The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture (SUNY series in Queer Politics and Cultures) by Morris Bonnie J

Author:Morris, Bonnie J. [Morris, Bonnie J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-07-29T04:00:00+00:00

The Sleuth Work and the Sleuths

Lesbians who did the “hunting and gathering” information work in the 1970s and ’80s had no way of knowing whether or not they were the first wave of sleuths trying to learn about their origins. Each woman writer, publisher, distributor, academic, and activist worked tirelessly on her own project, often alone, typing, handwriting, inventing card files and mailing lists piecemeal, over and over. Every aspect of lesbian culture discovered, produced, and publicized had to be done the hard way: word of mouth. Handwritten notes. Purple ditto stencils, smudged carbon copies, cheap typewriter ribbons, expensive long distance phone calls made “collect” from gas station booths. The work undertaken by many remarkable individuals required lonely and unseen effort, faith in the importance of what was being constructed, and the willingness to proceed without a cultural road map. Soon enough, the collective sense of outrage that so much had been hidden from us resulted in feminist scholarship with assertive titles such as Hidden from History; Becoming Visible; The Suppressed Archives; From Housewife to Heretic. Speaking in the 2014 film documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, historian Ruth Rosen declared, “We’d gotten degrees, and we realized we knew nothing about women!”

In her volume The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, the late, eminent women’s history scholar Gerda Lerner noted that for almost all of women’s history (of which lesbian history is one aspect), individual female thinkers assumed they were the first to try organizing around women’s rights. Denied any sort of education about women’s global heritage, feminists around the world usually worked in isolation, each pursuing women’s political rights with no template, no sense that there might have been earlier (or successful) efforts.

Women, for far longer than any other structured group in society, have lived in a condition of trained ignorance, alienated from their own collective experience through the denial of the existence of Women’s History. Even more important, woman have for millennia been forced to prove to themselves and to others their capacity for full humanity and their capacity for abstract thought … their major intellectual endeavor had to be to counteract the pervasive patriarchal assumptions of their inferiority and incompleteness as human beings.27

Shut out of institutions of higher learning for centuries and treated with condescension or derision, educated women have had to develop their own social networks in order for their thoughts, ideas a work to find audiences. … Women … did not know that others like them had made intellectual contributions to knowledge and to creative thought. … Without knowledge of women’s past, no group of women could test their own ideas against those of their equals, those who had come out of similar conditions. … Every thinking woman had to argue with the “great man” in her head, instead of being strengthened and encouraged by her foremothers.28

The artist Judy Chicago expressed the impetus for creating her well-known installation, The Dinner Party, in remarkably similar terms:

My Dinner Party would also be a people’s history—the history of women in Western civilization.

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