‘I Teach Therefore I Am’: Lesbian Studies in the Liberal Academy

The article discusses the origins of Lesbian Studies as arising out of an intellectually engaged grassroots lesbian community and an emergent Women's Studies within the academy. The article contrasts Lesbian Studies in the UK with the USA, which has ‘professionalized’ work in Lesbian and Gay Studies, which concomitantly has produced its own problems. Feminism bequeathed to Lesbian Studies the axiom ‘the personal is political’ and this is discussed as both a positive and a negative inheritance. The academy itself collapses the personal on to the Lesbian Studies lecturer which produces particular pressures from students, colleagues, the institution, and upon one's own intellectual trajectory in the form of the ‘taint’ of subjectivity. Finally the article attempts to identify an ambivalent relationship to liberalism which has made a limited space for Lesbian Studies but also continues to seek to police that sphere.     

Is ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ a lesbian plot?

Despite Virginia Woolf's lesbian vision of love and friendship between Chloe and Olivia in A Room of One's Own, the literary and critical text often serves to shut lesbians into a closet of prose. Among the debilitating myths used by writers are the ‘Phaon myth’ (that authentic lesbian experience must be terminated by an inauthentic heterosexual rescue), the vampire myth, and the myth of masculinity. The latter in particular has served to divide heterosexual women from their lesbian sisters, so that much feminist literary criticism displays a pervasive heterosexual bias by ignoring or distorting lesbian texts and subtexts. This paper suggests ways in which the word and concept ‘lesbian’ is being reclaimed by lesbian writers and critics. It calls for all women to destroy patriarchal myths about lesbians; reread literary texts for their lesbian subtexts; recover the works of lesbians, particularly lesbians of color; and, finally, proclaim the word ‘lesbian’ forcefully despite the threats posed by a misogynistic academy and society.     

Elizabeth’s Pious Pilgrimage; or the Ghost in the Garden

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the ‘Pious Pilgrimage’ section of Elizabeth and Her German Garden from a psychoanalytical perspective, focusing on the uncanny sense of the spectrality of the living and its connection to gender identity. It also offers an intertextual reading, placing the passage in the context of ‘the ghost in the garden’ as a recurring trope in the English novel. When ‘Elizabeth’ returns to the garden of her childhood, she experiences two spectral encounters: an imagined glimpse of her grandfather’s ghost and an encounter with a doppelgänger in the shape of a real child with her own name, who makes her feel as if, like Shelley’s Magus Zoroaster, she has met her ‘own image walking in the garden’. She is not the only figure in English literature to do so: behind the kitchen garden where Elizabeth has her encounter we can feel the presence of the kitchen garden in Great Expectations, where Pip sees a prophetic vision and encounters a double in the form of a ‘pale young gentleman’. This same encounter with ‘the ghost in the garden which is not a ghost’ resurfaces in a number of later texts, of which the author discusses two instances: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and David Profumo’s The Weather in Iceland. These can be taken as positive and negative conceptions of the spectrality of the living: von Arnim’s ‘ghost in the garden’ is balanced between the two in a passage treading the boundaries of comic realism and Gothic horror.     

What a Difference a Decade Makes: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Coming to Power</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Second Coming</Emphasis>

A critical look at two books, Coming to Power – Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, published in 1981, and its ‘long awaited sequel’, The Second Coming – A Leatherdyke Reader, published in 1996, yields many differences and similarities. Both books have been judged negatively or positively on the basis of their sadomasochistic content and in line with knee-jerk positions around the lesbian ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s. The feminist politics represented in each book and the connections to more general lesbian feminist concerns and developments of either the late 1970s (Coming to Power) or the late 1980s and early 1990s (The Second Coming) are often overlooked or dismissed. Comparing the kind of sex acts and personas fetishized in each book as well as the claims made for lesbian sm by its adherents often reveals more than the writers may have intended. A more nuanced reading of both books also reveals connections between lesbian feminism, particularly lesbian radical feminism and the sm dykes. Rather than being the ‘illegitimate children’ of lesbian feminism, as Coming to Power maintained in 1981, it is clear now that sm dykes and lesbian feminists are strange sisters who needed each other to define their particular politicized identities.     

