Manifeste d'une femme trans by Julia Serano

For our purposes, we compared interviews with study participants from two generations: “Baby Boomers” (born between 1946–1965) who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and “Millennials” (born between 1981–1996) who came of age in the first two decades of the millennium, with dramatic gains in the social and legal inclusion of LGBT people in the US. In this research, we examine the provocation “Is lesbian identity obsolete?” using qualitative interviews with LGBTQ+ participants living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Media accounts that conflate trans-masculinity with “lesbians in denial” ( Herzog, 2020, Kiss, 2018 Serano, 2021) have positioned “lesbian” as an identity category in flux. As articulations of gender and sexual identity categories have shifted, some writers have framed lesbian identity as “disappearing” or “going extinct,”( Morris, 2016). This special issue begins with the provocation “Is lesbian identity obsolete?” As conceptions of gender and sexuality have shifted in recent decades, tensions over the constitution of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ+) identity have surfaced. We further suggest that the political project of ending the oppression of all lesbians/women who love women is fraught, but essential in a world that hates women. In order to sustain solidarity between lesbians of different generations, we suggest that narratives about gender should include both intrinsic and extrinsic components. For Baby Boomer lesbians, lesbian identity connoted an alliance with feminism, and for Millennials their sexual identity indicated a political alliance with queer and trans* movements. It appears that participants across generations articulated their sexual identities strategically to express not only a sexual orientation but more importantly political and community alliances. Nevertheless, we found a shift away from understanding gender as an oppressive category to an understanding of gender as a proliferating identity in which one may play with gender in an intentional and creative manner. Participants from both generations rejected the gender binary. To answer this special issue provocation, Is Lesbian Identity Obsolete? we analyzed interviews with people who had identified at some point in their lives as lesbians, or as women/ femmes who were attracted to women - some of them part of the Baby Boomer generation and some part of the Millennial generation.

Manifeste d'une femme trans by Julia Serano