Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

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and critics over the past two centuries. As an identity position that both creates and embodies anxieties around sexed and gendered structures of power, the lesbian always arises at critical moments in the history of literature and generates a tremendous amount of theorizing. Likewise in a world where women are the prime objects of visual, and the prime subjects of material, consumption, the lesbian is a tremendously lucrative position. Lesbians are put on display for the titillation of both men and women, and they are a growing concern of target marketers seeking new opportunities for creating consumption. Therefore the lesbian continues to be highly visible in culture and theory. Some lesbian writers are now finding mainstream publishing success with openly lesbian novels in a global literature industry. The theoretical positions outlined above are more important than ever as the lesbian identity continues to operate in the global marketplace. WHY DO LESBIANS READ? INTRODUCTION • xlix From the earliest publications of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen in 1899, lesbians have talked about reading as an important part of their process of identification. Lesbian novels were listed in the Jahrbuch, and publicly discussed as important material by members of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which Hirschfeld founded. American lesbian pulp fiction of the postwar era has been referred to by Joan Nestle as “lesbian survival literature,” the category under which it is housed in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York. Oral histories from Great Britain, the United States and Australia repeatedly describe a process by which young women experience same-sex desires, yet do not have a language to describe or communicate about them. Trips to the library or corner drugstore in search of dictionary definitions and fictional representations provided the necessary explications. It is in literature, as much as in bars or schools, that women describe, again and again, the process of developing a lesbian identity. These stories are often told in a way that makes the young person essentially lesbian but without the knowledge to understand herself, until she finds the literature that gives her that knowledge. It could also be argued, in a Foucauldian sense, that the lesbian identity exists in the literature and is built around an interaction between that literature
l • INTRODUCTION and a set of desires that did not previously define the individual’s identity. That is to say, that literature is one forum where, between writers and readers, the lesbian identity was created. Narrative is a human instinct. It is the way in which we make sense of the disordered events and impressions that make up our world. In order to create and understand identity positions and their functions we tell stories about them and we read and listen to those stories. The novelistic form known to critics as the bildungsroman (the novel of education, bildung in German refers both literally to building and to the process of education) is a prime embodiment of this process of creating identity through narrative. In the bildungsroman a typically young hero leaves a closed, often provincial setting, and proceeds through the world overcoming obstacles to eventually find a place in the social structure and a personal identity. The so-called “coming out novel” is the specifically homosexual form of the bildungsroman. As such, it highlights the way in which narrativizing in literature has been a major vehicle for the production of what we know as lesbian identity. For women who love each other, literature has been both a revolutionary and an oppressive tool. For a literature formed by ideas of romance and sensual revelation, the lesbian figure has been a rich mine of ideas and sensations for centuries. NOTES 1. See Joanne Myers, Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian Liberation Movement: Still the Rage for a detailed discussion of the history of lesbian feminist debate in the 1970s. 2. For a specific in-depth study of a government sponsored program of eugenic extermination practiced on Native Americans see Nancy Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters. For a more comprehensive study of eugenic sterilization programs in Britain and North America see Stephen Trombley, The Right to Reproduce: A History of Coercive Sterilization. 3. See George Henry, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. 4. For an articulation of the idea of “sexual dissidence” see Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wild, Freud to Foucault. 5. See Bernadette Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism.
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