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The New Lesbian Studies: Into the Twenty-first Century; Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader.
On March 3, 1997, Entertainment Tonight featured a segment in which k.d. lang laid a deep kiss on Ellen DeGeneres as the announcer revealed that on April 30, DeGeneres's character would finally come out as a lesbian. This is not the same climate as the one I came out into in 1982, the year Margaret Cruikshank's Lesbian Studies: Present and Future was published. At that time, I was an undergraduate studying literature at a small school in Hutchinson, Kansas. Though I remember that we studied Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, I also remember that when I asked one of my professors if either of them were lesbians, I was told that (1) it didn't matter, and (2) no one could know for sure. I had never heard the word "lesbian" mentioned in my classes, much less on television, and I was pretty convinced I never would. But something's happened since 1982. In her introduction to Lesbian Subjects, Martha Vicinus characterizes the change:
In 1980 the pioneering historian Blanche Weisen Cook wrote of "The historical denial of lesbianism [which] accompanies the persistent refusal to acknowledge the variety and intensity of women's emotional and erotic experience." This "historical denial" has been overtaken by a cacophony of voices; the growth of cultural studies in the academy has brought the study of homosexuality from its suspect position to the center of our work on gender and sexuality. The lesbian is an accepted subject for scrutiny.... (1)
Both Vicinus and the editors of The New Lesbian Studies, Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni McNaron, provide readers with excellent lesbian studies "readers" that function as impressionistic maps of the territory lesbian scholars have covered in the last fifteen years.
In their introductions, Vicinus, Zimmerman, and McNaron (all lesbian feminist scholars), foreground the intense, and often disconcerting, tension between lesbian feminism and queer theory. Vicinus argues that queer theory's "wholesale embracing of a theatrical metaphor ignores the historical contingencies within which lesbian roles are constructed, and their specific meanings at different historical times -- indeed, even the possibility of their non-existence in the past" (6). McNaron and Zimmerman also define the difference between queer theory and lesbian studies in...