#laura cottingham

Most reviewers, even the few lesbian writers who publish in the commercial art press, adopt one of two positions when discussing the work of ‘out’ lesbian artists: either they flap their arms to call attention to the white-elephantness of the 'lesbian’ without being willing or able to explain what this has to do with either art or life, or they make no reference to lesbianism at all. Generally museums follow the latter approach.

The disacknowledgment of artists and writers who are lesbians, and of art and literary productions that are lesbian, colludes with the disapproval that lesbianism meets in social and political life. And in academic life. As Marilyn Frye has observed in "A Lesbian's Perspective on Women's Studies," women's studies departments across the United States are locked into an understanding of women that aggressively accepts the heterosexualization of women as normal and the marginalization of lesbians as natural or inevitable. Frye suggests a reconsideration of what sexual politics in the university might be if it weren't heterosexist politics: Imagine a real reversal of the heterosexualist teaching our program provides. Imagine thirty faculty members at a large university engaged routinely and seriously in the vigorous and aggressive encouragement of women to be Lesbians, helping them learn skills and ideas for living as Lesbians, teaching the connections between Lesbianism and feminism and between heterosexism and sexism, building understanding of the agency of individual men in keeping individual women in line for the patriarchy. Imagine us openly and actively advising women not to marry, not to fuck, not to become bonded with any man. Imagine us teaching lots of Lesbian literature, poetry, history and art in women's studies courses, and teaching out of a politics determined by Lesbian perception and sensibility.[5]

In order to discuss what is or isn't lesbian or anti-lesbian, or what social manifestations may be beneficial or detrimental to lesbians, a definition of what a lesbian is becomes necessary - and this isn't easy. The word itself derives from classical Greek, from the island of Lesbos where Sappho lived during the seventh century B.C. (which still exists, and is not, by the way, a Lesbian Nation). Such ancient terminology suggests an extensive history; but it's a history to which the present has no access. It's doubtful, for instance, that any reader of this book could name a lesbian who lived before the twentieth century - except for Sappho herself. Especially, lesbian-literate readers might recall Sappho's lover, Atthis, or perhaps the French convent sister, Marguerite Delamarre upon whom Diderot based his 1758 play, The Nuns. Even knowledge of twentieth-century lesbian life is scant. Before 1970, when the radical arm of the Women's Liberation Movement claimed lesbianism as self-affirmative, most lesbians did not want to be known as lesbians - and nobody else wanted to know about them either. Consequently, the lesbianism of many women's lives has been deliberately disacknowledged, and today's lesbians are left with very little knowledge of our history. Without any sense of our historical place, how are we to understand or produce our meaning in the present?

If lesbians working in mainstream art venues are more visible in their art in the 1990s than they were in the 1970s -- and there are some indications that this is so -- they don't seem to be any more comfortable as a result. Laura Aguilar's series of black-and-white works such as In Sandy's Room (1991) which presents the artist nude, stretched out on a chair in a sparse interior. An open casement window looks out onto a yard, but Aguilar is not distracted by the sun or the natural beauty: she's nodding out to the dull hum of the fan. Although one museum curator tried to convince me that this is an image of blissful self-contentment, my experience of lesbian existence doesn't allow me to accept such an interpretation. This is an image of diminished expectations.Even as some post-seventies lesbian artists -- including Judie Bamber, Cecilia Dougherty, Cheryl Dunye, Nicole Eisenman, Deborah Kass, Zoe Leonard, Siobhan Liddell, Catherine Opie, Nicola Tyson, and Millie Wilson -- appear to be moving toward mainstream recognition, it is generally at the expense of any serious institutional, curatorial, or critical consideration of what their work might have to say about the experience of being lesbian in the United States today. They could as easily be Latvian. Few of the artists, and even fewer of the curators and critics who select and interpret the art, have any awareness of the recent history of either lesbian or feminist art production. Most reviewers, even the few lesbian writers who publish in the commercial art press, adopt one of two positions when discussing the work of 'out' lesbian artists: either they flap their arms to call attention to the white-elephantness of the 'lesbian' without being willing or able to explain what this has to do with either art or life, or they make no reference to lesbianism at all. Generally museums follow the latter approach.[23]

Lesbianism is a much noisier word than feminism. In dominant discourse lesbian is frequently used as a signifier for far out, freaky, or everything but the kitchen sink. Take this published comment from one straight white male curator to another: "You're projecting a curatorial policy that now would have to take into account everything from Latvian artists to lesbian artists, I assume." [5] Here lesbian is emptied of all cognitive content, used simply for its alliteration with Latvian. If accepted as more than empty rhetoric, the equation between Latvian and lesbian artists acts to obscure the existence of lesbian artists, many of whom are, like the two white male curators in discussion, living and working in New York and not, like the alleged Latvian artists, at a great geographical and cultural distance. This gratuitous comment (and the acquiescent response of the other participant in the discussion) makes it safe to assume that neither of these individuals has any familiarity with or interest in either Latvian or lesbian cultures.One should consider what a privilege ignorance is among the otherwise educated or, rather, consider how impossible it would be for anyone to function in the American art community without an extensive knowledge of the ways and histories of the white male, while the white male educator, artist, curator, and critic can so easily continue in happy, hermetic ignorance of the rest of us (and use us as empty, flashy signifiers in conversation and in curating).

Lesbian is a word that can still stop discussion, raise eyebrows, trigger snickers, suggest sensationalism, and terminate or preclude employment. It's also a term that American television and print media, especially the supermarket tabloids, have recklessly and eagerly thrown at Nicole Brown, Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Roxanne Pulitzer, Vanessa Williams, and other women who are consciously or obliquely associated with feminism (even if they are not women who have ever chosen feminist as a self-appellation) because they possess a degree of personal and political autonomy that is considered unusual for a woman. Both lesbian and feminist are words that circulate around women whose actions, attitudes, and beliefs indicate that they might not fully believe in either the idea or practice of subordinating themselves to men. Charges or assertions of lesbianism can stir up emotions almost as readily as accusations of witchcraft once did in Salem Village, and the primary target is the same.[4] Although the term perhaps provokes less anxiety now than it did before the women's liberation movement encouraged lesbians to organize communities and assert ourselves as a political entity (and identity), lesbian is still a word that few people in the United States can write or say with any neutrality. Lesbian and its colloquial synonym, dyke, are seldom spoken or heard as purely descriptive enunciations; rather, both words are routinely inflected with threat, fear, uncertainty, taboo, marginality, exoticism, pornographic implications, apology, and confusion. Especially when spoken, lesbian is seldom allowed simply to be, to signify on its own terms, to mean what it could potentially, neutrally describe: a woman who is emotionally and sexually intimate with women (and not men) or a woman who is not economically or socially dependent on men. Lesbian (and I refer to actual lesbianism, not its simulacrum as practiced by women for the voyeuristic pleasure of men) cannot be allowed to mean only, or simply, this, because this is something that women who live in a male supremacist society, such as that of the United States, are still not permitted only, or simply, to be.