AHA Annual Meeting
Friday, January 7, 2011

Report by Lucinda Grinnell

This panel focused on lesbian and feminist activism and transnational organizing in the waning years of the Cold War. This was a period when the lesbian and feminist movements were engaged in complex ideological, strategic, and tactical battles about the direction and the focus of the movement in the United States, and when lesbian and gay activists were initiating political battles in Latin America in the context of authoritarian regimes as was the case in Mexico or within liberation struggles as was the case in Nicaragua.

The panel, chaired by Margot Canaday, included three papers and commentary from James N. Green. In her paper, “Re-Thinking Second Wave Feminism’s “Sex Wars,” Claire Bond Potter offered a revisionist perspective on the “sex wars” of the late 1970s and early 1980s in San Francisco, focusing on questions of lesbian sexual citizenship. Also examining solidarities and conflicts within lesbian activist communities in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s, Emily Hobson, “Embracing Our Sisters in Solidarity”: Revolutionary Nicaragua, Reagan-Era San Francisco, and Transnational Lesbian Possibility,” discussed the dynamics of lesbian participation in solidarity activism with Nicaragua, giving particular attention to race and class tensions and their effects. Lucinda Grinnell, “Challenging ‘Moral Renovation:’ Lesbian Activism and the 1982 Economic Crisis in Mexico,” also considered Mexican lesbian and gay activists’ participation in international social movements, as well as discussed activists’ responses to economic crisis and moralizing politics in Mexico City between 1982 and 1985.

As indicated by comment from both Green and the audience, all three papers point to the need for much more research on the dynamics of lesbian, feminist, gay, and queer politics nationally and internationally in the 1980s, at the same time being cognizant of all of the methodological challenges of working with oral histories and recent topics.