Left of Lesbian

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

What’s left of lesbian? Remarkably overdetermined––perhaps more so than other gender-sexual categories such as “gay” or “trans”––the category of “lesbian” has accreted a set of contradictory affects, political ambitions, and social meanings over the last several decades. Lesbian has been viewed as contemporary, retrograde, white, radical, regressive, groundless, pornographic, sexless, bourgeois, working-class, enduring, and under threat of erasure. Taking our cue from the 2020 issue of Social Text titled “Left of Queer,” we embrace the multiple valences of this panel title. Without determining what “lesbian” might mean too far in advance––or, perhaps, reproducing the scene of reception that awaits anyone whom this category interpellates––we ask: What remains of lesbian as a political and/or social identity? What is (thought to be) to the left of lesbian? What is left of a lesbian-forward queer theory? Reformatting the questions that guide this edition of the ASA convention, we ask: What kind of lesbian is invoked in queer studies, and when/how is “lesbian” studied? Are we living through a historical conjuncture characterized by the waning of modern gender-sexual categories in the context of late-stage capitalism?

We are an interdisciplinary group of scholars studying the aesthetic, cultural, and literary productions of queer, trans, and lesbian life in the Americas. Bearing a set of markedly divergent relationships to the term “lesbian,” our conversation began while serving as 2024 Pettit Fellows in Lesbian Studies at Yale and now seeks to expand our scope. Drawing from diverse disciplinary landscapes and lived experiences, this panel asks how we might think of “lesbian” as a relational, tactical position in broader queer and feminist struggles? Where and how does “lesbian” interface with colonial and imperial forces? To what extent do shifting cultural landscapes like the rise of anti-trans politics and the decimation of policies protecting queer and trans lives define or destabilize lesbian subjectivities? How do intersections with race, class, or geography multiply and disperse the category of lesbian? Together we aim to interrogate how “lesbian,” in its residual and emergent forms, operates as a generative and contested site for political mobilization and theoretical inquiry.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Alejandrina M Medina, University of California-San Diego

Panelists

• Lauren Bakst, University of Pennsylvania

• Diana Cage, University of California, Davis

• Maria Cecilia Azar, Brown University

• Tiana Reid, York University

• Connor E Spencer, Columbia University in the City of New Y

• Nikita Shepard, Elon University

Comment

• Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

Biographical Information

Alejandrina M. Medina (UC San Diego), Chair, a3medina@ucsd.edu
Alejandrina M. Medina is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, San Diego. She is also co-lead of the Black, Indigenous, and Trans of Color Histories Lab, which has recently been awarded a $460,000 higher learning grant from the Mellon Foundation. Her work thinks through material histories of race, sex, and ability within transfeminine aesthetic production.
Heather Love (Penn), Moderator, loveh@english.upenn.edu
Heather Love is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her A.B. from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, twentieth-century literature and culture, affect studies, sociology and literature, disability studies, film and visual culture, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press)

Lauren Bakst (Penn), lbakst@sas.upenn.edu
Lauren Bakst is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also pursuing a Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching draws on and moves across performance studies, queer and trans studies, Black feminisms, poetics, visual culture, and critical pedagogies. Her dissertation focuses on lesbian sex and erotics in the late 20th and 21st centuries through the study of experimental performance. She curates and organizes the School for Temporary Liveness, a para-site for performance and collective study, the next iteration of which will take place at The Kitchen (NYC) in 2025. Her writing is forthcoming in TDR/The Drama Review.

Connor Spencer (Columbia), connor.spencer@columbia.edu
Connor Spencer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His research interests span gender and sexuality studies, 20th-/21st-century American literature and visual culture, critical theory, the novel, realism(s), aesthetics, and archives. His dissertation examines the rhetoric and aesthetics of gender-sexual typologies in the American long twentieth century. A Graduate Affiliate at the Columbia Research Initiative for the Global Histories of Sexuality, his research has been supported by the Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant from Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection as well as a Beinecke Research Fellowship at Yale University. His writing is published or forthcoming in Post45, College Literature, and Esse Arts + Opinions.

Diana Cage (UC Davis), dcage@ucdavis.edu
Diana Cage (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis with an emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on intersections in art and medicine and feminist science projects that make interventions in health inequities. Her research interests include game studies and video game design, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist, queer, and trans STS. She is a former editor of the historical lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs and a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD) and works to bring awareness to the HIV/AIDS crisis as an ongoing, intersectional reality.

Cecilia Azar (Brown), mcazar@brown.edu
M. Cecilia Azar (she/Ella) is a Ph.D. student in the Theater Arts and Performance Studies Program at Brown University. She researches the cultural productions of cuir/queer and travesti/trans diasporas in the Americas. Drawing from theories of diaspora and decolonization, queer and travesti/trans studies, and performance studies, her work thinks about how displaced queer and travesti/trans individuals and communities engage with and negotiate space and identity. She holds a master’s degree in English from CSU, Los Angeles, and a master’s degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Maryland.

Tiana Reid (York University)
Tiana Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University in Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include black literature, gender, sexuality, and labor. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, Theory & Event, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, among other publications. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2021.

Nikita Shepard (Elon University), ns3307@columbia.edu
Nikita Shepard is an Assistant Professor of History at Elon University and a scholar of gender, sexuality, race, and social movements in the modern United States. Their book project, Embodied Politics: A Social Movement History of the Public Bathroom, examines toilets as sites and symbols of political conflict in the US over the past century. Their article "'Women are Women and Gay Women are Cops': Lesbian Police, Carceral Equality, and the Ambivalence of Confrontation," on the history of same-sex loving women in US law enforcement and their relationship to the legacy of lesbian feminism, is forthcoming in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Washington Post, GLQ, Journal of the History of Sexuality, the Oral History Journal, Spectrum South, RFD, and the 2023 anthology Queer Data Studies. They will receive their Ph.D. in History from Columbia University this spring.