Lesbians, Put on Your Eclipse Glasses
Anyone wondering what happened to lesbian scholarship in universities?
Anyone wondering what happened to lesbian scholarship in universities? This is the story within the National Women’s Studies Association, which according to field co-founder Margaret Cruikshank, would never have existed without the labor of lesbians.
As a pet project during her dissertation research, Rachel combed through every NWSA program from the conference’s inception in 1979 through 2018 to find panels with “lesbian” and “queer” in the titles. Watch the eclipse here.
More from the history of academic lesbianism coming soon at the StoneButchDisco.com Butch-Femme Reading Room!
For now, Rachel’s SBD essays are back up on the “Opinions Her Own”/Home page, all under continual editing but provisionally useful. Excerpts will be polished and shared periodically on Substack, interspersed with newer stuff. Many on the site were written before she got yelled at and told to die/go to hell a bunch on Instagram simply for talking about being female; thus, an angrier tone probably equates to “written later in time.”
Rachel attended the 2015-2018 NWSA meetings, and at all four, complete strangers to the Lesbian Studies Caucus showed up to the Caucus meeting and requested that the name be changed to the Queer Women’s Caucus. Every single year. Always a different person or pair of people.
This is awesome work
NWSA became quite the grim scene for lesbian feminists. My field of women's history was nearly wiped from the boards, and those of us who kept it going received a chilly reception. I appreciate the documentation you did showing the eclipse of feminist and lesbian topics as against the rise of trans and queer themes in the papers accepted at that conference.