"The Passage is Through:" Relations of Accountability in Lesbian Politics

• In Event: Feminist Affects and Attachments

Abstract

Queer theorists are often credited for having introduced a “politics of difference” to political theory. Because such a politics emphasizes certain groups’ exclusion from various publics, it tends to forcefully reject any form of political engagement perceived to enact or legitimize such exclusions. Although the lesbian political community of the 1980s is understood to deal in such exclusions, I argue that disavowing lesbianism has flattened, homogenized, and diminished our understanding of its political and conceptual contributions to political theory. Using materials from the largely ignored lesbian archive Sinister Wisdom, I show that lesbians from the late-1970s to the mid-1990s, in fact, sought a relational politics by exploring what it means to develop relationships of mutual accountability around issues of race and racism. Equally, they conceptualized processes by which to repair these relationships when they fail. Reconstructing lesbian relationality, first, highlights and clarifies the role of lesbian writers, activists, and scholars in developing the very democratic ethos that is now associated primarily with a politics of difference. Second, though, it reminds us to conceptualize differences not as exclusions, but as symptoms of complex relationships of authority and subordination, of privilege and marginality, of acceptability and legitimacy. Engaging in a relational politics that acknowledges these dynamics is neither simple nor clear-cut; however, the lesbian relational politics I reconstruct offers a promising site in which to inaugurate a political practice that remakes relations of inequality into relations of accountability. 

Author

• Elena Gambino, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities