Identity Crisis

Not much scholarly news to note as of late, other than me being face down in piles of queer theory and issues of lesbian identity and representation. I find myself getting really annoyed (as are some of my other women's studies colleagues) as I slog through this material. Everything is butch/femme. The butch is invisible. The femme is invisible. But in a world where identities and performances of gender and sexuality have become overwhelmingly fluid, where the heck is the scholarship on other identities? I only found a handful of articles addressing an "inbetweener" aesthetic...and to me, that's still another way of saying these binary constructions do not work. Neo-femme and post-femme and post-lesbian are tossed around quite a lot as well, but don't really speak to an identity. I've yet to hear someone label themselves as post-femme. It is problematic to me that a field grounded in the deconstruction of these binaries, still upholds them so firmly in scholarship. And as I try to find some answers for my own research, I realize the answers don't exist because the questions haven't been asked. So perhaps my research is going to take the path of asking a lot of serious questions rather than theorizing within a framework that doesn't exist at the moment.

My friend, k, is doing some groundbreaking work on this exact issue with bisexuality. And kudos to her for that! The scholarship on bisexual identity and sexuality is perhaps even further behind lesbian identity and sexuality (which may have to do with so-called lesbian privilege in women's studies...but that is a can of worms I am not opening). So, fellow gender scholars and music scholars who deal with gender--in this area at least, it looks like we've got some work to do.