Problematizing the Privileging of Lesbian Voices: The Subaltern Voices of Women Loving Women Within the Lesbian Narrative

• In Event: Roundtable Session 99
  In Roundtable Session: Which River Metaphor Is Yours: Culturally Responsive and Socially Responsible Methodologies

Abstract

My river appears to move smoothly with barely a ripple on the surface, yet beneath the smooth surfaces surges a current much faster and more dangerous than what appears on the surface. If one remains on the surface, then the flow of the river takes us down stream easily and safely. However, if I or others break the surface, then the current tumbles me/us around the rocks, through the gravel and sand of the river bottom and we emerge scraped and battered further down the river from our starting point. It is this analogy of breaking the surface, of challenging the meta-narrative of lesbian history through the differential power relationships of select lesbian voices that is the focus of this paper.

In this paper, I problematize the valorization and romanticization of lesbian narratives within the seminal works of lesbian histories, presented as the “simplistic conflation of voices as evidence” (Mazzei & Jackson, 2009, p. 4). This problematization emerges out of my own self-interrogation as a lesbian, a feminist, a historian; each of these identities are singular yet interwoven, each is a noun yet again an adjective and yet again a verb. It is this excavation of these identities as not fixed, as narratives and counternarratives, that challenges the multiplicity of ways in which the subaltern voices of lesbians has been “mediated, constrained, determined, and commodified” (p. 5). By this, I mean the deliberate omission of self-identified women – loving – women who chose to not use the label ‘lesbian’ in their narratives. It is this privileging of one narrative over another, as Mazzei and Jackson describe “creating transcendental, universal truths” (2009, p. 1) about lesbian history framing research up to and including the present that is the focus of my chapter as I excavate the implications of culturally and socially responsive methodologies within the marginalized communities of women-loving-women within the “lesbian” narrative.

Author

• Anna V. Wilson, Chapman University