I will upload some readings from the class and thought maybe the topic could be themed around lesbians and women? Up to you. Thank you SO much!!!

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Notes on lesbian

Laura Cottingham

n attempt to construct a lesbian history, whether it be sociological or art historical, involves con- fronting silence, erasure, misrepresentation, and

prejudice-all of which present formidable obstacles to historical research and writing. How is it possible to recon- struct a story from evidence that is partial, absent, hidden, denied, obfuscated, trivialized, and otherwise suppressed? The traditional methodology of historical research, and by extension the value system used to evaluate the quality of texts written in the name of history, is necessarily overde- termined by a prioritization of primary sources. But what if these primary sources do not exist because governments have not counted or otherwise documented the historical subject(s); or because the social and political persecution of said subject(s) has encouraged them to silence them- selves; or because prejudice has enabled families and biographers to destroy documents such as letters and diaries that contain the crucial content that might consti- tute testimony or evidence? Some lesbian historians understandably believe that more information about les- bians in the past exists than we now know of or have access to and that, therefore, more primary sources and more tra- ditional history is forthcoming. But it might also just as easily be assumed that the availability of written proof of lesbians and lesbianism is significantly less present and existent than lesbians and lesbianism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American history have in fact been.

Although the traditional historical practices of exca- vation and recontextualization have yielded valuable con- tributions to the understanding and construction of European and American lesbian history by scholars such as Lillian Faderman and Barbara Smith in the United States, Ilse Kokula in Germany, and the Lesbian History Group in the United Kingdom, published texts by these

and others invariably begin with an enunciation of the par- ticular problems raised in rendering lesbians visible given how deliberately and successfully patriarchy has made us invisible. Even more often, patriarchal societies have dis- allowed women the possibility of being lesbian at all, in which case it is extremely difficult to produce and leave behind lesbian documents.

The introduction to a recent work by the London- based Lesbian History Group, Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History, 1840-1985, outlines some of the distinct problems lesbian historians face:

Writing the history of women is difficult because in a patri- archal society (i.e., one organized in the interests of men) fewer sources concerning women exist and those that do have often been ignored as "unimportant," or have been altered. The task of the feminist historian is first to rescue women from oblivion, and then to interpret women's experi- ence within the context of the society of the time.

This is also true for the lesbian historian. In her case, however, the problem of sources is magnified a thousand- fold. First, there is relatively little explicit information about lesbian lives in the past, though probably much more than we know about at the moment. Second, much important material has been suppressed as irrelevant, or its signifi- cance overlooked by scholars pursuing a different theory. Material may have been omitted as "private" or likely to embarrass the family or alienate the reader. Much of the evi- dence we do have has been distorted by historians who will- fully or through ignorance have turned lesbian lives into "normal" heterosexual ones. Women can be ignored, but les- bians must be expunged.

Lesbians do not usually leave records of their lives. Those who do may not include any details which would identify them as unmistakably lesbians.'

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It is, after all, one of the central political problems of histo- ry, as both a philosophical construct and an academic dis- cipline, that it can only be written-that is, it can only exist-from what has both already existed and still now exists. Additionally, history not only depends on the preex- istence of a material world of (already) lived experience, it also depends on both the existence and the accuracy of documents for and of the already-lived, as well as the interpretation of those documents. Given that what history we do know is a narrative of male supremacy no matter how subversively or productively we choose to interpret or uti- lize it, how is it theoretically possible to expect that the documentary evidence left behind could yield lesbian information that is in any way commensurate to or reflec- tive of lesbian experience?

Lesbian history invariably confronts the most pro- found conundrum of the basic premise of history, for it must address not only what has or has not been left behind by way of documentary remains (and how to decode them through the distorted lens of the present), but must in addi- tion confront the successful assimilation of women into heterosexuality and ask why this has occurred. For to understand lesbians, past and present, we must acknowl- edge that the lesbian functions within historical parame- ters that constitute a hard-earned escape from the politically enforced narrative of heterosexuality. The per- sistence of such neutralized misnomers as sexual prefer- ence mask the coercive function of heterosexuality by setting up a false premise that equates same-gender and cross-gender affections (although "sexual preference" is usually only called in to label gays or lesbians). Sexual preference also deliberately disables any full understanding of lesbians and lesbianism by relegating both our histories and our bodies to the limited realm of sexual activity.

