The Lesbian-Identified Lesbian: Lesbian Feminisms for a Post-Binary Future

Lesbian feminist Monique Wittig’s 1979 provocation that “lesbians are not women” was a prescient forecast for the present era, a time when the designation of woman is increasingly understood as gender essentialist, over-universalizing, and trans-exclusionary by many. Lesbian feminist theory of the 1970s and ’80s is often dismissed as irredeemably white, middle class, and trans exclusionary in its fundamental tenets—a reading that erases the vital contributions of trans, working-class, and women of color lesbian feminists of the era. Moreover, this narrative obscures an abundance of lesbian feminist theory that is, in fact, remarkably compatible with emergent “post-binary” notions of gender and sexuality. In this article, I use the concept of what Jed Samer calls “lesbian potentiality” to reconsider the generative possibilities of these lesbian feminist repertoires of meaning as they pertain to sex, gender, sexuality, and the body. I argue that we stand to benefit from a reconsideration and recontextualization of 1970s and ’80s lesbian feminist texts to make three crucial interventions for the contemporary moment: to resist the claiming of lesbian rights for transphobic ends, to find tools for conceptualizing gendered and sexual power in a post-binary cultural context, and to offer a framework for how to live in an increasingly unlivable world.