Re-thinking feminism: Some thoughts on the limitations of ‘basics’-training

In this article, I draw on my experience as a Jew and a lesbian and as a Jewish lesbian—both outside and inside the Women's Liberation Movement—to examine the problem of feminist ‘basics’ and to assess the new ethos of ‘diversity’, which has emerged in recent years as ‘other feminists have begun to make our presence felt within feminism.     

IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE (SILENCED) CHILD

The rhetoric of the ‘best interests of the child’ frequently emerges in public and political debates concerning the changing nature of family and society. This article explores how the rhetoric was invoked in recent same-sex marriage debates in Australia. We analyse the public submissions to the 2009 Australian government inquiry into same-sex marriage to reveal the ways in which the abstract figure of ‘the child’ was deployed. It became evident that heteronormativity was privileged and upheld primarily through the discourse of children's best interests. Concern about the well-being of children raised by lesbian and gay parents was the pivotal argument by those who opposed same-sex marriage. Heteronormativity was reproduced through the claim that same-sex parenting is harmful to children and thus heterosexuality was positioned as the only ‘safe’ place for parenting. A small number of the submissions in support of same-sex marriage also based their arguments on the best interests of the child. Typically, these submissions positioned lesbian and gay parents as ‘just like’ heterosexual parents and in doing so they produced an idealised homonormative couple. This unwittingly reinforces heterosexuality through the construction of an ‘acceptable’ domesticated homosexuality, based on adherence to heteronormativity, which effectively marginalises other family forms and sexual behaviours. We argue that the rhetorical power of the ‘best interests’ argument relies on the absence of the voices of actual children raised by lesbian and gay parents and that this silencing has harmful consequences for these children.     

“Second Generation” Voices: Queer Youth with Lesbian/Bisexual Mothers

Research on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth with LGBTQ parents is absent in the social science literature. The present qualitative, exploratory study utilized a social constructionist and queer theoretical lens through which to explore the sexual/gender identity formation and disclosure experiences of 18 LGBTQ young adults with lesbian/bisexual mothers. Findings suggest that LGBTQ parents may have a uniquely positive influence on their LGBTQ children in regard to their sexual and gender identity development. However, some participants reported perceiving societal scrutiny related to their mothers’ lesbian/bisexual identities and, thus, felt pressure to be heterosexual and gender-conforming. Furthermore, some participants did not necessarily utilize or view their lesbian/bisexual mothers as sources of support in relation to their own sexual/gender identity formation. While much more research is needed that examines the experiences of LGBTQ children with LGBTQ parents, this study represents a first step in addressing the existing literature gap.     

Feminist catch-as-catch-can

Looking back at her own involvement as a ‘right on’ lesbian feminist activist in the German women's movement Monika Jaeckel now feels that too much valuable energy is spent in struggles between sisters. She proposes to focus on the dialogue among as many different women as possible, validate different personal and professional choices and perspectives and to do this by openly confronting our contradictions. Accepting, if necessary by struggle, differences among women will result in mutual protection—instead of ‘trashing’—and in more space for feminists. Such a strategy includes not blaming and guilt tripping each other for our (relative) priveleges but rather devising new ways how to share and distribute available resources, and thus turn our diversity into our strength.     

British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration

In a post-feminist, post-lesbian feminist, postmodern or queer world, should lesbian work remain clearly identifiable, even when it refuses to claim lesbian identity as such? Scanning anthologies from the past three decades of lesbian poetry, and focusing particularly on the work of Maureen Duffy, Marge Yeo, Dorothea Smartt, Gillian Spraggs and Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Yorke addresses issues of lesbian visibility, lesbian identification, lesbian desire, and lesbian performativity. How do we identify what constitutes a lesbian poetic in an era when ‘lesbian’ as an identity is less overtly defended, and many anthologies gloss over lesbian difference in prioritizing a higher order dedication to theme?     

Out of the mainstream: water rights,politics and identity

ABSTRACT

Indigenous maize from Mexico has become crucial for a wave of contemporary agricultural development initiatives seeking to cultivate a ‘Green Revolution for Africa’. Plant breeders developing disease-resistant hybrid maize for Africa use cutting edge technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 to mine the genomes of maize collected in Mexico 75 years ago, during the Green Revolution’s earliest incarnation. Historicizing this transnational linkage, this paper argues that Green Revolution science appropriates indigenous maize through racial logics rooted in whiteness. In the 1940s, American scientists sent by the Rockefeller Foundation to improve Mexico’s agriculture negotiated their own racial subjectivity through their encounters with Mexico’s indigenous people. In the process, they constructed a racial hierarchy that equated whiteness with scientific superiority and indigeneity with underdevelopment. This racialization undergirded a maize program led by E.J. Wellhausen that collected and catalogued hundreds of varieties of Mexico’s maize – and then distributed them to American seed companies. Wellhausen’s seeds formed the genetic backbone for subsequent Green Revolution projects. The ‘white science’ he embodied expanded as the Revolution sought out nonwhite agriculture across the global South. Today, the Green Revolution’s racial logics are re-articulated along its geographical and technological frontier, as indigenous maize provides the seeds for the African Green Revolution.     

