An Appetite for Activism: The Lesbian Avengers and the Queer Politics of Visibility

Abstract

The Lesbian Avengers, an activist group of the early 1990s, utilized rhetorics of visibility to draw attention to lesbian issues, highlighting their gendered and sexualized bodies. Coinciding with the emergence of lesbian chic in popular culture, the Avengers complicated the bodily abstraction presumed in public discourse by flaunting a sexual excessiveness that could not be contained by a heteronormative economy of desire. Premised on displacement, the Avengers’ visibility therefore productively queers the politics of visibility.

Keywords:

• activism
• embodiment
• Lesbian Avengers
• lesbian chic
• queer
• visibility

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Women's Studies in Communication editor Valeria Fabj, and WSIC's anonymous reviewer, as well as Barbara A. Biesecker, Charles E. Morris III, Claire Sisco King, and Karma R. Chávez for their comments on earlier versions of the article. This project would not have been possible without the generous assistance of Carrie Moyer, Kelly Cogswell, Sarah Schulman, and the Lesbian Herstory Archives. This article is derived from a chapter of the author's dissertation, defended at the University of Iowa in 2006; a portion of this project was presented at the National Communication Association convention in 2006.

Notes

Other founding members include Ana Maria Simo, Anne-Christine D'Adesky, Maxine Wolfe, Marie Honan, and Ann MaGuire.

The third edition of the “Lesbian Avenger Handbook: A Handy Guide to Homemade Revolution” was produced and made available online in 2011, as part of Kelly Cogswell's Lesbian Avenger Documentary Project. Cogswell's website, http://www.lesbianavengers.com, was launched in 2010 in an effort to document the Lesbian Avengers’ history, organizing materials, and images. Though many of the images and documents I cite in this article are now included on lesbianavengers.com, my citations of them refer to the original documents housed in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York.

Even the Lesbian Avengers’ name is a popular culture reference, perhaps alluding both to the 1960s television series, The Avengers, which featured strong female characters, and to the team of superheroes collectively called “The Avengers,” who were debuted as “earth's mightiest heroes” by Marvel Comics in 1963 and who are the subject of the eponymous 2012 film.

The deaths of housemates Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian H. Mock are often claimed as a hate crime motivated by homophobia and understood in relation to Oregon's antigay Measure 9, which was on the ballot at the time. However, the three men found guilty of their murders described themselves as White supremacists and were also convicted of “racial intimidation”; in fact, the perpetrators claimed that it was not Cohens and Mock but four other African Americans sleeping in the apartment who were their intended targets. But witnesses and others connected to the case have suggested that the victims had been taunted with both racial and sexual epithets, and that the crime was likely motivated by both racism and homophobia (Egan; “10 Years or More”). Thus, this tragedy offers a stark and sobering illustration of the intersectionality of marginalizing discourses and the vulnerability that attends visibility.

Deneuve magazine changed its name to Curve in 1995 after being threatened with a lawsuit by French actress Catherine Deneuve, who claimed that the magazine infringed on her right to market her own name and image.

The emergence of lesbian chic coincides with and is enabled by concurrent changes in public perceptions and images of feminism in the 1990s. Earlier feminist ideologies (which, significantly, sometimes linked feminism and lesbianism) were partly replaced by a “new” feminism steeped in popular culture, disseminated by the mainstream media, and represented by Ally McBeal (see Quinn; Gibbs and Attinger; and Bellafante). Indeed, the Lesbian Avengers’ own tactics, which combined the legislative focus of “liberal feminism” with the grassroots direct action associated with “radical feminism,” also reflect the shifting feminist ideologies of the third wave (Whittier 62).

For further explorations of the relationship between visibility and politics, please see Fenske; Oates; Shoemaker; Skerski; Shugart, “Managing Masculinities”; and Shugart, “On Misfits and Margins.”

See Rand.

A public is “autotelic,” or “a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” (Warner 67).

The appreciation for butchness in the face of the heteronormative devaluation of such an enactment of gender is a common theme in lesbian literature (see, for instance, Burana and Due; Coyote and Sharman; Feinberg; and Nestle).

In the Lesbian Avengers’ poster, only the woman on the far left is clearly not White. However, in the original CK One advertisement (where the models’ faces are included in the photo), the figure in the center (wearing the black bra) is also easily recognizable as a woman of color.

From 2004 to 2009 Pam Grier played a heterosexual role on Showtime's The L Word, a television show that arguably participated in the more recent evolution of lesbian chic.

On queer recruitment, see Morris.

The traditional Habermasian public sphere has been critiqued and supplemented substantially by scholars who note the presumed normative body that can participate freely in public deliberation (see, for example, Felski; Fraser; Pezzullo).