Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Friday, June 10, 2011

Report by Leisa Meyer

Leisa Meyer, Chair; Participants: Evelyn Blackwood, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Matt Richardson, Leila J. Rupp, Susan Stryker, Ruth Vanita, Martha Vicinus

The “Lesbian Generations” Roundtable was framed by a series of questions posed to all participants, which focused on the definitions and meanings of “lesbian” as an identity, experience, and idea historically and transnationally.The participants interrogated same-sex female desires and acts from a variety of vantage points, and what became clear by the end were the challenges, as Leila Rupp noted, of writing histories of a “group” that is not clearly defined even to in the present. Who is included in the category “lesbian”? How do we address the contentious borders between lesbian and transgender identities, between passing women and transmen, between gender identity and sexual identity? And how do we make sense of female same-sex sexualities in a globalized world?

Nan Alamilla Boyd noted that because the category of lesbian is contested and often gets confused with the concept of community, it might perhaps be more productive to consider lesbian history as the history of an idea rather than a group or a people. She suggested that we turn to the history of the production of meanings and ideas underlying various articulations of “lesbian,” adding that global capital forces the movement of ideas and materials into transnational meanings and cultures.

Ruth Vanita in turn called our attention to the issue of translation. She offered that, when speaking of same-sex sexual identities and experiences, we need to acknowledge that we are writing in a particular language and that “translating” these ideas to a different language often involves approximation. There are many times no adequate translations from one language to another that capture the specific cultural meanings of a phrase or a term; this inadequacy holds for every term and phrase, not just “lesbian.” She also suggested that we more fully embrace and engage literature as a source that is quite complicated in relation to female-female relationships as it deals with the overlap between “history” and “representations” of that history.

On the “contentious borders” between lesbian and transgender identities, embodiment and histories of bodies were common themes, with Evelyn Blackwood recommending that we look to Judith Halberstam’s “female masculinities” as a framework, and to the commonality of female bodies, including female-bodied transgender individuals, as possible analytics on this question. Susan Stryker suggested using the metaphor of immigration, asking that we think more theoretically about crossing borders and noting the long history of transsexual and transgender presence in lesbian communities. And in relation to her work Sapphistries, Leila Rupp commented that, while she was “uneasy” about including women who crossed gender lines in her study, she was more uneasy about leaving them out.

Last, Martha Vicinus posited we needed to turn away from psychoanalytic frameworks for understanding female same-sex relations historically, and she clarified the general consensus of the participants that there cannot be one singular or unitary framework for understanding and conveying these histories.