"am I That Name?": Constructions and Misconstructions of Lesbian Studies‪.‬

Since it was first proposed by scholars such as Jeri Dawn Wine in the early 1980s, and continuing for roughly 15 years, radical feminist academics struggled to disrupt oppressive structures of thought about gender and sexuality by installing Lesbian Studies in one of the primary sites for the production of knowledge in our culture, liberal arts institutions. The project was ambitious. Its advocates were determined to take on the formidable opponents of sexism and heterosexism despite representing a tiny minority subpopulation inside universities and in the larger society. Some at first envisioned Women's Studies as the logical (albeit problematic) institutional home for this work, but advocates wrote books and articles published by North American and British presses beginning in the early 1980s and continuing through the 1990s in which they argued for an autonomous Lesbian Studies alongside other identity-based programs such as Women's Studies and Native Studies. They often argued that separate disciplinary status was necessary in an overwhelmingly male and heterosexual institution where tenure, promotion, and publication processes would otherwise stall the careers of professors working on lesbian topics and stifle the development of lesbian-focussed scholarship. Thus The Lesbian Review of Books asks "Is Queer Theory Preempting Lesbian Studies?" (1994-95, p. 1) and takes up the discussion on pages headed by the banner "Feminism vs. Queer Studies, or, Are Lesbians Queer?" (pp. 20-22), where Lesbian Studies advocate Bonnie Zimmerman offers a litany of anxieties: