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Lesbian Feminist Conflicts in Contemporary Popular Culture

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Lesbian Feminist Conflicts in Contemporary Popular Culture UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE A Woman’s Place: Lesbian Feminist Conflicts in Contemporary Popular Culture DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Culture and Theory by Jessica Pruett Dissertation Committee: Professor Jonathan Alexander, Chair Professor Victoria E. Johnson Professor Jennifer Terry Professor Christine Bacareza Balance Professor Sora Y. Han 2021 © 2021 Jessica Pruett TABLE OF CONTENTS Page VITA vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Sounding Out: Olivia Records and the Soundtrack of the Women’s Music 15 Movement CHAPTER 2 Making Herstory: Lesbian Anti-Capitalism Meets the Digital Age 55 CHAPTER 3 “A Gathering of Mothers and Daughters”: Race, Gender, and the Politics of 92 Inclusion at Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival CHAPTER 4 Beyond One Direction: Lesbian Feminist Fandom Remakes the Boy Band 131 CONCLUSION 173 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my committee chair, Professor Jonathan Alexander, for his intellectual generosity, faith in my abilities, and extensive feedback on previous drafts of this work. His enthusiasm for teaching, writing, and learning is infectious, and I have been lucky to witness it for the last six years. I would also like to thank my committee members, Professors Jennifer Terry, Victoria E. Johnson, and Christine Bacareza Balance. Professor Terry’s mentorship has made me a better teacher and sharper thinker, and she has worked tirelessly to provide me with opportunities to develop my work and grow as an academic. Professor Johnson’s feedback on previous drafts of this work has been invaluable, and her research expertise has deepened my own writing and thinking on media and popular culture. Professor Balance’s generous feedback and guidance gave shape to my dissertation, and her own work made this project seem possible. Financial support was provided by the University of California, Irvine, the James Harvey Scholarship, and Michigan State University’s Special Collections. iii VITA Jessica Pruett 2014 B.A. in English and Women & Gender Studies, Arizona State University 2016 M.A. in Culture and Theory, University of California, Irvine 2021 Ph.D. in Culture and Theory, University of California, Irvine PUBLICATIONS “Lesbian Fandom Remakes the Boy Band.” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 34, 2020, n.p. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1865. “Lesbian One Direction Fans Take Over Tumblr.” In A. Cho, A. McCracken, I. Neill Hoch, and L. Stein (Eds.), A Tumblr Book: Platform and Cultures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020, pp 194-200. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION A Woman’s Place: Lesbian Feminist Conflicts in Contemporary Popular Culture by Jessica Pruett Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Theory University of California, Irvine, 2021 Professor Jonathan Alexander, Chair Feminist theorists have chronicled lesbian feminists’ role in developing a theoretical and political foundation for the academic fields of gender studies and queer theory. Many queer theorists have critiqued lesbian feminists’ rigid policing of lesbian identity, noting that this often resulted in the exclusion of women of color, trans women, and sex radicals from lesbian communities. However, there is little work that chronicles the political, racial, and gender diversity among lesbian feminists. As a result, lesbian feminism is frequently depicted as a social movement solely comprised of white, cisgender women, erasing the major political, theoretical, and cultural contributions that women of color and trans women made to these communities. Such depictions fix lesbian feminism’s political legacy and minimize its significance to contemporary social movements. “A Woman’s Place” traces the relationship between lesbian feminist history and contemporary popular culture in the U.S., illuminating lesbian feminism’s influence on the queer and feminist political movements of today. This cultural history draws from my archival research at the Lesbian Herstory archives, the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, along with the special collections at Michigan State University and Smith College. In addition to archival research, my methods include textual analysis, political economic analysis, and ethnographic interviews. Through critical readings of letters, newspapers, and organizational documents chronicling major political conflicts from lesbian feminist history, v I argue that the persistent tension and disagreement within lesbian feminist communities was a mark of their political diversity. I contrast these historical conflicts with contemporary depictions of lesbianism