Opengender

The concept of a gay sensibility as constituted through hidden forms of subcultural exchange, or gossip, is perhaps outdated in an era in which a commercially organised lesbian and gay media effectively dominates the queer discursive sphere. The institutionalisation of lesbian media has made a relatively homogenous sub-cultural discourse available. This discourse has been codified, however, in the context of wider shifts in the discursive (re)production of capitalism, culture, and individual. The distinction, widely recognised during the 1970s, between mainstream and 'alternative' or 'counter-cultural' production has blurred. At the same time, within postmodern discourse, a capitalist economy seems to articulate as the 'best of all possible worlds' to queers rather than as an oppressive and expropriative regime and a site for radical transformation.

The institutionalisation of lesbian discourses in commercial contexts has led to the production of lesbian identities, in major Western urban centres at least, which are marked by practices of marketing and consumption. This is not to say that, even in these urban centres, lesbian identity is now reducible to a marketing device or commodity. Rather it is to suggest that the most visible contemporary forms of lesbian cultural production or spectatorship are intelligible only with reference to these constructs. Along with new tropes such as 'lifestyle' or 'lipstic' lesbians, lesbians continue to deploy identificatory codes and practices such as role-playing and also continue to mobilise critique in the language of radical feminism. The coding of the 'lifestyle' lesbian is, of course, produced in the matrix of prior lesbian discourses and is saturated with them. Conflict between lesbianisms as these transformations unfold also effects a continuing diversity of lesbian "reading formations" (Clark, 1991: 194).