Lesbian Time

Abstract

When reading the essays in this rich and enriching collection, I was thinking about what it means for contemporary gender and sexuality theory to track a lesbian genealogy across time and space: how to go beyond the conventions of periodization that still bind contemporary scholarship even when disciplinary boundaries are displaced. Much of my own work on sexology has been concerned with questions of discipline formation, especially the gendered politics of organizing knowledges into distinct areas of specialism, and what the translation of ideas across disciplinary, national, and linguistic contexts can tell us about the gendered conditions of their production.¹ Temporally, a central part of my work focuses on the fin de siècle, the point in time when a new modern vocabulary of sexuality forcefully laid claim to discourses of the intimate as well as the political, the individual as well as the collective. This brief historical moment has been the focus of extensive critical attention since the publication of Michel Foucault ’s History of Sexuality inaugurated the new field of historical enquiry built around scrutinizing the manifold contingencies attached to the emergence of a modern scientia sexualis. But while historians of sexuality have examined, for example, the links between sexual discourse and subject formation, including important studies of how, as Lisa Duggan puts it, “the relative powerlessness of lesbians [… ] has been enforced historically by limiting their means of direct public self-representation,” the ways in which lesbian histories and historiographies are shaped by and across modern conventions of periodization has yet to be explored in full.²