As I have attempted to demonstrate, the lesbian discourses which have mobilised lesbian spectatorship in the second half of this Century have characteristically articulated lesbianism in resistance to a diversity of disciplinary discourses — and most characteristically that of gender. Lesbian identifications or discourses are not, however, necessarily predicated on the gendering process and, more recently, the focus of lesbian discourse has not only diversified but has also shifted quite fundamentally. Whilst many current lesbian discourses remain primarily gender-focused, new discourses are emerging (most particularly in urban centres) which, whilst continuing to 'live' resistance to gendering, do not articulate their lesbianism solely, or even primarily, in reference to this field of discourse.
The discursive construct of a 'multicultural' and globalising free-market appears to have achieved an effective dominance in the (re)production of US and thus, to some extent at least, middle-class life more globally. By and for this (globalising) class, gender, sexual, or ethnic differences have been re-signified as a politically-neutral 'diversity' which may be served morally indifferently by the 'hidden hand' of audience segmentation, window and niche marketing techniques. The global 'free market' is represented as not only as the best of all possible worlds, but as the only possible world, and thus oppositions to the disciplinary, exploitative, and oppressive effects of this dominant discourse are, at least in the west, commonly re-signified as 'unrealistic'.
The Hollywood blockbuster continues to take a realist approach to representing 'difference' articulated in the practice of including the 'presence' of tokenised black figures available, through a realist aesthetic, to a 'positive images' interpretation. A multiplicity of 'indie' film practices, on the other hand are very evidently now able to detach, re-appropriate, and re-circulate the codes by which marginal cultures, including lesbianisms, have counter-identified themselves and make them available to more sophisticated, multiple, active, reciprocalised, or complicit, reading practices. This new facility in the recirculation of consumable identities must inevitably effect a shift in the activity which used to be known as 'oppositional' or 'aberrant' reading. My own lesbian readings of Bad Girls, Set It Off, and Bound, for example, are not actually articulated against preferred readings offered by these texts. On the contrary, a deconstructive mode is their calculated source of appeal to calculatedly diverse market sectors whose common factors are an educated, or an already-estranged, reading strategy and an attitude of urban cosmopolitanism. The lesbian spectator may take pleasure from being addressed by a mainstream text as 'in the (lesbian) know', and the heterosexual spectator may take pleasure from a sense of appropriative voyeuristic control over a scenario which might potentially unpleasurably exclude or threaten him/her. In the now-dominant discourse of capitalist liberal democracy, everybody can enjoy a representational illusion of control over the commodified production of 'self'. But to what extent can such commodified practices of production and consumption thus still be claimed as oppositional, resistant or even 'deconstructive'?
It was said of feminism that if the 'subjects' cited by that discourses of identity politics ever achieved their aim of destroying the boundaries which excluded women by and from language and culture then the very categories of gender would themselves disappear, leaving feminist politics without a constituency. Indeed, a 'post-feminist' discourse claims this very effect. Queer has seemed aware of a contradiction between its anti-identificatory discursive strategies and its politicised appeals on behalf of queer-identified individuals — but has maintained this contradiction as resistantly productive. What seems most difficult to process under current conditions is that the re-circulation of contradictory identifications through the dominant has not destroyed, but re-signified and depoliticised, practices of identity, detaching them from more politicising discourses and recycling them through a range of contexts of production and consumption. Far from disappearing, therefore, subcultures produced in 'identity' are larger and more visible than ever before. At the same time, practices of 'identity' have become depoliticised and, apparently, largely ineffective in challenging a neo-capitalist mode of identity production whose hyper-productivity precisely depends on diversification.
Queer discourse has, by and large, thus been incorporated to a free-market mode of capitalist cultural production and circulation. Commodities are no longer re-appropriated and counter-signified as queer, but are now consumed collaboratively by queers as already queer. This capitalist context of queer cultural production articulates its producers as well as its products and consumers. The fetishistic effect of commodification ensures that producers and production processes appear inaccessible to transformative intervention by consumers and largely beyond their control. Commodification has generated a privileged field of queer articulation which effectively excludes consumers who are non-producers of cultural commodities. Address to, and feedback from, consumers are mediated by the professionalised techniques of marketing analysis and PR rather than articulated and contested in unmediated form directly between cultural producers and consumers at public events. The passivity of consumption seems to have set in (although this passivity increasingly no longer appears as gender-specific). A depoliticised representation of queer debates or issues is professionally managed through homogenising modes of production which cite more confrontational forms only by omission. Urban lesbian consumers are increasingly unable to cope with, and are uninterested in, any cultural products and commodities which contest (resignified as 'failing' in) the reproduction of institutionalised (and thus easily and passively decoded) modes of representation.
