On the Evolution of Queer Studies

Abstract

As lesbian/gay and queer scholars have developed and embraced queer theory over the past fifteen years or so, the field has made inroads in the academy as it has created new avenues and languages for discussing the machinations and representations of genders and sexualities. The very need to make plural those last two nouns hints at the fundamental shifts and profusion, even at the level of language, caused by the meeting of women’s and gay/lesbian studies with the larger post-structuralist project that has suffused the academy in recent decades. A great deal has been gained — no less in institutional acceptability than in provocative intellectual exchange. As a lesbian studies scholar, I think also about what has been, if not entirely lost, then buried or misrepresented. The casualty immediately obvious to many lesbians is the culture and politics in which I came of age, lesbian feminism. Formulated in the United States in the 1970s, lesbian feminism was (and remains, though less potently) a multi-issue movement at whose core lies the belief in lesbianism as itself a material, political expression of radical feminist politics. For all its manifest and often rehearsed faults, not least the prioritizing by some of an insular counterculture over substantive political activism by the mid-1980s, there is also much we should remember and that contributed to queer theory itself.