politicizing biographies: the forming of transnational subjectivities as insiders outside

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) subjectivities. Our focus lies on theorizing the ways through which privileged (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking Feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we are alternately the subject and the object of our research process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have ‘experience’. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an ‘insider-outside’, that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as ‘women’) could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranged (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat.     

Feminist Reflections on Researching So-called ‘Honour’ Killings

Drawing on 2 years of field research conducted between 2008 and 2010 in London’s Kurdish community, I discuss the practical and ethical challenges that confront researchers dealing with violence against women committed in the name of ‘honour’. In examining how feminist methodologies and principles inform my research, I address issues of researcher positioning and the importance of speaking with, rather than for, marginalised groups. I then explore the difficulties of operationalising this position when dealing with honour-based violence. Using the interview data from the 2008–2010 study and a case study of the trial of Mehmet Goren (who was convicted in 2009 of murdering his daughter Tulay for supposedly dishonouring their family), I discuss the socio-cultural norms and values underlying honour codes, examining both the position of men and women in relation to the maintenance of family honour and the regulation of women’s sexuality and conduct. In particular, I explore the difficulties inherent in obtaining and understanding victims’ own personal narratives, especially in legal settings, while simultaneously showing how it is only through empowering women to speak for themselves that we will be able to bring about the deep societal changes needed to eradicate honour-based violence.     

wal-mart, ‘katrina’, and other ideological tricks: Jamaican hotel workers in Michigan

This essay explores the relationships between labour and community formation in order to think through how, where, and when diasporic solidarities are imagined or refused. I draw on ethnographic research among Jamaican women contracted for seasonal work in US hotels to situate diasporic calls and responses in relation to specific contexts and a changing global political economy. I show how global geopolitical shifts not only shape the processes of identity formation and social reproduction, but also condition the perpetuation of notions of nationalized racial hierarchies and ideologies of progress. I also show that hotel workers' notions of ‘America’ and their commitment to the ‘American Dream’ shapes their subjectivities as migrant workers/consumers and, in their assessment, differentiates them from African-Americans, particularly those most immediately affected by Hurricane Katrina. In doing so, I demonstrate that one of the ideological hegemonies of diaspora is the idea that an individual's capacity to affect their own social mobility and that of their social network always outstrips the ‘locals’ in diasporic elsewheres.     

‘Gone are the Days’: Bisexual Perspectives on Lesbian/Feminist Literary Theory

In this article I offer a map of recent UK and US lesbian feminist literary theory which highlights the shifting and often paradoxical interpretations of lesbian sexuality as both real and as metaphorical. I focus on two key texts which offer overviews and analysis of the field from different sides of the Atlantic, which are both accessible, in the sense of being written from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ lesbians, rather than structuring lesbian feminist literary criticism around traditional critical concepts, and which also, unusually, offer some (small) comment on bisexuality. These two works are Bonnie Zimmerman's Safe Sea of Women (1992), and Palmer's Contemporary Lesbian Writing (1993). I argue that lesbian/feminist literary theory offers particular constructions of sexuality which, while challenging many of the assumptions of heterosexual feminist literary theory, largely ignores the bisexual content of much lesbian fiction, and consequently glosses over some of the tricky areas of gender and sexuality difference. Through this ‘les/bi’ reading I hope to encourage the figure of the bisexual woman to question both constructions and deconstructions of lesbian sexuality.     

