"Am I That Name?": Constructions and Misconstructions of Lesbian Studies

Since it was first proposed by scholars such as Jeri Dawn Wine in the early 1980s, and continuing for roughly 15 years, radical feminist academics struggled to disrupt oppressive structures of thought about gender and sexuality by installing Lesbian Studies in one of the primary sites for the production of knowledge in our culture, liberal arts institutions. The project was ambitious. Its advocates were determined to take on the formidable opponents of sexism and heterosexism despite representing a tiny minority subpopulation inside universities and in the larger society. Some at first envisiDned Women's Studies as the logical (albeit problematic) institutional home for this work, but advocates wrote books and articles published by North American and British presses beginning in the early 1980s and continuing through the 1990s in which they argued for an autonomous Lesbian Studies alongside other identity-based programs such as Women's Studies; and Native Studies. They often argued that separate disciplinary status was necessary in an overwhelmingly male and heterosexual institution where tenure, promotion, and publication processes would otherwise stall the careers of professors working on lesbian topics and stifle the development of lesbian-focussed scholai-ship. Thus The Lesbian Review of Books asks Is Queer Theory Preempting Lesbian Studies? (1994-95, p. 1) and takes up the discussion on pages headed by the banner Feminism vs. Queer Studies, or, Are Lesbians Queer? (pp. 20-22), where Lesbian Studies advocate Bonnie Zimmerman offers a litany of anxieties: Who will form the inevitable new gay-and-lesbian or queer studies programs? Who will do the hiring, and who will get hired? Who will constitute its curriculum? Who will edit and serve on the boards of new journals and book series? Who will write the textbooks, and what will they include? Who is and will be invited to speak at conferences? Who is training graduate students, the next generation of scholars and teachers? In short, who is or will be in charge? [italics hers] (1994-95, p. 20) Zimmerman's questions are rhetorical ones: the answer assumed to be painfully obvious is, Men, of course; they're the ones with the access to resources. However, despite such warnings of the dire results that would ensue from failing to develop Lesbian Studies, there is little sign of a staunchly lesbian-centred effort continuing into the 2000s, with current discipline-building efforts far more likely to be focussed on some other less identity-based and apparently less feminist formation. It now seems certain that the goal of discipline status will not be reached in its intended form: there is no Lesbian Studies program or department, not anywhere, and only one scholarly publication, the Journal of Lesbian Studies is devoted exclusively to lesbian-focussed scholarship (the Lesbian Review of Books having ceased publication at the end of 2002). The question then remains, why has the project fizzled out? Has the nonemergence of Lesbian Studies shown us that it was never intellectually or institutionally feasible, as postmodernist critiques of identity politics would suggest? Was the combination of feminism and homosexuality toxic in the patriarchal culture of the liberal arts? Were their numbers too small and their project too anti-academic to have succeeded? Or were its advocates simply too rigid and unwilling to work with others? Lesbian Studies has been constructed in all of these ways over the course of its development. In this article I examine the various constructions made of the Lesbian Studies movement both by its proponents and by outsiders. This analysis leads me to argue that far from having been a naive cul-de-sac on the road to Sexuality Studies, it was then and remains now a strategically important project in the struggle against heteronormativity. I begin by contextualizing the emergence of Lesbian Studies as inseparable from the historical struggle over what it means to be lesbian. …

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