Even when lesbianism is consciously and obviously

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Lesbian Art Project, Lesbian Fashion Show, ca. 1977-79, unidentified model, staged at the Los Angeles Woman's Building.

enunciated in textual and visual representation, readers and viewers and critics often remain determined to ignore it. An example given in Barbara Smith's introduction to Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology should be familiar to most American readers of this essay, as it concerns the 1982 winner of both the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the American Book Award for what became a 1985 Hollywood feature that garnered Academy Award nominations across the board: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. In her exami- nation of the forces that keep lesbianism, and most espe- cially black lesbianism, unmentionable, Smith writes:

Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple, is a marvel because it so clearly depicts the origins of contemporary Black femi- nism in the lives of our mothers, in this case of poor women living in the rural South. It also represents a breakthrough in both the context of trade publishing and Black literature, because of its original and positive portrayal of a Black les- bian relationship. Not surprisingly, in the unanimously pos- itive reviews of The Color Purple, Black and white critics have steadfastly refused even to mention the true subject of the book.2

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Lesbian Art Project, Lesbian Fashion Show, ca. 1977-79, unidentified model, staged at the Los Angeles Woman's Building.

Similar and more recent examples of not-seeing and not-naming the lesbian could be listed ad infinitum. In a book of Berenice Abbott photographs, recently repub- lished in 1990, the foreword by Muriel Rukeyser takes pains to call the reader's attention to Abbott's portraits of James Joyce, Andre Gide, and Jacques Cocteau but fails to reveal the fact that Abbott photographed high culture's Left Bank lesbian set of the 1920s, and that Abbott's charmed lesbian circle is featured one-by-one in the portraits of Jane Heap, Sylvia Beach, Princess Eugene Murat, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and- from their countenances and appearances-many of the other women featured in the book.3 Not to acknowledge Abbott's lesbianism is not to understand her art or her sub- jects. Such disacknowledgment also functions to deny les- bians access to our cultural history, thus allowing the heterosexual regime to claim it falsely for themselves. Likewise, the lesbian life and art of the French photogra- pher Claude Cahun, a contemporary of Abbott's, was exhibited for the first time in a large retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1995. Cahun's work, which consists mostly of defiant, ironic, and direct- gaze self-portraits produced during the 1930s and 1940s,

is hardly helped or sufficiently explained by the heterosex- ist writings included in the recent catalogues of her work.4 Some understanding of the lesbian subculture of Paris before World War II should be as necessary an art histori- cal tool to comprehending Cahun (or Abbott!) as is some knowledge of French-especially considering that Cahun collaborated with her lover Suzanne Malherbe on many of their photomontages. The particularities of lesbian life, as historicized and grounded in social experience, are still not accepted as even appropriate, much less necessary, art historical tools. How often have I been asked, by hetero- sexual art historians and critics after a few glasses of wine, whether it really matters at all whether an artist is lesbian or gay? Let me say that for many of us it matters a great deal-and it is obviously of significant importance to gov- ernments past and present that have enacted, and continue to enact, laws and other prohibitions against us.

Perhaps, though, as with the silence around The Color Purple, the problem of not naming the lesbianism in the art of Abbott, Cahun, and others is related to hetero- sexuality's ideological imperative that lesbianism cannot be mentioned or shown if this is done with approval. It appears that lauding lesbianism-not just describing it- is the most unmentionable deed. For Abbott's photograph- ic portraits of friends and lovers, Cahun's self-portraits, and Walker's fictional narrative render lesbianism and the women who live it with dignity and approval.

The disacknowledgment of artists and writers who are lesbians, and of art and literary productions that are lesbian, colludes with the disapproval that lesbianism meets in social and political life. And in academic life. As Marilyn Frye has observed in "A Lesbian's Perspective on Women's Studies," women's studies departments across the United States are locked into an understanding of women that aggressively accepts the heterosexualization of women as normal and the marginalization of lesbians as natural or inevitable. Frye suggests a reconsideration of what sexual politics in the university might be if it weren't heterosexist politics:

Imagine a real reversal of the heterosexualist teaching our program provides. Imagine thirty faculty members at a large university engaged routinely and seriously in the vig- orous and aggressive encouragement of women to be Les- bians, helping them learn skills and ideas for living as Lesbians, teaching the connections between Lesbianism and

