Conclusion: Dividing Lines, Ties That Bind

Abstract

Noting the early date of Jeffrey Weeks’s rather dismal report, presented in the first epigraph, on the many issues polarizing lesbians, gay men, and feminists, one might wonder whether “the ranks” of sex, gender, and sexuality practitioners have yet begun to close, whether they have realigned or redivided themselves over different issues, whether “solidarity” and “splitting asunder” have themselves been revalued in discursive and political contexts. Significantly, Weeks’s focus is not on texts, where much of my own attention has turned, and not even on academics, but on “ordinary” men and women whose sexual and political interests position them against the cultural mainstream and, Weeks cannot help but lament, against each other.