To Theorize as a Queer Feminist?: The Archive of the 1989 Inside/Out Conference

In recent years, a number of theorists have postulated the existence of a distinct queer feminist critical perspective (Jagose 2013, Huffer 2013, Wiegman 2014). Though none of these projects are centrally invested in historicizing the development of queer feminism, the general consensus seems to be that queer feminism was consolidated as a body of thought in the years following the emergence of queer theory in the early 1990s. This paper builds upon the premise that queer feminism exists as a discrete knowledge project in its own right. Specifically, this paper examines the history of queer feminism by looking at the 1989 Inside/Out conference, which was put on by the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale (LGSCY). LGSCY’s annual conferences are often imagined to serve a “canonizing mechanism” in the formation of what became queer studies (Prosser, 1998, 24). Of these conferences, the 1989 conference is perhaps the most memorable. On the first day, nine attendees, including Bill Dobbs of ACT-UP NY, were arrested for breaching the peace. Later, Eve Sedgwick’s session erupted into a heated dialogue over her sexuality with audience members shouting, “Are you a lesbian?” In all, the raucous conference ignited debates over identity, politics, and theory in relation to the increasing academic legitimacy of the field. In this paper, I revisit this field-defining conference to offer a historically specific account of the process through which the institutionalization of queer studies in U.S. colleges and universities helped facilitate the appearance of what we now call queer feminism.