in popular culture, which circulate and reinterpret lesbian feminist political legacies. Using a range of examples, including an indie pop band, an Amazon original television series, and a viral Instagram account, I analyze how lesbian feminist conflicts over race, gender, and sexuality play out in contemporary contexts. I argue that the political questions and concerns animating lesbian feminism remain relevant for queer and feminist thinkers and activists today, particularly regarding the persistence of a gendered division of power and the importance of building alternative social and economic institutions for women. Focusing on this history of collaborative struggle helps to both illuminate our political present and map a path forward for the future. vi Introduction: From the Lesbian Past to the Queer Future? It is imperative that we build our own media. No serious political movement in history has ever relied on the communications of its oppressor. Without our own media we are without voice. –Rita Mae Brown, “The Shape of Things to Come” On January 31, 2019, the premium cable channel Showtime announced that it was rebooting the original series The L Word. The show’s initial 2004-2009 run, which was helmed by showrunner Ilene Chaiken, had been praised as heralding a massive shift in how lesbians were depicted on television; though it tended toward soap opera-like storylines, The L Word was the first television drama to focus on the lives of lesbian, bisexual, and queer women. Over the span of six seasons, the show both sparked and addressed debates about queer women’s sexualities, featured numerous celebrity cameos, and amassed a devoted and active fan base that extended into the digital realm through show-sponsored fan fiction contests and OurChart.com, a social networking website based on the series. When the beloved series’ reboot was announced nearly 15 years after its debut, numerous media outlets published articles celebrating the show’s return. Much of this writing reflected on the show’s enduring impact on televisual depictions of lesbians, referring to the series’ original run as a groundbreaking “seismic event”1 for lesbian viewers and a high-water mark for lesbian visibility on television. The L Word’s sexy, glamorous depiction of lesbianism in sunny Los Angeles had certainly made a lasting impression on queer and lesbian viewers, many of whom wondered how the show’s reboot would reckon with its legacy. While The L Word would go on to shape subsequent televisual depictions of lesbianism, the series was also an attempt at grappling with lesbian historical legacies. In particular, the 1 Wortham, Jenna. 2020. “’The L Word’ Was a Trailblazer. Can a Reboot Keep Up With the Culture?” The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 12, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/magazine/the-l-word-was-a-trailblazer- can-a-reboot-keep-up-with-the-culture.html. 1 original series set out to reject popular associations of lesbianism with the politics and aesthetics of lesbian feminism. Some critics considered this to be one of the show’s most significant representational interventions; prior to The L Word’s 2004 premiere, one New York magazine writer enthusiastically forecasted that the show would destroy stereotypes of lesbians as “decked out in fanny packs, tool belts, Birkenstocks, ear cuffs, and bolo ties, as we revel in our man- hating, tofu-eating, mullet-headed, folk-music-loving, sexless homebody glory.”2 Such celebrations of The L Word’s fashionable, attractive cast rely on its distance from a form of lesbian feminism that prized downwardly mobile aesthetics, rejected the fashion industry, and centered a critique of the patriarchy in its political ideology. Although the show’s post-Trump reboot sought to right many of the original series’ representational wrongs, particularly regarding the show’s history of rampant and unapologetic transphobia, The L Word’s second iteration ultimately did not make significant changes to the glossy, pro-consumerist aesthetic that has marked the series since its inception. Throughout this dissertation, I return to popular cultural phenomena like The L Word: media texts that attempt to articulate something about contemporary lesbian identity, which ultimately do so by staking out a particular relationship to lesbian feminist politics. By depicting a version of lesbian life that was emphatically consumerist, The L Word made the case for a contemporary lesbian identity that disavowed lesbian feminism’s anti-capitalist leanings. Like The L Word, many (though not all) of the media texts that I analyze construct their own versions of contemporary trans, queer, and lesbian identity by disavowing lesbian feminist political legacies. I ask what version of lesbian feminism is imagined through these disavowals, and return to major moments of conflict in lesbian feminist history
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