The Future is Lesbian (and So is the Past)

The ‘return of the lesbian’ indicates a spatio-temporal movement: where has the lesbian been, and to where is she returning? These questions can be answered by looking to feminism and its generations. The ‘lesbian’ has been correlated with the second-wave, whereas the broad notion of ‘queer’ has been associated with the third. If the lesbian is back, a re-configuration of feminist time is in order. Artist Allyson Mitchell has proposed ‘deep lez’ as a strategy for recuperating radical lesbian politics, calling on the unfashionable to inform new, strategic positions for thinking lesbian identification. Using deep lez as a critical lens, this paper considers two studies: one, the graphic appropriation and commercialisation of the lesbian separatist slogan ‘the future is female,’ and two, the re-staging of Annette Kennerley’s cruising film Sex, Lies, Religion (1993) by Lina Bembe and Max Disgrace under the title Tribute (2018). The first asks us to consider the ethics of retrieval, and what (if anything) can be salvaged from a politics discordant to our own. The second attends to the lesbian’s temporal significations, re-configuring the otherwise tidy pairing of lesbian/second-wave and queer/third. Looking to these dialectical images, the paper questions the suturing of identification with ideology, opening the sign lesbian to a capacious reading which accounts for its potential in past and present—dislodging ‘lesbian’ from a generational model of feminist time, and using her return to posit one which is disinvested from a teleological narrative of progress, foregrounding the messy, conflicting, and often generative experience of identification.