Ambivalent Attachments: Queer and Trans Histories of Lesbian Feminism

Ambivalent Attachments:Queer and Trans Histories of Lesbian Feminism Rachel Corbman (bio) LESBIAN DEATH: DESIRE AND DANGER BETWEEN FEMINIST AND QUEER BY MAIREAD SULLIVAN University of Minnesota Press, 2022 Mairead Sullivan prefaces their important new book, Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer, by admitting an ambivalent attachment to the word "lesbian": "I have written this book because associating my work with lesbian makes me endlessly nervous," they explain, even as "I cannot let lesbian go" (vii–ix). This passage not only appears in the closing paragraph of the book's preface; it is also reprinted on the cover in yellow lettering against a soft lavender background, wryly mimicking the aesthetics of late twentieth-century feminist and queer artists like Jenny Holzer or fierce pussy—an aesthetic trace, that is, of the history that Sullivan cannot let go. Sullivan is not the only queer scholar to begin a full-length study of lesbian feminism with this sort of disclaimer. "The first syllable of the word lesbian always feels like molasses," Jed Samer admits in the first sentence of Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s (2022). "I have gotten more than enough practice, tasted many a spoonful of lavender molasses, writing this book" (1). Cait McKinney, too, opens their media history of lesbian feminism by acknowledging their "ambivalent identifications with lesbian feminism" and "even to the category of 'lesbian" (26). This shared apprehensiveness is not surprising. Lesbian feminism first took shape in the early 1970s as a political project that sought to dismantle the patriarchy by valuing "emotional and erotic connections" between women (Samer, 2). Fifty years later, lesbian End Page 185 feminism tends to be associated with anachronistic and bad politics. Contemporary scholars and activists often bristle at lesbian feminism's enthusiasm for women and lesbian as categories, which now smacks of gender essentialism and implicit whiteness. Many of us worry specifically about lesbian feminism's storied hostility toward trans people and, especially, women. To be clear, lesbian feminists did not share a uniform position on trans people and issues in the 1970s and 1980s.1 Rather, lesbian feminism secured its transphobic reputation through a handful of frequently cited examples of trans exclusion in the 1970s and 1980s and the vitriolic transphobia of a "small but vocal minority" of trans-exclusionary radical feminists in the present, who often position their "gender critical" feminism as a direct extension of the past (18). Lesbian feminism's real and imagined transphobia takes on a particular weight in the current moment, as right-wing politicians in the United States continue to introduce bill after bill targeting trans people's access to health care, sports, education, bathrooms, and identity documents. Even if the history of lesbian feminism does not explain the right's fixation on trans people in the contemporary culture wars, scholars and activists cannot help feeling like this history conspires with the present. Projects on lesbian feminism must thus confront the reputation that precedes their object, even if they push back on the assumption that lesbian feminism was truly as white, essentialist, and transphobic as critics often assume. In Lesbian Death, Sullivan thematizes the ambivalence that animates recent work on lesbian feminism. In doing so, they participate in what Jennifer Nash refers to as the "introspective turn," joining a body of thought that takes the affects, desires, and attachments of contemporary feminist and queer scholarship as its object of analysis (2019, 13). Sullivan's strategy of sitting with mixed feelings follows an existing critical trend. In Considering Emma Goldman (2018), Clare Hemmings studies the contradictions inherent in early twentieth-century anarchist Emma Goldman's politics as well as the fraught reception of her work over time. "A sustained focus on ambivalence," Hemmings argues, "helps us to engage past politics and theory as complex or contradictory, and to foreground the importance of current complexity, despite our desire to have resolved both past and present paradoxes" (18). In a somewhat similar diagnosis of dominant critical tendencies, Kadji Amin argues that queer and left criticism End Page 186 often rushes to either critique bad objects or to idealize good ones. Amin suggests that scholars might instead "inhabit unease, rather than seeking...