| My dissertation explores lesbian and lesbian-feminist alternative publishing, an area of institution-building largely ignored in publishing history, women's history, and literary scholarship but extraordinarily influential in the progress of the women's movement itself and the creation of lesbian-feminist theory and literary culture. Working as individuals, in collectives, in profit and non-profit enterprises, lesbian-feminists wrote some of the most influential literary and theoretical texts of the mid-century women's movement and then, when mainstream publishing outlets were slow to support or hostile to their work, they created the publishing houses, bookstores, newsletters, and journals that could disseminate their creations. They created the apparatus to record, among other things, the construction of new lesbian and lesbian-feminist cultural identities. Thus, to speak of lesbian publishing--or of paper lesbianism--is to acknowledge and formalize a primary influence on lesbian identity formation. Paper lesbianism is the record of lesbian existence forcing itself into history; it is also an important but under-examined strand of the complex of social, political, and cultural changes that are the legacy of the popular liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. I document the relationship between a social movement and publishing, between power and paper, by examining, first, how lesbianism has been represented in U.S. culture and popular media since 1950, and second, how lesbians themselves have challenged those representations by constructing counter-institutions and generating counter-images. |
