SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Martha Vicinus is the Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished University Professor of English, Women’s Studies, and History, and THE Director of the Sweetland Writing Center at the University of Michigan. She is the author and/or editor of nine books, including the award-winning anthology Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader, and, most recently, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928. Her primary areas of research are Victorian women, Victorian studies, sexuality and British imperialism. She is currently working on Cosmopolitan Women, about Anglo-American writers and artists who lived in and wrote about Italy and France during the years 1880-1930. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, and Australian National University.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION
In her lecture, Professor Vicinus will survey the dominant paradigms of lesbian history since the 1980s, and argue that each reflects the political times, ranging from early feminism to ACT UP and the struggle for transgender rights. While acknowledging the importance of Michel Foucault’s social constructionist arguments for pushing gay and lesbian studies beyond its early recuperation of lost heroes and heroines, she will suggest that scholars need to move beyond his theories. In her recent work she has argued for complex identifications, embedded in familial, class, national and racial associations. Indeed, she contends that sex and sexuality always work within specific social and economic contexts; no identity, whether defined as authentic or performed, is free from its contemporary conditions. Just as our writing of history reflects our current priorities, a hundred years ago writers framed and defined sexual identities and behaviors in terms of their own times.
The second half of her lecture will suggest possible future work in the field, focusing on “difficult” identities forged by women-loving-women in relationships with men. Rather than seeing the history of lesbians as existing within a specifically female framework, it may be more fruitful to cast a critical feminist eye on how lesbian history differs from women’s history. She concludes by examining Edith Ellis as an example of a woman who awkwardly balanced the complex identifications of her acknowledged masculinity with her marital life as the wife of Britain’s preeminent sexologist. She embraced the often conflicting roles of wife, surrogate mother, socialist, author, entrepreneur—and out lesbian—until her premature death from diabetes in 1916.
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