Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

INTRODUCTION • xxxix
riod. This was true, with a great deal of local variation, throughout Europe
and the Americas. Both feminist and lesbian literature continued to
develop in the postwar period. The publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s
Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) in 1949 was a major turning point
and had immediate affect in both the United States and Britain, where
it was in print by 1953. De Beauvoir was the first theorist to posit the
cultural construction of woman, though her lengthy section on lesbianism
relies heavily on the categories and ideas of deviance set up by sexology.
In the United States the most important development in postwar lesbian
literature was the mass-market publication of literally hundreds of
lesbian paperbacks (most often referred to as “lesbian pulp novels,”
though many of them were not novels at all). From scientific studies to
literary anthologies to accounts of the lesbian subcultural world that resemble
travel literature to romance novels, publishers of paperback
original fiction found the figure of the lesbian highly profitable. This literature
is significant for a number of reasons. First and foremost it disseminated
ideas of lesbian identity and subculture in unprecedented
volume. Second, the best of lesbian pulp literature articulates the concerns
of an emerging feminist movement while even the worst of it
highlighted the anxieties around women’s work, consumption and sexuality
that dominated the period.
The concerns raised within the work of paperback writers like Ann
Bannon and Valerie Taylor form the substance of the popular feminist
movement that emerged in the 1960s. Alongside the struggle for lesbian
representation, which continued within mainstream feminism after
1977, an emerging and consciously lesbian feminism articulated a specific
analysis of the relation between sexism and homophobia. A number
of powerful manifestos, including “The Woman-Identified-Woman-
Manifesto” and the “Combahee River Collective Statement,” exemplify
the complex and radical understanding of class, race and gender that
marked this movement. Lesbianism is seen, in these works, as the root
(radical) for overall social change (revolution). This idea was influential
even among heterosexual feminists, some of whom chose to live
for a time as “political lesbians.” Certain literary works, such as Marge
Piercy’s Woman at the Edge of Time (1978) are documents of this era,
during which gender dissidence and same-sex desire were championed
by otherwise heterosexual feminist writers. Since the control of