Unlikely Alliances? Lesbian-Feminism and Queer Theory

Linda Garber, Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Reviewed by Alexandra Winter.

The ten years or so since the academic emergence of queer theory have been characterised by debates not only between queer and gay and lesbian studies, but also by tensions between queer theory and feminism. Feminist academic Biddy Martin, for example, while recognising the benefits of a queer critique of feminist understandings of sex and gender, has expressed concern that queer theory views feminism as an outmoded dinosaur. This risks, she suggests, positing gender and race as fixed entities against which the 'play' of sexuality is contrasted. Indeed, this articulation of fixity is precisely what enables the apparent play of queer theory, so that feminism is represented in terms of a staid and even conservative older generation in its insistence on a material embodiment. By contrast, the reach of queer for some theorists enables an emphasis on sexuality rather than what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called, in The Epistemology of the Closet, the 'coarser stigmata of gender difference.' This tension between feminism and queer has not only been played out in academic or theoretical circles, but has also been hotly debated among feminist activist circles and (in my own experience) in university campus women's rooms. Linda Garber's Identity Poetics productively engages with the debate between lesbian feminism and queer theory at the points at which the disagreement is characterised as one of generational difference, one of gender versus sexuality, and one of essentialism versus postmodern play. Garber's project is not to construct a defence of either, but she argues that the relationship between queer and lesbian feminism is perhaps not as discordant as it is frequently represented, and that queer theory owes much to the activism, and also poetry, of lesbian feminists, particularly working class lesbians and lesbians of colour.

Identity Poetics both negotiates a historical trajectory between lesbian feminism and queer theory, and engages in close textual analysis of poetry and prose by Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Gloria Anzaldúa. This enables Garber to trace the lesbian feminist roots of queer theory, and performatively to enact the text's position that the poetry of working class lesbians and lesbians of colour is in itself an important theory-making strategy. Thus, the first chapter examines the social construction of lesbian feminism, specifically examining poetry as an important site for the dissemination of ideas and an emergent lesbian identity (especially in relation to the rise of poetry readings and the advent of women's and lesbian publishing houses in the 1970s). More specifically, Garber locates poetry as a self-consciously constructivist project, creatively building a lesbian 'lineage, history, and identity' (11).

Garber introduces and develops the term 'identity poetics' to refer to the discursive and social negotiations between lesbian feminism and queer theory, and to provide a simultaneous affirmation and deconstruction of identity (politics) in the poetry/theory of working class lesbians and lesbians of colour. Thus, much of her textual analysis focuses on issues of identity. This is partly in response to the familiar (and, as Moira Gatens puts it, tired and tiring) charge of essentialism that is often directed towards lesbian feminism. The insistence on identity may also be read as symptomatically reflecting the poststructuralist impact upon theorisations of identity more generally. Thus in the chapter on white American poet Judy Grahn, Garber points to Grahn's reclamation of words such as 'queer' and 'dyke' in her poetry about working-class women, the emphasis on the free play of language, and a nascent critique of what queer theory knows as 'heteronormativity.' Similarly, Garber reads Black American poet and activist Pat Parker's poetry as pre-empting postmodern or queer notions of identity by refusing a singular and unified subjectivity - reflecting on the differences within. For Garber, Parker's work also begins to articulate a critique of the nature of differences between women, analysing the silences and exclusions around class and race within the women's movement and lesbian feminism. A similar critique of identity is also located in the work of Audre Lorde, the Black American writer, activist and lesbian feminist, who Garber reads as drawing on various myths, histories and identities in order to articulate not an essential or archetypal identity, but a 'postmodern lesbian-feminist identity poetics' (112). Other elements of Lorde's work that Garber reads as 'queering' stereotypes of lesbian feminism are an emphasis on sexuality (instead of the prudish and humourless caricature of lesbian feminism), and a deployment of a 'strategic essentialism' that has more recently been associated with theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Diana Fuss and Elizabeth Grosz.

Placing Adrienne Rich next to Lorde as one of the most prominent voices of lesbian feminism, Garber discusses the way in which these authors have frequently been read out of context, understanding this as part of the reason why elements of Rich's work have been repeatedly invoked as representative of the sins of lesbian feminism. Promoting a more detailed re-reading of Rich, Garber draws out links between Rich's well known concept of compulsory heterosexuality and queer theory's (and in particular, Judith Butler's) critique of the heterosexual matrix. Similarly, Rich's formulation of the lesbian continuum (reading a range of relationships between women as 'lesbian') is not represented in terms of a gender/sexuality (or a queer versus lesbian feminism) oppositionality. Instead, Garber analyses the motivations underlying the lesbian continuum and queer as similar; both 'draw attention to sexual identities that are suppressed by heterosexism, and . . . construct disruptive, insurgent categories of identity that fly in the face of the terms' typical usages' (137).

Finally, Garber reads the work of Chicana cultural theorist and poet Gloria Anzaldúa as a bridge between the poetry of Grahn, Parker, Lorde, and Rich, and the emergence of queer in the early 1990s. As with these writers, Anzaldúa's work is understood to be decidedly queer in terms of the problematising of identity, and of the categories theory/poetry. Although Anzaldúa consciously invokes the term queer, as well as an identity, or identities, that are self-consciously liminal and borderline (see Anzaldúa's oft-cited Borderlands/La Frontera), Garber is careful to link her work with that of the emergence of a specific Chicana feminism in the 1980s and the deployment of a strategic essentialism, rather than appropriating her work to a completely queer or postmodern deconstruction of identity.

There are two potential risks in Garber's project - either too thorough appropriation of lesbian feminism by queer theory, or an uncritical celebration of lesbian feminism. Garber is on the whole careful not to realign the work of Grahn, Parker, Lorde, Rich, and Anzaldúa with a queer agenda, for to do would misrepresent these women and their work, as well as the social and historical importance of the expression and theorisation of a specifically lesbian feminist identity and politics: 'Although I argue that lesbian feminism is neither as white, middle class, nor antiqueer as it has been portrayed, neither do I assert that lesbian feminism is not white, middle class, nor, well, lesbian feminist' (127). Thus Garber emphasises the influence of these authors as both poets and theorists in specific contexts and locations. In particular, Identity Poetics is important in its recognition of the ongoing marginalisation of working class/lesbians of colour within contemporary queer theory, and for its reconceptualisation of queer theory as having a particular history in the work of working class/lesbians of colour.

Garber however, does not uncritically affirm lesbian feminist politics, but reveals its complexity and its importance to the contemporary moment of queer theory. Identity Poetics allows for a complex dialogue between queer and lesbian feminism, a dialogue that is productive both in terms of positioning queer as having a discursive and literary history, and in terms of a reassertion of the specificities of gender, race, and class in this history. Indeed, Garber's text suggests that it is precisely the recognition of, and, the poetic/theoretical engagement with these specificities that have shaped the emergence of queer concerns and interests. Ultimately Identity Poetics advocates a re-reading of the work of lesbian feminists, working class lesbians and lesbians of colour in order to place this work as central so as to 'build lesbian theories that are coalitional, dynamic, and broadly influential in both academic and activist spheres' (207). To return to Martin's concerns, rather than positing lesbian feminism as the material ground against which the play of queer occurs, Garber exposes this ground as itself shifting and unstable. The concept of identity poetics is presented not just as a possibility for dialogue between (and a simultaneity of) queer and lesbian feminist identities, but also in terms of poetry/theory and theory/activism.

Alexandra Winter is writing a PhD thesis on the topic of 'Skin' in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland.