Doing the Lesbian in Queer Feminist Art History

The definition of the term ‘lesbian’ has been contested across decades of feminist thinking. In the 1970s, writers like Monique Wittig and manifestos like ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’ theorised the lesbian as a political and sexual subject with the potential to refuse structures of womanhood and compulsory heterosexuality. This presentation will consider how lesbian art provides a fertile way of imagining different approaches to writing histories of feminism by turning to the work of a number of feminist historians whose scholarship has attended to the subject of lesbian-identity through the lens of visual culture. Many of the scholars of feminist art who have been most attentive to lesbian-identity are also artists. Representing a particularly queer kind of art historian, this list includes Laura Cottingham, Elizabeth Ashton, Harmony Hammond, Catherine Lord, and Cherry Smyth. Writing from inside their own experiences of lesbian community, each of these writers has challenged the materials and methods for doing feminist art history through lesbian culture. For example, writing in the mid-1990s, Cottingham addressed the way that the apparent absence of the lesbian from both archives and accounts of art challenged the ways art history is practiced altogether. This paper will examine how many of the historians listed above shift emphasis away from ideas of reclamation or visibility. Instead, it will argue that the ways these writers turn to the identifications, desires, and materials of a lesbian past offer us experimental forms and eccentric models with which to address the contemporary queer dynamics of feminist art history.