Lesbians and the Arts: A Bibliography and Research Guide

Any form of research-based scholarly activity is set about with obstacles and pitfalls. The research process itself is littered with dead ends, false or misleading clues, lost data, the inadequacies or eccentricities of previous researchers and many other stumbling blocks. Moreover, the process of becoming an academic is itself something of a trial. The academy, despite its own illusions to the contrary, is firmly located in the social world and is as saturated with discriminatory practices, exclusions and prejudices as any other arena of social activity. It continues to be a hostile environment for scholars who have the wrong colour skin, the wrong class background or the wrong gender. These difficulties are compounded and multiplied in Lesbian Studies.

The process of becoming an academic, difficult enough for any woman, is made much more difficult by the still widespread and unexamined presence of homophobic and heterosexist beliefs and by the very real penalties attached to being a lesbian. When liberal heterosexuals assure a lesbian that her sexual activities are unimportant or irrelevant, they are chosing to ignore the fact that lesbians routinely lose their jobs, their homes, their children, their liberty and sometimes even their lives for this 'unimportant' reason. Although some academic environments may be relatively safe places for a lesbian scholar to be open about her identity, many are not, and in any case that safety does not extend to the wider world outside the institution. Even within the relatively protected space of the academy, heterosexist beliefs about lesbians persist unchallenged and largely unexamined, presenting the lesbian scholar with an additional set of problems and pressures.

So much for the lesbian scholar. What of the scholarship of lesbian-ness, of the content of Lesbian Studies? Lesbian Studies concerns itself with lesbians (as historical figures and cultural producers) and with lesbian-ness (as a shifting social/cultural construct) and its effect on lesbians and non-lesbians, their cultures, meaning-making and relations of power. It is cross-disciplinary, and its potential field of study is vast. Yet the development of this wide- ranging scholarly enterprise demands very peculiar skills. The student of Lesbian Studies must be a scavenger, a cat burglar, a sneak thief, haunting the margins of established disciplines in order to grab at the tiniest morsels of information and unearth contested scraps of data which have been carefully and deliberately buried. Lesbian-ness has been stigmatised and reviled in most cultures throughout recorded history, so the very trace of lesbian existence has been all but erased from the record. The very notion of 'a lesbian' is itself a peculiar product of European modernity, and swiftly becomes anachronistic when we attempt to apply it at other historical moments and in other cultural contexts. Moreover, clumsy heterosexual scholarship has done its best to 'protect' the respectability of significant individuals by denying, sometimes in the teeth of existing evidence, that such women were lesbians. It is both laughable and enraging to witness art historians Petersen and Wilson (1976) insisting that Rosa Bonheur's relationships with her two women lovers was 'pure' (ie, not sexual), or Patricia Meyerowitz (cited in Richards 1990) claiming that Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were 'never' lesbians, or David Robinson (cited in Klaich 1985) striking at the heartland of lesbian history with his somewhat farcical insistance that Sappho herself could not possibly have been a lesbian because 'a bad woman does not love the small and hidden wild flowers of the field...as Sappho did'. Clearly, it is not simply neglect which has erased lesbians from scholarly texts, it is a quite deliberate and ongoing project of obliteration - and one which, incidentally, exposes the much- vaunted intellectual objectivity of the academy as a political fiction.

This obliteration has profound consequences for lesbian scholarship. In 1990, when I was researching my Master's dissertation on lesbians and the state, I keyed the word 'lesbian' into the computer in the University library. It came up with a mere sixteen entries, four of which concerned Greek poetry (written by men) from the isle of Lesbos. Even those sections of shelving where some lesbian content might be expected, such as women's studies, were empty. When I wrote Lesbian Studies: Setting an Agenda, I pointed out that lesbians were marginalised in both women's studies and gay studies. Looking in the indices of recent feminist books it is all too clear that lesbian issues continue to be marginal or neglected altogether within women's studies. Gay scholarship has greatly improved, with most recent publications according much more space to lesbians. There has been an extraordinary explosion of lesbian, gay and queer scholarly activity, witnessed in the pages of publishers catalogues. Even the most deeply serious of academic publishing houses currently boasts a substantial handful of queer titles. Indeed, it might seem to a casual observer that this is a golden age of lesbian scholarship, since the new Queer Theory is dominated by lesbian names; Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Mandy Merck, Eve Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis et al. Yet this work remains, at the present moment, confined to the intellectual equivalent of Provincetown or the Tenderloin, a gay ghetto. More mainstream disciplines, such as sociology or art history, show isolated pockets of activity around lesbian issues, but these are almost exclusively the result of interventions on the part of individual lesbians. My University library now contains whole shelves full of books in the field of Lesbian Studies, but they would not be there now without the efforts of myself and lesbian colleagues in other Faculties. If we leave, these shelves will no longer be kept up to date with fresh stock. This Bibliography is the result of similar efforts, and represents one solution to the problem of limitations on lesbian energy; Sandra Scheck began working on it during her internship at the Library and Research Center of the National Museum of Women in the Arts because, even in that context, lesbian art and artists remained hidden. We are still very far from getting sexuality incorporated into the academic mainstream. Until this happens, not only will lesbian (and gay) scholarship be vulnerable to complete obliteration (as happened at the end of the Weimar regime in Germany earlier this century), but the academic mainstream will remain flawed and inadequate, as I have argued at length elsewhere (Wilton 1995).

Lesbian Studies stands at a uniquely exciting, if unstable, point in its history. It is, therefore, a very timely moment for the publication of this Bibliography. Scholars who have access to this rigorous and wide-ranging work will no longer have to waste time reinventing the wheel or digging around for tiny scraps. Moreover, lesbian-ness is especially significant in the arts. Pause for a moment and consider the following: high art images of the female nude (Boticelli's Birth of Venus, Rembrandt's Bathsheba) are referred to as 'erotic', if the subject is male (Michaelangelo's David, hundreds of St Sebastians), nude images become homoerotic. This is an interesting little exposee of the assumed relations of looking which structure the entire arena of art. It is taken utterly for granted not only that the viewer must be male, but that the desiring gaze is itself male. Otherwise, the nude male could as easily be erotic as homoerotic, and the entire genre of the female nude could be homoerotica for lesbian viewers. Introducing the figure of the lesbian into this peculiarly petrified set of gendered assumptions is a profoundly destabilising and radicalising intervention. The desiring gaze of one woman at another, the saturation of an entire oeuvre - be it painting, sculpture, architecture, drawing, performance, film or photography - with the implications of that desiring gaze, these hidden facts introduce a rogue element into our cosily settled histories and theories of art. In addition, the now well established theories concerning the social production of art require fresh consideration of the significance of the sexuality of the artist, in the context of the sexual norms and politics of her time. This means that lesbian scholarship in the arts has extraordinary potential, and Scheck's bibliography, covering as it does books, monographs, exhibition catalogues, articles, web sites, unpublished theses and other hard to access sources, opens many doors and gateways into this exciting field. Annotated bibliographies such as this one represent a huge conservation of research energy and time, and, while very useful in any research area, are like water in the desert for lesbian scholarship. I only wish I had been able to get my hands on this one years ago!

Bristol, January 1997

References:

Dolores KLAICH (1985) Woman Plus Woman Tallahassee, Naiad

Karen PETERSEN and J.J. WILSON (1976) Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century London, The Women's Press

Dell RICHARDS (1990) Lesbian Lists: A Look at Lesbian Culture, History and Personalities Boston, Alyson Press

Tamsin WILTON (1995) Lesbian Studies: Setting and Agenda London, Routledge

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