-femme literatures as a pedagogy of gathering and recuperation. Prompted by the loss of an early syllabus on lesbian histories, I examine the genre of the syllabus and contend that “butch-femme” is not the same as “queer” or “LGBTQ.” Through reflective and autobiographical writing on memory, place, queerness, and social media, the essay traces an ephemeral archiving revealing the stakes for naming and remembering butch-femme lesbian “worlds.” The essay highlights a sample student project and offers a syllabus as a teaching resource.

Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures

Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures

‘There are Some Perversities that Cannot Stand’: Nostalgia, Homosexuality, and the Continuation Novel

Crime fiction scholars tend to ignore continuation novels (written as part of an established series after its creator's death) despite their importance in the international literary marketplace. As these novels exist in dialogue with their own contexts and those of their predecessors, they raise important questions about the handling of social mores. This article examines the presentation of homosexuality and its connection to criminality in two twenty-first century continuation novels, Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk (2011) and Stella Duffy's Money in the Morgue (2018). Horowitz's deliberately conservative novel uses the Victorian context to present a relationship between male homosexuality, conspiracy, and paedophilia that would be unacceptable in a ‘contemporary’ mainstream crime novel. Duffy's rewriting of Ngaio Marsh's unfinished Roderick Alleyn novel, however, creates a dialogue with lesbian history in the context of speculation around Marsh's own repressed sexuality.

Queer Girls and Intergenerational Lesbian Sexuality in the 1970s

Drawing on letters and writings by teenage girls and oral history interviews, this article aims to open a scholarly conversation about the existence and significance of intergenerational sexual relationships between minor girls and adult women in the years leading up to and encompassing the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. Lesbian history and culture say very little about sexual connections between youth and adults, sweeping them under the rug in gender-inflected ways that differ from the suppression of speech in gay male history and culture about intergenerational sex between boys and men. Nonetheless, my research suggests that, despite lesbian feminists’ caution and even negativity toward teen girls, erotic and sexual relationships with adult women provided girls access to support, pleasure, mentorship, and community.

The Perception of Men's Intimacy in the Fin de Siècle: A Consideration via Delville's The School of Plato

Jean Delville's The School of Plato (1898) is remarkable not only as a statement piece of fin-de-siecle occulture, but also for its bold portrayal of Plato's pupils as a group of ephebes in intimate association. The canvas and its reception history lend themselves uniquely to a consideration of the complexities of an art-historiographical engagement with representations of male love, yet the majority of scholars have tended to subsume the work's 'homoeroticism' under Delville's occult preoccupations. In this essay, I attempt to unpack the male intimacy pictured by aligning art-historical analysis with queer theory and gay and lesbian history, seeking to suggest ways in which the painting may have straddled the line between normativity and deviance. I argue that its affinity with newly compact categories of subversive sexuality - then to an unprecedented extent in the public eye in Belgium - may help account for the government's stubborn refusal to purchase the work.

The place of geography in lesbian history

AbstractLesbian history has undergone several paradigm shifts in recent decades. Historians draw on the theoretical and methodological approaches taken in other disciplines as part of their interest in remaining accountable to the present‐day community. Lesbian geographies, part of the geographies of sexualities field, offer a valuable way to consider the role of place and space in lesbians' lives in the past. It also suggests that an intersectional approach can aid in demonstrating the ongoing value of lesbian history to current struggles.