For the first time in history, many out-and-proud lesbians have reached their golden years. Born during a time when lesbian identity was stigmatized and criminalized, they continue to
bravely demonstrate new ways of remaining visible and thriving outside of heteronormativity. Today, younger lesbians and queer women come out in a very different climate. Whereas older lesbians were seen through tropes of criminality and pathologies, younger ones experience new forms of stigma, discrimination, and a lack of community spaces, even while navigating a far broader lexicon of available identities and discourses of acceptance.. Historical moment shapes identity including issues around naming as lesbian. In this special issue, we are interested in understanding the lived experiences, cultural productions, and political projects shaping the lives of lesbians and queer women of the so-called Silent, Baby Boomer, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z generations.
We seek empirical and theoretical contributions that examine the generational experiences of different cohorts of lesbians while accounting for the diversity in lesbian identities. We also seek submissions that take a comparative perspective to understand differences across generations. We aim to illuminate not only generational particularities and differences of lesbians and queer women from different age cohorts, but also to complicate generational dichotomies by understanding lesbians’ lives as they intersect with other social positions such as class, race, and gender (i.e., cis or trans), as well as cultural and geographical locations.
Some topics of interest might include:
• Generational perspective: Studies that use a generational lens to understand lifespan milestones of cis and trans* lesbian and queer women of the Silent, Baby Boomer, Millennials, and Gen Z generations.
• Cultural shifts and the virtual revolution: A comparative analysis that focuses on shifts in lesbian representations, media, literature, visual art, and digital culture. What is
the impact of the virtual revolution on the emergence of new lesbian representations? How are new meanings of gender and sexuality represented in queer and lesbian cultural productions?
• Desire, gender, and sex: how is lesbian desire constructed within and across generations? How does lesbian gender performance and desire reconfigure itself differently across different generations of lesbians? How have identities such as andro, butch, stud, boi, and femme morphed and changed across different generations (and across race, class, and geography, among other intersections)? How have lesbians’ sexual practices, kinks, and fetishes shifted with history and political moments?
• Geographies: Shifts in the relationship between lesbians and space and place. How have lesbian community spaces shifted? What is the impact of gentrification and the closing of feminist cafes and lesbian bars on lesbian culture? How do lesbian online community spaces construct and practiced? What do mapping projects of lesbian spaces tell us about the evolving nature of the lesbian community?
• Political shifts, schisms, and solidarity: How do lesbian political goals morph and change across generations and historical moments? What intergenerational schisms emerge among lesbians of different age cohorts, political ideologies, and grievances? How do conflict and solidarity enact in lesbian online spaces and beyond? How do lesbians and queer women in different parts of the world create solidarity across generations and opportunities for dialogue across differences?
