Generations of Ex-lovers Cannot Fail: Rethinking Lesbian Feminism Today

Abstract

Generations of Ex-lovers Cannot Fail: Rethinking Lesbian Feminism Today Jack Jen Gieseking (bio) Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020 Rox Samer’s Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022 Executive Director Sarah Chinn of the (then) Center of Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS)1 co-organized the Lesbians in the 1970s conference in 2010 to “commemorate, celebrate, and evaluate the diverse contributions of lesbians over the course of the 1970s” (Chinn 2011). In her CLAGSNews newsletter retrospective, Chinn delightedly records that hopeful estimates for 250 registrants were surpassed with 450 attendees(!) “filling the halls of the [CUNY] Graduate Center with more lesbians than the building has ever seen and most likely ever will see!” She adds how exciting it was that paper proposals “came from younger women (and a couple of men), who were engaging lesbian experiences in the 1970s as meaningful topics for academic study and political analysis.” Over a decade later, academic work about 1970s lesbian feminism has finally begun to accumulate—by an ever more diversely gendered authorship—including the publication of two central, insightful texts: Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies and Rox Samer’s Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s. These books fit together; they are complementary texts. Both argue against limiting notions of lesbian feminism as any fixed, certain framework or as defined by any one group of people. Both authors write against any claim to lesbian feminism by trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). Instead, lesbian feminism is multitudinous and malleable—in fact, what is lesbian (or the 1970s-style of capitalized Lesbian) is still being constructed and will be constructed again. Both books draw on new archives and texts and rethink previously studied materials in important ways, and both are packed with readable, powerful prose from which to rethink, reimagine, write, and teach about lesbians in the 1970s. While the authors do bring in [End Page 249] race and disability and provide significant theorizing around both concepts, the most significant shared weakness is the uneven attention both books pay to these positionalities, whereby some areas are stronger than others. Published in 2020, McKinney’s Information Activism, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, does the profound work of turning lesbian information-making and -sharing into an utterly invigorating read. The book’s principal concept, “information activism,” is the work of “women who responded to their frustrated desire for information about lesbian history and lesbian life by generating that information themselves” and thus produced “how movement-related information is stored, sorted, searched for, and retrieved by lesbian-feminist activists serving communities they care about” (2, 13). In other words, McKinney traces how this “not-so-sexy shuffling of documents . . . about sex and sexuality” was a practice of information activism (9). This massive effort was a project of survival, connection, and self-understanding and collective insight. Bridging the emergence of 1970s lesbian feminist media with the shifts to 1980s lesbian database creation and maintenance, computer use, and software selection, McKinney frames their Information Activism through the production of lesbian information infrastructure, which also will be of interest to infrastructure studies. The first of the book’s four core chapters focuses on that most popular of lesbian documents, newsletters, the “connective tissue that made readers aware of the larger information infrastructure” (35). The following chapters examine phone hotlines, indices, and, finally, the digitization practices of lesbian archival materials. McKinney is especially enthralled with—and good at—making visible the labor of lesbian information-making. Even as an expert in this area, I was repeatedly wowed by how little access lesbians had to the positive, accessible, and organized information that we could so easily rely on by the twenty-first century, even before search engines, thanks to amateur-cum-professional archivists and librarians and activists. McKinney’s book pays homage to the many excellent books that have examined lesbian print culture before it, like Agatha Beins’s (2017) Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity. The first chapter in Information Activism, “The Internet That Lesbians Built: Newsletter...