The Enkidu Summer Conference 2008: Storytelling, Memories and Identity Constructions

México City, 3 - 7 July, 2008

Queer Utopia in Lesbian Arts and Culture

Jasmine Rault

Department of Visual Arts

University of Western Ontario

My paper posits a movement within contemporary lesbian cultural and aesthetic production that mobilises outdated cultural references and political visions from recent history that jar against the present to produce what might be called spaces of queer utopic desire. Contemporary lesbian artists and musicians have been revisiting and recycling queer figures such as the vampire and the zombie, lesbian feminist separatist politics and music from the 1970s, including anthems from the Olympia Records produced "Lesbian Concentrate" (1977), less in the spirit of camp or drag performance than in the spirit of revitalizing current sexual politics with traces of radical hope and desire from the past.

Artists like Lorri Millan and Shawna Dempsey of Finger In The Dyke Productions, Heather Cassils, Clover Leary, and Julia Steinmetz of Toxic Titties, Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner of Dyke Action Machine (DAM!), and musical groups like Lesbians on Ecstasy and the Mexican/Argentinean ensemble Kumbia Queers enact the sort of disruptive temporal folding that queer theorists such as José Esteban Muñoz (2007), Elizabeth Freeman (2007) and Kate Thomas (2007) have described in terms of ‘queer futurity’. Past cultural moments and politics are drawn into the present and significantly the public as all of the groups and artists I discuss perform in public spaces to engender a disturbing, disruptive proximity to rather than equivalence or identification with other times and people. In the spaces that these performers enable the sense of public belonging is constituted, as Freeman explains, "in pleasurable cathexis across historical time as well as across the space between [performance] and audience. What takes place between the performer and the object of her performance, or between an audience member and the performer/her alter ego, can be some mixture of identification, disidentification, arousal, contempt, longing but cannot be reduced to common belonging under the sign of ‘gay’" (GLQ, vol. 13, no. 2-3, 2007: 164).

My paper argues that these performers and performances mobilise sexual identity (lesbian, dyke, queer) as an anachronistic and chronotopic force to spatialise rather than identify shared desire. This spatialization of desire operates along a logic of recruitment a central theme for all the works I examine here into the pleasure of that cathexis Freeman describes. My paper seeks to examine, then, what I suggest is a movement in contemporary lesbian cultural and aesthetic practices towards utopic futures generated in spaces of productive proximity to the unassimilable desires of the past.

About Jasmine Rault

Dr. Rault is an FQRSC post-doctoral fellow in the Visual Arts department at University of Western Ontario, Canada.