“Look over here, look over there, lesbians are everywhere”: \nLocating Activist Lesbians in Queer Liberation History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Body Politic was a seminal lesbian and gay liberation journal that published monthly between 1971-1987. Produced in Toronto, it became a formative voice in the emergent lesbian and gay liberation movement in English Canada. It is a rich body of knowledge that has been thoroughly excavated to explore the lives and experiences of gay men and erotic masculinity during the period. There is a common misperception that queer women were absent from the journal and the movement more broadly. In this dissertation, I argue that they were far from absent, though certainly absented. The grand narrative of the liberation period posits two polarized groups: a gay movement seeking freedom from state regulation of sexuality versus a women’s movement seeking state protections to secure women’s freedom, with the two camps coming to a head over key issues, including intergenerational sex, SM, pornography, and sex work. This dissertation examines women’s contributions to the journal and the larger ArQuives, to reveal a group, whom I term activist lesbians (as opposed to gay liberationists or lesbian feminists), who navigated these seemingly oppositional movements. Throughout, they remained true to the radical liberatory roots of the gay liberation movement because they continued to incorporate and push for an intersectional feminist praxis. This dissertation identifies defining moments that are often overlooked in queer history. The analysis grapples with the legacy of The Body Politic, questioning the progress of queer liberation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".