What If? Lesbian Feminism and the Future’s Now

It is hard to imagine a figure more celebrated and maligned than lesbian feminism: on the one hand, she represents second-wave feminism’s most cherished aspirations; on the other, its most disappointing failures. Parsing the split decisions that define her, this essay examines how the discourse of race undergirds lesbian feminism’s contemporary composition, allocating mistakes that rupture revolutionary time to whiteness while tracing aspiration to the lifeworlds of Black lesbian activism and theorizing. Such a split offers a number of comforts, even as it reproduces Black women’s reproductive role in saving feminism and the fields of study that have attended it, while tasking white women with the masochistic work of citational mimicry. Arguing against the perpetuation of this dynamic, the essay considers the critical security we’d need to give up in order to interrupt this generational transmission. I locate my analysis in the context of queer theory, paying attention to the temporal dispositions of gender performativity and queer of color critique.

Duke Scholars

Author Robyn Wiegman Literature