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feminism and between heterosexism and sexism, building understanding of the agency of individual men in keeping individual women in line for the patriarchy. Imagine us openly and actively advising women not to marry, not to fuck, not to become bonded with any man. Imagine us teaching lots of Lesbian literature, poetry, history and art in women's studies courses, and teaching out of a politics deter- mined by Lesbian perception and sensibility.5

Writing about lesbians and lesbian art from a lesbian position that affirms and approves of lesbian existence is itself an act of advocacy, just as the number of dissertations and monographs and the amount of money Europe and the United States heap on white male artists is a form of politi- cal as well as cultural approval. Unless more lesbians are willing to accept the necessity of advocating our right to exist and our right to our cultural heritage, our history as well as our present and future will continue to be lost, denied, trivialized, and otherwise damaged.

For it is impossible for lesbian history to come into a recognizable cultural space until lesbians are themselves more visible in their/our own time. Unless we insist on our lesbian selves, unless we articulate ourselves visibly as such in the present, history will no doubt continue to erase us, and the lesbian historians of the future will be left with fragments and puzzles not much better than the ones we possess of the past today. Freeing ourselves from the self- censorship imposed on us is perhaps one of the most vital concerns contemporary lesbians face. One need only encounter cultural materials as otherwise dissimilar as the memoirs of French novelist and writer Marguerite Yourcenar or the New York Daily News interview with the comedian Ellen DeGeneres to witness how pervasive the necessity of lesbian self-erasure still is.6 And I have yet to enter any academic institution or situation in the United States that is free of a hiding, self-silenced, fearful lesbian: women who are unwilling to live heterosexualized, but still unable to publicly enunciate themselves as lesbians.

A significant historical turning point for lesbian his- tory in the United States is the period during the 1970s when lesbianism was chosen, celebrated, and culturally enunciated within the women's liberationist organizing of second wave feminism. Although individual lesbians had declared themselves as such before 1970, it was within the public discourse of the women's liberation movement that lesbianism was verbalized, aestheticized, collectivized,

.-.. ^. i A :

BaLw,pooelgfoLebaAtPoet198ofelihgah Bia Lowe, proposed logo for Lesbian Art Project, 1978, offset lithography.

Bia Lowe, proposed logo for Lesbian Art Project, 1978, offset lithography.

and otherwise actively demonstrated outside the confines of the personal, the private, the salon, and the bar. It was during the women's liberation movement, and despite the efforts of mainstream feminism's self-defined heterosexual- ists, that lesbianism became, quite simply, an issue, and sought to escape from the taxonomies of personal idiosyn- crasy, scandal, gossip, or cause for recantation within which lesbianism had previously dis-functioned.

It is not surprising then, that lesbian history has emerged in academic scholarship only after 1970, after the moment when lesbians, seemingly for the first time in his- tory, announced themselves as a self-recognized group-as a people who could, therefore, have a history. Given that the very idea of history relies on the acceptance of a cate- gorical imperative, of an understanding of a sense of conti- nuity through a formal arrangement of things or people-whether it be the concept of a nation (the United States of America), a culture (the Japanese), a religion (Christianity), or an ongoing production of related objects or forms (abstract painting)-there could be no history of lesbians if lesbians did not first declare themselves deci- sively as an entity, as a people who exist across time and space (and, relevant to the paradigm of lesbian identity, across nationalized and cultural boundaries), and as a peo- ple for whom a collective identity is accepted as apt despite the invariable differences that exist between any members of an acknowledged group. The personal and col- lective energies lesbians exerted on behalf of lesbianism during and within the 1970s women's liberation movement also helped produce an increase in the number of women willing and able to live as lesbians.7

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At the same time, it would appear that the general cultural declaration made by lesbians in the United States during the 1970s is still not considered by many to be enough to warrant our inclusion in either history or popular consciousness. Or perhaps it was precisely because les- bianism was so loudly enunciated during the 1970s that subsequent historical accounts have sought and continue to seek to diminish it. I base this assertion on the erasure and minimalization of lesbians and lesbianism from historical accounts of the 1970s; in particular I am concerned here with the heterosexualization of the feminist art movement.

The feminist art movement that emerged in the Unit- ed States during the 1970s has yet to be historicized or oth- erwise recognized with any degree of scholarship or other forms of cultural attention equivalent to the actual impact the movement has had on subsequent developments in American artistic practice. Rather than expand this argu- ment, I would like to address a few instances of cultural attention that have been paid to the feminist art of the sev- enties in order to situate the problem of lesbian erasure within the context of contemporary art history, as articulat- ed through a few recent productions.