Insider Perspectives or Stealing the Words out of Women's Mouths: Interpretation in the Research Process

This article examines the ways in which social class differences between the researcher and female respondents affect data analysis. I elaborate the ways in which my class background, just as much as my gender, affects all stages of the research process from theoretical starting points to conclusions. The influences of reflexivity, power and ‘truth’ on the interpretative process are developed by drawing on fieldnotes and interviews from an ethnographic study of women's involvement in their children's primary schooling. Complexities of social class are explored both in relation to myself as the researcher and to how the women saw themselves. I argue that there is a thin dividing line between the understandings which similar experiences of respondents bring to the research process and the element of exploitation implicit in mixing up one's own personal history with those of women whose experience of the same class is very different. Identification can result in a denial of the power feminist researchers exercise in the selection and interpretation of data. However, researchers are similarly powerful in relation to women from very different class backgrounds to their own, and I attempt to draw out problematic issues around power and ‘truth’ in relation to the middle-class women whom I interviewed. I conclude by reiterating that, from where I am socially positioned, certain aspects of the data are much more prominent than others and as a consequence interpretation remains an imperfect and incomplete process.     

Did Mrs Danvers warm Rebecca's pearls? significant exchanges and the extension of lesbian space and time in literature

This article is concerned with the ways in which literary spaces can become sexualized by the transfer of objects between women, as well as by the ways in which bodies themselves touch. It discusses how lesbian desire changes both spatial and temporal structures, via a consideration of the use of pearl imagery. In particular, it analyses the link between sexual, class and bodily construction in two texts: Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) and Carol Ann Duffy's poem ‘Warming Her Pearls’ (1987). These texts encode contrasting ideas about the lesbian body, ideas that are discursively textured by the periods in which they were written and by the relative ideological resistance of their writers. While du Maurier's novel establishes a concept of spatial and temporal enclosure, Duffy's poem creates an unconfined and unstable lesbian body-text. Within this, the pearl can be seen as a subversive device, destructuring and stretching the parameters of lesbian desire.     

‘She Knew What was Expected of Her’: The White Legal System’s Encounter with Traditional Marriage

A recent case in the Northern Territory of Australia has raised the issues of intra-racial rape and the legal recognition of traditional marriages between Indigenous people. The defendant in the Jamilmira case was charged with statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl. He argued that the girl’s status as his promised wife should lead to mitigation of his sentence. Members of the Northern Territory judiciary and others in the community were divided in their response to his claim. Ultimately the case led to reform of the law in relation to the recognition of traditional marriage, a response which outraged some members of the Indigenous community. In this article I examine the various representations of culture and individuals that were utilised by ‘the law’ and how these representations informed the legal response. In the process I question the limits of my own role as a ‘white middle-class feminist’ in the context of explorations of law and culture. Is there a space to become involved in these debates without being complicit in fostering racism and prejudice and without reverting to stereotypes and cultural arrogance?     

Imagined more than women: lesbians as hermaphrodites, 1671-1766

In texts circulating in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women who had sex with women were often denounced, mocked, and exiled from womanhood; one of the most common strategies was to call them hermaphrodites. There was constant slippage between concepts of sexual deviance at this time, but two ideas in particular – lesbian desire and hermaphroditical anatomy – became tightly bound into the figure of the tribade, a woman whose phallic ‘member’ (whether a prolapsed vagina or an enlarged clitoris) was thought to enable her to have penetrative intercourse with women. This essay follows the hermaphroditical tribade through children's compendia, gynaecological handbooks, neoclassical satires, love poems and anti-masturbation treatises. Though the writers were generally hostile, their debates over anatomy and motivation, and the tonal ambiguities in their treatment of these freakish heroines, make these texts rich sources for lesbian history.     

What about the children? arguments against lesbian and gay parenting

In this article, I explore arguments commonly used to support the claim that lesbians and gay men should not be parents. Thematic analysis of recent media representations of lesbian and gay parenting and six focus groups with university students highlighted the repeated use of a number of arguments to oppose lesbian and gay parenting. I critically discuss the six most prevalent in this article. These are: (1) “The bible tells me that lesbian and gay parenting is a sin”; (2) “Lesbian and gay parenting is unnatural”; (3) “Lesbian and gay parents are selfish because they ignore ‘the best interests of the child’”; (4) “Children in lesbian and gay families lack appropriate role models”; (5) Children in lesbian and gay families grow up lesbian and gay; and (6) “Children in lesbian and gay families get bullied.” I examine these themes in relation to other debates about lesbian and gay and women's rights, and highlight the ways in which they reinforce a heterosexual norm.     

Ouch! Western Feminists' ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’

‘Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking.The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have con.gured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘traficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world traficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘traficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.