Articles that are not about history, but rather are about how we think about history don't have the same "zing" and "pop" as facts-on-the-ground articles, but especially once one gets past marveling at the incoherent wealth of primary evidence that historians are presenting to us, it becomes more and more important to think about how we think. This article is the sort of general talk that is typical of opening a conference roundtable. It doesn't have some of the deep digging into historiography that I enjoyed, for example, in the collection The Lesbian Premodern. But it does address ideas such how we "periodize" lesbian history and how we study world-wide related phenomena without shoehorning them into a Western historical framework. I think the idea of "generations," both of female same-sex experience and of the historical study of those experiences, is an intriguing one. Certainly across my own lifetime and even strictly within USA culture, there are multiple distinct and identifiable ways of experiencing lesbian-relevant desire, to say nothing of distinct and identifiable ways of relating to the word and concept "lesbian."
On twitter yesterday, someone posted a comment about "why are identities/labels like bi, gay, non-binary, and trans get to be 'umbrella terms' that are understood to encompass a collection of different identities and experiences, while some people feel it's 'dangerous' to suggest that 'lesbian' could have similarly varied application?" I contributed to the discussion by pointing out that, given the ways that the word "lesbian" has been used prior to the 20th century (and, in fact, prior to the later 20th century), most of the women to whom that word was applied in the past would not meet the strict and narrow definitions that a (small) group of exclusionists argue for today. But the definitional wars over the word "lesbian" are not unique to people who want to preserve it only for some small select "pure" core meaning. Challenges are also raised by people who feel that identifying a person or a relationship or an act as "lesbian" erases any other possible reading of that person, relationship, or act. This position, too, risks functionally erasing the word and concept "lesbian" from history. The introduction to The Lesbian Premodern challenges the tendency for this asymmetry of "umbrella terminology" function, where a male historical figure will be welcomed as "gay" for any trace of same-sex relations, while a female historical figure will be allowed the identity of "lesbian" only if and when she can be proven to have engaged in same-sex erotics and to have done so exclusively to any heterosexual interests.
My own personal position is that when you look at the historic usage of the term lesbian (apart from its geographic sense) one can either conclude that it has a broader meaning of "relating to any female same-sex relations" or one can conclude that no one in history was using the word correctly. My (very personal) belief is that the greatest risk from movements to push for a narrow, rigid, "pure" usage for "lesbian" is that it will result in us losing useful access to the word entirely. And that would be a historic and cultural tragedy.
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