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...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 envisioned 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 scholarship.
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 non-emergence 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.
Lesbian Studies in Historical Context
The existence of Lesbian Studies (and indeed, in contemporary senses of the term, of "lesbians") encompasses only the last few decades, during which lesbian existence has become vastly more conceivable than before thanks in large part to the deliberate identity-constructing efforts of lesbians. Like "gay," the term "lesbian" was first widely adopted in response to the 1950s era of state-engineered social conservatism that was designed to restore sexist gender roles after World War II, and has been increasingly used since the 60s in preference to the pathologizing term "homosexual" that carries oppressive connotations from its history of service within medical discourse. Lesbians struggling to reconstruct the meaning of "lesbian" have had to fight not only the salacious prejudices left over from the aggressively homophobic 50s and the political and theoretical work that consolidated under that name, but also the continued use of "lesbian" as a "scare word, to be hurled at any woman who does not conform to conventional notions of femininity" (Stone, 1990, p. 11).
Like lesbian identity itself, Lesbian Studies developed at a uniquely auspicious time: the century closed with much less institutionalized oppression of "women" and "homosexuals" than that with which it opened in the Western world, under the pressure of several decades of gay and lesbian rights movements and such related political movements as feminism, Black civil rights, and more recently, disabled rights activism. Though mainstream cultures remain obviously heteronormative, in roughly 40 years lesbians have moved some distance towards the possibility of life in dominant culture rather than in only a few isolated lesbian-only spaces (though the title of TV's The L-Word points to our lingering status as not quite fit for mainstream society).
In some usages, "lesbian" is merely shorthand for "any woman who desires/has sex with and/or loves women," whatever her political beliefs or lack thereof. However, it also began in the 60s to be used as the sign under which such women worked to create anti-heteropatriarchal theory, ethics, and cultural spaces such as music festivals, consciousness-raising groups, antiviolence work, and lesbian feminist presses, that constructed lesbian identity as the praxis of feminism to the extent that "lesbian" implied "feminist." During the 90s, the feminist orthodoxy that is said to have developed around lesbian identity, privileging feminist politics and demanding non-masculinist behaviours and attractions, had explicitly given way (in part under the influence of queer theory and politics) to a proliferation of identity categories signifying a far greater range of political investment or indifference, and a far greater range of gender expression and sexual practices. Feminism became less crucial to lesbian identity, but its strong commitment to constructing lesbian culture can be seen in the women-only march that precedes the larger annual lgbtq Pride March in Toronto. The march uses "Dyke" as an umbrella term instead of "Lesbian," but insists on the political importance of acting in solidarity with each other. Thus the 1999 advertisement read,
Celebrate women loving women. Dykes, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgendered women, wimmin-loving-wimmin, womyn-fucking-womyn, bulldaggers, tops, bottoms, lipstick lezzies, baby-dykes, diesel-dykes, jocks, high femmes, soft butches, lesbos--whatever you call yourself, the fourth annual Dyke March is for you.
"Lesbian" as used in "Lesbian Studies" similarly signifies a strong political commitment to the principle of women working in solidarity to fight the oppression of all varieties of "women loving women."
The emergence of lesbian culture in academic form is very recent. When my colleagues Doug Arrell, Keith Louise Fulton, Debbie Schnitzer and I taught the first courses in Lesbian and Gay literature at the University of Winnipeg in 1991-93, we were certainly not the first in Canada to do such work, but we knew of no one else; the usual vehicles of networking (conferences, journals, associations) did not exist for our field. In part in order to network with other course developers, I did survey research into Lesbian Studies in Canadian universities in 1992, and found only two course descriptions in Canadian undergraduate calendars that mentioned even "homosexual" content. When I joined the lesbian caucus of the Canadian Women's Studies Association in 1992, the number of people active in teaching lesbian content in Canadian university courses was small enough that most of us knew each other through the caucus of 15 people. Margaret Cruikshank's Lesbian Studies: Present and Future (The Feminist Press, 1982) was the only book on the subject, and I was able to uncover only a handful of other sources: Carolyn Gammon's compilation of course syllabi and related information (work done when she was a graduate student at Concordia University) and a modest assortment of articles, mostly on coming out in academia, that had started appearing in the early 80s. Among the first were Jeri Dawn Wine's stream of articles on lesbians in academe beginning with RFR's landmark "The Lesbian Issue" (1983) and again in RFR (1987), Atlantis (1988), CAUT Bulletin (1988), and in Sharon Dale Stone's collection, Lesbians in Canada (1990).
The developments of the 1990s altered the topography of the field. Three lesbian studies books were published in the mid-90s: Linda Garber's Tilting the Tower: Lesbians Teaching Queer Subjects (1994), Tamsin Wilton's Lesbian Studies: Setting an Agenda (1995), and Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni McNaron's The New Lesbian Studies: Into the Twenty-First Century (1996), all of which I discuss in this article. Queer theory emerged as the single biggest challenge to the viability of the identity-based field of Lesbian Studies, with the flourishing of Foucauldian studies that undermined identity categories and the publication of influential works such as Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw (Routledge, 1994), Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), Diana Fuss' Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Tendencies (1993), and Michael Warner's Fear of a Queer Planet (1993).
Concurrently with this period of growth, university budgets were severely cut and program rationalization threatened even well-established academic units like Classics, Religion, and European Languages (Carleton, 1997), making quandaries about whether to work towards establishing a specialized program in Lesbian Studies seem quaint. What little evidence of structural emergence of Lesbian Studies there was at the time of my SSHRC survey in 1992 (most notably, a stream of courses within the Women's Studies Program at Concordia University's Simone de Beauvoir Institute that side stepped official approval processes through their status as "special topics" courses) dwindled over the course of the decade from fantasies of departments and programs to the level of course content--which, however, had proliferated across the disciplines. By the early 1990s Lesbian and Gay Studies had become quite widespread in English departments and across the liberal arts curriculum of North American universities, constituting, in Linda Garber's words, "a minor growth industry, one of the very few new fields to emerge in a shrinking academic job market" (1994, p. ix).
This expansion was in part thanks to a prodigious increase in largely postmodernist queer scholarship in the area. Lesbian Studies, along with Lesbian and Gay Studies and Queer Studies, and now "Gender" and/or "Sexuality" Studies, also grew hugely as a publishing category, with major scholarly presses such as Routledge issuing separate catalogues of new titles in the quickly growing field. Active Lesbian Studies discussion lists developed on the internet. By 1995, Louis Crew's e-directory of Lesbian and Gay Studies Scholars in North America listed over eight hundred people, and John Younger's Lesbian and Gay Studies extensive (but not exhaustive) online directory listed hundreds of courses and many programs in the US and Canada. (1) The lesbian caucus of CWSA remained small, but the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association that formed in 1992 grew within a few years to a membership of several hundred, and settled a few years later at mid-size for academic associations, about 150....
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