So far, this process of commodification has been offset by persistent (although contradictory) references to precedent forms of oppositional lesbian and gay sub-cultures as 'guarantors' of queer systems of meaning. Queer cultural articulations and commodities are always-already inflected by the context of their production in queer communities 'real-ised' through processes of the historicisation of lesbian and gay 'memory'. The queer/lesbian cultural sector is, however, now achieving a level of institutionalisation which increasingly throws into question accounts of the (re)production of queer (or queer forms of lesbianism) as resistance. Indeed, queer memory frequently registers as nostalgic rather than oppositional. Indeed, as was the case with feminism by the start of this decade, it has become difficult to show the systemic techniques of an exclusion of queers from a normalising representational order in which 'our' positive image is plastered all over prime-time networked TV and national presses. At the same time (and again as with feminism), this process of partial assimilation is accompanied by an ever-more virulent condemnation and exclusion of the more challenging discursive elements or forms of lesbian/queer articulation. Appeals to 'experience' have appeared as ruled out by post-modern frames of reference — indeed, reference to 'real conditions' tends to mark discourse as counter-regulatory (liberal/civil rights) in practice (whether by demanding greater, or lesser, or different modes of regulation).
At the same time, the rising dominance of a neo-Darwinist account of 'reality' centred in the scientific field of genetics re-articulates a 'natural order' allegedly underpinning capitalist economic and discursive orders. In the domain of infotech, on the contrary, 'reality' figures as 'virtual' and only accessible through technology. Potentiality for intervention in the ordering of 'reality' is thus represented in such discourses as a matter of scientific or technical expertise. Rather than undermining conservative or liberal appeals to a 'natural order', discourses of postmodernism now appear rather to serve the capitalist processes of alienation and commodification by fostering an impression of the inaccessibility of the material order to human will. As such, they appear to represent poor strategy for the dispossessed.
This shifting of the boundaries of dominant constructs of 'identity' is accomplished by assimilating more highly visible individuals from resistant formations, whose subcultural 'knowledges' then facilitate the more rigorous exclusion of politically persistent 'extremists'. This state of affairs was articulated in Marxist terms as a 'recuperative' strategy, to be resisted by finding relatively indigestible modes of opposition. In Foucauldian terms, of course, it signifies as indefinite process of discursive struggle; which cannot be resisted except by diversifying new resistant formations. Of course, even this mobile resistant strategy will simply feed, in its turn, into the constant cultural innovations which drive hyper-productive capital. At the same time, the institutionalisation of queer and its resultant high visibility in the dominant has also produced boundary confusion and panic — or 'backlash'.
Clark (1991) argued that the circulation of 'the lesbian' figure in and through capitalism can be re-signified oppositionally by 'the lesbian' who is able to re-encode the resistant elements of lesbian discourse which capitalism leaves on the side of its plate. The question of what these residually resistant or oppositional practices or codings are is begged, however. Queer discourse either discreetly ignores such questions, or thrusts 'sexuality' into the breach — a queer 'sexuality' which is argued to exceed the representational order of sex-gender in its redistribution of signifiers and yet simultaneously appears as the very mode of the current circulation and consumption of queer identity through the hetero-capitalist system. Queer lesbianism thus effectively re-constitutes itself as nothing more than a marginal mode of capitalist production and consumption.
Although queer collaboration with this process of commodification appeals for its legitimisation to a Foucauldian critique of 'sexuality' it actually appears to unfold in contradiction with any historically-situated discursive critique. One may, on the other hand, deploy a postmodernist account of the contradictory complexity of the coding of lesbian articulations, and the excess produced in its reiterations, in order to signify those parts of 'the lesbian' which exceed gendered and/or capitalist modes of reproduction. It may be seen as an inescapable effect of the postmodern condition that 'the outside' is constituted only in inconsistent (diversifying) reiterations of the dominant. The Diva-reading lesbian-on-the-street seems, on the whole, fairly happy with a polysemic and polymorphously ill-defined model of 'sexuality' and its consuming pleasures. It is not enough, however, merely to cite the impossibility of any 'outside' to a discursive formation since such citations merely tend to valorise the inevitability of whatever discursive effects which it finds. Resistance is futile, so party-on!