As of 1996, there have been only two museum exhi- bitions organized in the United States that distinctly fea- tured (and named as such) works produced from the feminist art movement of the 1970s: Division of Labor: "Women's Work" in Contemporary Art (1995), which was organized by the Bronx Museum and traveled to the Muse- um of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" in Feminist Art History (1996), organized by the Armand Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. Both of these exhibi- tions refrained from demarcating the artistic energy of the 1970s as an art movement and included art from the 1980s and 1990s, a curatorial decision that minimizes the gener- ative position of the seventies. Stretching the influence of feminism across three decades avoids announcing the first decade as the movement it was and therefore reduces fem- inist art to a mere tendency. At the same time, however, the exhibitions inadvertently acknowledged the formative position of the seventies on subsequent visual products by the simple fact that the earliest dates on the exhibition checklists were of works from the late 1960s and the 1970s. The Sexual Politics exhibition charted a more com- plicated and hotly contested art historical trajectory by sit- uating dozens of women artists from the seventies, eighties, and nineties around one late-seventies feminist center- piece: Chicago's Dinner Party (1979). The curatorial and physical centrality allotted Chicago forced more than a few

seventies feminists to refuse to participate in the exhibition.8 Both Division of Labor and Sexual Politics overly het-

erosexualized the feminist art movement of the 1970s through the omission and miscontextualization of art made by and about lesbians. The eclipse of lesbianism appears in each of the exhibition titles. "Division of Labor" imme- diately suggests the heterosexualized division under which women are cast as men's domestic servants, housekeepers, and wives-a connotation corroborated by a curatorial emphasis on art that interacts with the tradition of domes- tic crafts. By including 1980s and 1990s craft-inspired art by men, Division of Labor struck a curatorial position pro- pounding a male-female dialogue, while making no acknowledgment of either the dialogue or the argument between lesbian and nonlesbian women. Harmony Ham- mond was the only lesbian included in Division of Labor. Despite Hammond's public work promoting lesbian visibil- ity as an artist, a writer, and an educator,9 her exhibited Floorpieces were discussed in the curator's exhibition essay exclusively in the context of Minimalism; specifically, as references to Carl Andre!0l Indeed, as long as historians and critics insist on examining every artwork in relation- ship to the art of (more) famous (white) male artists, the possibilities for understanding lesbian art, indeed all art, will continue to be greatly curtailed. For the Sexual Poli- tics exhibition, the heterosexualization of the title is itself a form of cultural colonization-as Sexual Politics takes its title from Kate Millett's most famous book, a work that is itself an indictment of heterosexuality. Abetted by the gen- eral reclamation of the phrase sexual politics into a gener- ally neutral ("it means something about gender, right?") rather than heterosexual-critical term, the exhibition dis- acknowleges both the lesbian authorship and lesbian implications of the eponymous book.

Indeed, both exhibitions relegate lesbianism and les- bians to marginal consideration. Although Sexual Politics includes more lesbian artists (including Tee Corrine, Nicole Eisenman, and Cheryl Gaulke), the works are left unelucidated within the exhibition's installation, stranded in the opaque confines of an idea of so-called difference. Perhaps most significantly, both exhibitions refuse to address the critique that seventies lesbian feminism and its art practitioners posed to both patriarchy and heterosex- ualized women. The practice of offering just illustration or description-that is, including usually marginalized art- works but dropping their context-appears to be one of the most popular devices to preclude the real implications of all identity politics. Thus, people make a nod to lesbianism without acknowledging its persecution, use the word gen-

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der but forgo discussing sexism, or write the word race when the real issue is racism.

The only general art historical text on seventies fem- inist art currently in print, The Power of Feminist Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, refers to lesbians by name on just 11 of its 318 pages. All of the direct, but nonetheless fleeting, references to lesbians are made by the four lesbians (including myself) included among the eighteen contribu- tors, as well as by one of the book's editors. One of the book's seventeen essays could and should have been devoted to lesbianism, given that lesbianism as theory and practice was among the most divisive, explosive, and radi- cal issues debated among seventies feminist activists and artists. The editors, as well as the lesbian and nonlesbian contributors, are aware of the central role lesbianism played in the social organizing of seventies feminism (especially in California, which is the book's primary geo- graphical focus), given that all of the contributors (exclud- ing myself) participated in the feminist movement of the 1970s and therefore had direct experience with the trou- bled cycle of enunciation and repression that framed les- bian cultural manifestations during that period. But the different strategies of representation employed by visual artists are incapable of surfacing within historical accounts that refuse to investigate hegemony beyond the level of mention, that stay at the level of superficial nods to the complex histories held and suggested by words like lesbian (or woman or black). It appears that lesbianism, one of the most critical engagements of 1970s feminist art and activism, is still unthinkable, undiscussible, and unpub- lishable twenty-five years later.

