IAS Talking Points Seminar: Everywhere, somewhere, anywhere: Lesbians and their nations

“Lesbians are everywhere,” as lesbian activists gleefully pointed out from the 1970s onwards. But what did this actually mean? On one level it signalled the pull of the transnational and the sense that any lesbian was automatically incorporated into an imagined lesbian nation which held out the promise that she could find a welcoming community wherever she travelled. Yet the phrase also insisted on the desire for the local, to be recognised as existing somewhere, as part of a unique and specific community with its own set of experiences and challenges. And if lesbians were both everywhere and somewhere, they were also subject to the vagaries and repressions of particular nation-states in determining the political, economic, legal and social conditions under which they found themselves. This could be and was translated into limitations on their mobility and their ability to go anywhere. This presentation considers the real-and-imagined geographies of lesbian community through the lens of the nation.

Speaker

Professor Liz Millward

(Senior Visiting Research Fellow IAS, UCL)

Respondents

Dr Rebecca Jennings

(Rebecca teaches on the history of gender and sexuality in modern Britain, UCL)

Dr Katherine Hubbard

(Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department, University of Surrey)

All welcome. Please follow this FAQ link for more information. All our events are free but you can support the IAS here.