Or one may deploy, instead, a diachronically historicising mode: lesbianism signifies in excess of queer commodification by reference to a sedimented or narrativised history of the exclusion, oppression, and resistance of lesbians and women. There are many forms of lesbian-feminist identificatory practice persisting which continue to refuse to participate in the 'mainstreaming' of lesbian identity and are, indeed, strenuously opposed to it. This persistent lesbian feminism is marginalised by the queer-capitalist representational order because it remains incompatible with capitalist modes of production, distribution, and consumption. Indeed, it might be said, in terms of a history of the present, that lesbian-feminist discourses have, perhaps, become resignified as the contradictory objects of a commodified queer-lesbian identity.
Second-wave feminist articulations of lesbianism elided together the discursive formations of patriarchy and capitalism but these re-dislocate in a queer articulation of a 'post-gendered' discursive order. The free-market, globalising, neo-capitalist order cited by queer, which actually depends on a multiplicity of identifications, has managed largely to withdraw itself from availability to critical scrutiny of its modes of dominance — whilst its effects are everywhere debated. This discourse of a globalising free-market structured by its key fields of genetics and infotech nevertheless refers all signs to itself with ever-increasing ubiquity; including — and perhaps most conspicuously — those of identity. That is, free-market hypercapitalism seems increasingly to constitute itself as the referent of questions of identity in a more generalised narration of a historical present. This is not only effected, as it is in queer discourse, through the commodification and consumption of sexuality, but also through the free-market reconstruction of modes of the exploitation of labour and extraction of surplus value (that is, in the discursive organisation of work practices). Foucault wrote his historicising account of 'sexuality' and identity in 1976. Could it be that the world order has radically changed since then? Even if Foucault's account of a "history of the present" is accepted in the first place (which it was not in many lesbian formations), the production and disciplining of identity may nevertheless now be shifting mode to one which does not primarily reference 'sex'.
Whilst 'sex/gender' may still be a crucial factor in the disciplining of identity and its commodification, its dominance would appear, increasingly, to be open to question. Even if the part(s) of queer/lesbianisms which are argued to remain 'outside' of the capitalist system of identity production as matrix for consumption could be narrated, how do we narrate the current mode of contestation effected by these excesses? 'Resistance' is certainly not effected by consuming publications, accessories, or clothing, or by eating in certain restaurants or watching certain films. Although they may provoke vociferous culturally-conservative reaction, these are, after all, perfectly consistent with dominant modes of production and consumption of identity as commodity. The extent to which the re-circulation of an alternative content through capitalist channels effects any radical (or systemic) contestation is debatable.
Of course, the depoliticising tendencies of commodification do need to be weighed against the considerable gains in everyday security and prosperity achieved for gays, lesbians and other excluded groups through the familiarity engendered in heterosexual culture by the circulation of lesbian (and 'other') lifestyles through dominant media. Nevertheless, there is a diversity of politicised discursive fields within the lesbian 'sub-domain' (particularly outside of western urban centres) which remain strongly affiliated to specifically feminist models of resistance — and/or to ethnographically co-defined models — and which remain equally strongly opposed to the neo-capitalist/patriarchal order. Everyday conditions for most lesbians, and women, in the white-male-dominated-technocratic-capitalist-post-colonial world remain embattled — and are perhaps becoming increasingly embattled. Few lesbians would feel happy about abandoning the vitally reassuring conceptual and social spaces effected by the practices of lesbian identification. The need for lesbian identity is very clearly still felt — and is not (yet?) reducible to a gender-despecified marketing demographic.
