Mairead Sullivan, MSW, PhD

My book, Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer, traces the meaning of lesbian political commitments from the 1970s to today in order to understand how lesbian identity has shifted in relationship to wider political and cultural moments. I conceptualize lesbian political imperatives as a tense switch point between feminist and queer political and theoretical commitments. The central narrative of the book unfolds with a specific attention to current anxieties around the death of the lesbian identity. The recent loss of lesbian space, specifically bars, bookstores, and music festivals, has led to an increasing anxiety that the lesbian is reaching extinction, especially as she is figured as the anachronistic holdover of radical feminist commitments in distinction to the anti-essentialist impulses of queer and trans politics. Curiously, this anxiety emerges against the backdrop of both an increased visibility of LGBT communities and a rising interest in 1970s feminism, often aestheticized in relation to the lesbian. I take to task the anxiety over lesbian’s disappearances in order to understand how such anxiety tracks with lesbian’s political and cultural life.