Gay and Lesbian Studies Forum

Scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of gay and lesbian studies have recovered a considerable amount of material about same-sex relations that has been largely neglected until our own time, but they do not simply look for lesbian/gay ancestors in the past or write for gay/lesbian readers in the present. They ask questions about the ways in which sexuality has been experienced, regulated, and represented, explicitly and implicitly, not in isolation from but in relation to other cultural issues, such as assumptions about social order and disorder. They have not only investigated lives and texts and images but also interrogated categories. They have problematized both proscribed “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” through empirical and theoretical work on the construction of sexual activities, identities, and communities. This work has broadened “lesbian and gay studies” into “lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender studies” and, more recently, “queer studies,” which emphasizes the indeterminacy of sexual subject matter, the links between various forms of otherness, and the connections between academics and activism. Scholars working on social history, literary history, and art history under any of these umbrellas face many of the same problems: locating, contextualizing, and interpreting sources, reading verbal and visual discourses as well as silences and absences, integrating the subject of same-sex relations into disciplines while rethinking the narratives that have traditionally structured them. The following case studies are intended to illustrate not only the common objectives that define the field but also the variety of materials and methods employed in current work on this subject.