In effect, 'the lesbian' comes in (or out!) to play insofar as individuals or collectivities mobilise any discourse whose referent is 'lesbianism' in order to contest any form of the exercise of power, to narrativise and cohere resistant acts, or to affirm or rebut the speech of others by citing the denomination. In other words, although lesbianisms cannot be defined once and for all; as referent, lesbianism(s) are discursive constructs effected by repetitions of lesbian signifiers whose significations are confirmed by recognition on the part of others who employ them in similar ways. There is no substantial 'lesbian' which anyone using the term refers to. Lesbians' own narratives of history and culture remain widely different and lesbians may not necessarily set off along the same chains of reference when the denomination 'lesbian' is cited. Many prefer not to use such a Eurocentric term, for example, in order to avoid a falsely inclusive confusion when 'we' speak as 'the' lesbian. The language game of lesbianism does, however, generally still work. Its illusion of coherence has developed, through narrations and re-narrations of the effects of its deployment, as lesbian histories and as materially lesbian practices. This illusion has enabled the mobilisation of the speech and activities through which lesbian individuals act out their daily lives and effect politicised contestations. An already narrativised lesbian position opens out and as we assume the 'address label' thus offered, we take on its historical 'baggage' willy-nilly.
It is perhaps currently only as the discursive object of lesbian-historical narratives (lesbian memory), rather than through any currently effective process of contestation, that 'the lesbian' can still be conceptualised as remaining 'outside' of the dominant culture or as constituted in resistance to it. The efficacy of deployment of 'the lesbian' now seems localised to the production of a tenable everyday life for certain female individuals and the affective or professional communities which they form. The 'knowledges' mobilised by these lesbians remain in excess of the discursive competence of the heterosexual-capitalist representational order and thus cannot be entirely controlled by it. It therefore remains possible to sustain limited (non-systemic) forms of lesbian resistance within this matrix. It seems debatable, nevertheless, whether the production of identity as a matrix for capitalist consumption and manipulation is currently being effectively challenged by deployment of 'the lesbian' in the discursive field of 'sexuality'. This view seems to be borne out by the minimal level of culturally visible activism carried out specifically in the name of lesbianism (rather than that of women more generally) during the 1990s in comparison with the 1970s or 1980s.
Postmodern theory denies an 'outside' to discourse and, on the whole, this seems to have been interpreted, in academic writing at least, as a ruling-out any (imaginary) order of alternative aspirations of the kind which fired the radicalism of previous decades. The current focus on essentialism and/or 'sexuality' appears, in effect, to have become as reductive and binaristic as 'identity' politics themselves — and as available to re-appropriation to the re-production of (male) dominance (for the neo-capitalist formation is still reproduced by mobilising a masculine mode of agency regardless of the number of female persons who might hold authority within its institutions). Whilst some long to restore lesbian feminism's claims to a female 'truth' and a primary focus on discourses of gender, others argue for the abandonment of restrictive and exclusionary identificatory practices. But the fragmentation of women's identifications (and the degree of the incorporation of femininity to the (masculinising) public sphere achieved by the second wave) problematises the mobilisation of coherent resistance under the sign of 'the woman'. Moreover, the expansion of specifically lesbian sub-cultural spaces has meant that lesbians in urban centres tend to feel less of a practical connection to the discursive or cultural spaces occupied by heterosexual women than they did in the 1970s and 1980s. There is often more of a focus on the anti-lesbianism, racism, and other contestations which divide us (women) rather than an anti-patriarchal commitment which unites us. Finally, a queer/lesbian primary critical focus on sub-cultural practices rather than on dominant practices has opened out the specificities of lesbianisms and femininities but may by now be tending to an occlusion of the extent to which femininity is still represented as subordinated to the 'phallic' gaze in its 'to-be-looked-at-ness' in the overwhelming majority of light-entertainment media and advertising representation, as well as in economic and social practices.
The total abandonment of identificatory collectivities, on the other hand, would seem more ideal than practicable under the real (materialised) conditions which currently face lesbians. If practices of counter-identification are not to be abandoned altogether, however, it would appear increasingly vital for lesbian discourse effectively to address the fundamental re-ordering and fragmentation of identificatory formations and their relation to shifting modalities in the discursive production of a globalised free-market over the last few decades. Attributing a (strategic or biological) materiality to the lesbian body cannot effect such an analysis. A more situated (in a discursively modelled history of the present) and multiplicitous approach to articulating lesbianisms and feminisms need not be seen as effecting further division or fragmentation. It may be seen, instead, as providing a means to analyse just what has, or has not, changed in the discursive ordering of sexuality, race and gender in a 'history of the present'. This book represents an attempt to articulate a history of the present in order to develop strategies and techniques capable of effecting a situated and systemic resistance to present modes and strategies of domination.