Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

simultaneous affirmation and deconstruction of identity (politics) in the poetry/theory of working class
lesbians and lesbians of colour. Thus, much of her textual analysis focuses on issues of identity. This is
partly in response to the familiar (and, as Moira Gatens puts it, tired and tiring) charge of essentialism
that is often directed towards lesbian feminism. The insistence on identity may also be read as
symptomatically reflecting the poststructuralist impact upon theorisations of identity more generally.
Thus in the chapter on white American poet Judy Grahn, Garber points to Grahn's reclamation of words
such as 'queer' and 'dyke' in her poetry about working-class women, the emphasis on the free play of
language, and a nascent critique of what queer theory knows as 'heteronormativity.' Similarly, Garber
reads Black American poet and activist Pat Parker's poetry as pre-empting postmodern or queer notions
of identity by refusing a singular and unified subjectivity - reflecting on the differences within. For
Garber, Parker's work also begins to articulate a critique of the nature of differences between women,
analysing the silences and exclusions around class and race within the women's movement and lesbian
feminism. A similar critique of identity is also located in the work of Audre Lorde, the Black American
writer, activist and lesbian feminist, who Garber reads as drawing on various myths, histories and
identities in order to articulate not an essential or archetypal identity, but a 'postmodern lesbian-feminist
identity poetics' (112). Other elements of Lorde's work that Garber reads as 'queering' stereotypes of
lesbian feminism are an emphasis on sexuality (instead of the prudish and humourless caricature of
lesbian feminism), and a deployment of a 'strategic essentialism' that has more recently been associated
with theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Diana Fuss and Elizabeth Grosz.
Placing Adrienne Rich next to Lorde as one of the most prominent voices of lesbian feminism, Garber
discusses the way in which these authors have frequently been read out of context, understanding this
as part of the reason why elements of Rich's work have been repeatedly invoked as representative of
the sins of lesbian feminism. Promoting a more detailed re-reading of Rich, Garber draws out links
between Rich's well known concept of compulsory heterosexuality and queer theory's (and in
particular, Judith Butler's) critique of the heterosexual matrix. Similarly, Rich's formulation of the
lesbian continuum (reading a range of relationships between women as 'lesbian') is not represented in
terms of a gender/sexuality (or a queer versus lesbian feminism) oppositionality. Instead, Garber
analyses the motivations underlying the lesbian continuum and queer as similar; both 'draw attention to
sexual identities that are suppressed by heterosexism, and . . . construct disruptive, insurgent categories
of identity that fly in the face of the terms' typical usages' (137).
Finally, Garber reads the work of Chicana cultural theorist and poet Gloria Anzaldúa as a bridge
between the poetry of Grahn, Parker, Lorde, and Rich, and the emergence of queer in the early 1990s.
As with these writers, Anzaldúa's work is understood to be decidedly queer in terms of the
problematising of identity, and of the categories theory/poetry. Although Anzaldúa consciously invokes
the term queer, as well as an identity, or identities, that are self-consciously liminal and borderline (see
Anzaldúa's oft-cited Borderlands/La Frontera), Garber is careful to link her work with that of the
emergence of a specific Chicana feminism in the 1980s and the deployment of a strategic essentialism,
rather than appropriating her work to a completely queer or postmodern deconstruction of identity.
There are two potential risks in Garber's project - either too thorough appropriation of lesbian feminism
by queer theory, or an uncritical celebration of lesbian feminism. Garber is on the whole careful not to
realign the work of Grahn, Parker, Lorde, Rich, and Anzaldúa with a queer agenda, for to do would
misrepresent these women and their work, as well as the social and historical importance of the
expression and theorisation of a specifically lesbian feminist identity and politics: 'Although I argue
that lesbian feminism is neither as white, middle class, nor antiqueer as it has been portrayed, neither
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