Mind the Gap?

Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory. Linda Garber. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 262 pp.

Early in her provocative study Identity Poetics Linda Garber recalls how the differences between lesbian feminism and an emergent queer theory were cast in the early 1990s (and beyond). "Not quite 'Gen X,' but not a Baby Boomer either," the then late-twenty-something Garber would find herself at a conference panel, book party, or protest at which an older, usually white lesbian academic or political activist bemoaned the "generation gap" in lesbian theory and singled out queer theory and its young devotees, who derided, whenever they stooped to mention, lesbian feminism (1-2). At the same time, and often at the same conferences and events, Garber would hear her generational peers congratulate themselves for moving beyond the "essentialisms of lesbian feminism and identity politics" (2). Garber was reading queer theory, but she also knew—and, as Identity Poetics makes clear, knows—a lot about lesbian feminism. In this oedipal face-off between old school and new, Garber often found herself in the awkward position of raising both hands to interrupt unfolding generational narratives that left her, but not only her, no place to stand.

Happily, in Identity Poetics Garber clears a space for a different conversation between academic (and activist) generations and between lesbian feminism and queer theory. She does so largely by refusing to follow the standard way of telling the story. Indeed, one of the book's sustained arguments is that "generation" and "generation gap" are inadequate frames for making sense of the often antagonistic division between lesbian feminism and queer theory. It is not simply that the too neat divide by generation makes no sense of a scholar like Garber herself, unless it names her an "anachronism" or a "throwback."¹ It also cannot reckon with the institutional history of queer theory. As Garber reminds us, "Queer theory was not institutionalized by young graduate students (though the enthusiasm and hard work of many helped to propel it) but rather by tenured scholars with access to the instruments of academic power—academic journals, fellowships, professorships" (185-86). Still more crucially, this division by generation leaves out of view the vital contributions of working-class lesbians and lesbians of color to both lesbian feminism and queer theory. Garber goes so far as to claim that "the creation and sustenance of the debate [in its divisive generational cast] relies upon the marginalization of working-class/lesbians of color" (5).

This is a bold claim, but one that Garber solidly backs up. She identifies a range of issues and concerns shared by lesbian feminism, in its working-class and women-of-color incarnations, and queer theory: the social construction of sexuality; identity as positionality rather than essence; the value of coalition (affinity politics); the inextricability of difference; multivocal, shifting identifications. These overlapping interests are more than "coincidental similarit[ies]" (100), Garber argues. They demand a different way of imagining and narrating the relations between lesbian feminism and queer theory. "What would the story sound like," Garber wonders, "if it were the story of women of color's identity poetics, with lesbian feminism and queer theory as white middle-class bit players, sideshows, or as mere interpretive structures in its narrative?" (8).

Garber postulates a nuanced historical genealogy that effectively moves the work of working-class lesbians and lesbians of color front and center. In so doing, she also helps chart a new critical genealogy of feminist and LGBTQ studies and activism. In contrast to the received histories in which feminism and lesbian feminism were white, middle-class, exclusionary movements ultimately betrayed by their own political correctness, humorlessness, and tunnel vision, Garber presents a dynamic, multidimensional view.

Poetry is crucial to the new story. Garber devotes one chapter each to Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work showed that poetry was not...