Beschreibung:
Before the rise of the political and theoretical project of ‘queer’ (which, in my estimation, is a second-wave millennial project begun in the 1990s), scholarly and performative lesbian practices were situated within and against feminist scholarship. Early on, the agenda was to establish lesbian visibility and, in consequence, to reveal and deconstruct the structures of representation, on the stage and on the page. Indeed, the context for lesbian work was intentionally composed of women, misunderstood as separatism, while actually creating a fully gendered notion of surrogation. By this I mean to gesture to Joseph Roach's notion of surrogation as ‘improvized narratives of authenticity and priority’ that can ‘congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’. In situating lesbian visibility strictly within the gendered category of women, a genealogy and authenticity were invoked for its representation that were removed from the violence of binary logics of gender.