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[F]or it is in the painful process of this translation [of anger into action] that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave difficulties, and who are our genuine enemies.
—Audre Lorde 1984, 127
The inquiry into teaching feminist “classics” seems particularly apropos at this cultural moment, given the resurgence of anxieties about the relationships between political beliefs and sexual/gender identities, anxieties that echo and rearticulate those of the 1970s. Then, debates often centered around gatekeeping strategies of the political identity “feminist,” and lesbianism as feminism’s “magical sign,” whereas current conversations wonder whether the identity “lesbian” is automatically transphobic and/or racist (King 1986). We can look to texts entitled “Do I Have to Give Up Lesbian History to Participate in Queer Culture?,” “For Many Young Queer Women, Lesbian Offers a Fraught Inheritance,” or The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture to see that the very question of identity categories themselves provoke apprehension (Wilson 2018; Cauterucci 2016; Morris 2017). These fears tell us something about how we understand the seventies and its relationship to the present. To teach seventies lesbian-feminism risks reinforcing one-sided narratives of progress or loss: either the seventies is seen as a time of racist, transphobic lesbian-feminists from whom we have evolved to be more intersectional, or as a space of politically engaged activists from whom we have fallen away into academic nitpicking and overly theoretical conversations (Hemmings 2011, 3–4).1 In the classroom, we are more likely to encounter the progress narrative; students have learned, often from social media, that earlier feminist movements centered white, cis women, and now we are moving toward ever greater inclusivity. As Finn Enke (2018, 10) argues,
In less than one generation, the “second wave” became aka “white feminism” and “trans-exclusionary feminism,” and now, 1970s feminists is often used as a shorthand genealogy of today’s racist and trans-exclusionary feminists (TERFs). How did “1970s feminism” enter collective memory as the exclusionary thing, distinct from the experiences, labor, and critiques by feminists of color, trans and queer people of the same era? And why . . . are stories of exclusion and abjection so magnetic?
Stories of exclusion are magnetic, in part, because they set up a foundation for a progress narrative; we can...