Of course, a central problem for critics, intellectuals, and historians who have sustained engagements with cul- tural materials deemed irrelevant and not valuable by the dominant culture is that our efforts are not easily rewarded with the resources necessary to conduct our work. We are expected to do more work-find images and documents that do not appear in books and sift through archival mate- rial that has not been catalogued-but we are also expect- ed to take for granted that we will receive less money to conduct our work. And frequently when we are given encouragement to do what we do best and we are even will- ing to accept that the resources we have for our work amount to little more than the air we breathe and the time we number among the living-our efforts are still sabo- taged. There will be no dramatic shift in the circumstances that constrict lesbian experience and lesbian culture until the political circumstances that normalize misogyny and

other forces of exploitation are dramatically altered. One of the most insidious formulations manufactured by the cor- ruption of identity politics is the Woman or the African American or the Chicano or the Lesbian invited to present a culturally marked body for the photo session, the acade- mic panel, the cover of the college catalogue, and other staged representations. Our images are used to mask the reality of our subordination. We know just how much we are being used when we attempt to speak and no one lis- tens and when no one bothers to look at or speak of the work that we have produced.

Notes 1. Lesbian History Group, Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in Histo-

ry, 1840-1985 (London: Women's Press, 1993), 3. 2. Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York:

Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1982), intro., 1. Although this example is now dated by over a decade, it remains a spectacular example of lesbian erasure given how otherwise acclaimed The Color Purple was as both a novel and a film in the early 1980s.

3. Muriel Rukeyser, foreword to Berenice Abbott/Photographs (New York: Smithsonian Institution/Tenth Avenue Editions, 1990).

4. The exhibition is documented in the Mus6e d'Art Modere de la Ville de Paris's catalogue Claude Cahun Photographe (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1995). See also Francois Leperlier, Claude Cahun, 'ecart et la mdtamorphose (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1992).

5. Marilyn Frye, Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1992), 53.

6. See Marguerite Yourcenar, Dear Departed: A Memoir, trans. Maria Louise Ascher (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991); and Tabitha Soren, "Ellen's New Twist on TV," New York Daily News, November 24,1995, USA Weekend section 4-6.

7. Even just looking at the number of women who "became" lesbians dur- ing/within and subsequent to the women's liberation movement indicates that the dialogue on lesbianism that occurred within the movement had a direct effect in enabling women to identify themselves as lesbians. Although an oral history of the movement in the United States would supply considerable evidence, just a look at famous women offers an indicator. Consider, for instance, that Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, and Adrienne Rich were married and considered themselves heterosexu- al before the advent of the movement.

In terms of the effect the women's liberation movement has had on subsequent possibilities for self-identified lesbians in the United States, I suggest that the gains in relative economic status the movement garnered for women have made it possible for more members of the next generation to choose to live sexually and economically independent from men (especially, if not exclusively, those of us who are white, middle classed, and college educated).

8. Some of the seventies feminist artists who were approached by the curators and refused to participate in Sexual Politics are Mary Beth Edelson, Harmony Hammond, Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Snyder, and Nancy Spero.

9. Hammond was on the editorial board for the "Lesbian Art and Artists" issue of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, no. 3 (1977). She was also the curator of A Lesbian Show at 112 Greene Street Workshop in New York in 1978. For a discussion of a variety of contemporary lesbian art and artists, see Hammond's "A Space of Infinite and Pleasurable Possibilities: Lesbian Self-Rep- resentation in Visual Art," in New Feminist Criticism, ed. Joanna Frueh et al. (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 97-131.

10. See Lydia Yee, "Division of Labor: 'Women's Work' in Contemporary Art," in the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1995), 17.

LAURA COTTINGHAM is the author of lesbians are so chic ... (London: Cassell, 1996). She is currently working on Not for Sale, a video history of the feminist art movement.

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