sapphic/wlw blog!

Spring/Summer

“One of the interesting features of lesbian history, as opposed to women’s history, is the seemingly unresolvable ambiguity of the subject of lesbian history. That ambiguity is partly attributable to the fact that the lesbian (and the homosexual) as a distinct sort of person appear to have been the creation of late 1800’s medical and psychiatric discourse. As a culturally constructed subject, the lesbian does not exist prior to that time. Thus, of the women who cross-dressed, married other women, had sex with women, and formed intensely romantic but non-sexual friendships with women before the late 1800s, one may reasonably ask, “But were they lesbians?” Their ambiguous status reflects not only the relatively recent invention of the lesbian but also the absence today of consensus on any single definition of what it means to be a lesbian. Even the centrality of sexual desire to lesbianism can be called into question, as it was in the equation of lesbianism with woman identification. We cannot, it would seem, get at lesbian difference by asking “Who is a lesbian?” Not perhaps should we, since the “who is” question invites a set of troubling assumptions: that identity is an interior essence, that one is definitely and permanently either a lesbian or not a lesbian, and that real lesbians can never be correctly read for traces of heterosexuality (and vice versa). But perhaps we can get at lesbian difference, and do so without inviting these troubling assumptions, by instead asking “Who represents the lesbian?” Through what images does the lesbian become more thinkable? What images invite a lesbian reading?”