Sociology
“Lesbians Are Not Women”: Bringing Lesbian Feminist History to bear on Emerging Lesbian Gender Projects
Lesbian feminist Monique Wittig’s 1979 provocation that “lesbians are not women” was a prescient forecast for the present era, in which the designation of “woman” is increasingly understood as gender essentialist, overuniversalizing, and trans exclusionary by many (Forstie 2020; Keating 2018; Muraki 2019). Some young people who might have identified as lesbians a generation ago now reject the label, but others are engaged in what queer theorist Eve Sedgwick (2002) might call a “reparative reading” of lesbian, transforming it from a sexual identity to a gendered subjectivity. As novel as this re-reading may seem on its face, its roots can in fact be traced back to the lesbian feminism of the 1970s and ‘80s (Williams 2016). This project will use content analysis and archival research to put these historical and contemporary movements in conversation with each other and consider how history might inform the nascent 21st century lesbian gender project and improve its liberatory potential.