Cross-Purposes

The fifteen essays collected in this volume stage a long-overdue critical examination of the history, current condition, and evolving shape of lesbian alliances with U.S. feminists. The contributors to Cross Purposes: Lesbian Studies, Feminist Studies, and the Limits of Alliance are situated in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways within the interrelated fields of lesbian and gay studies, womenOs studies, and queer theory. Their mutual purpose is to create a forum for discussion of the strengths, risks, and limits of the lesbian alliance with feminism at a time when the former is defining its own disciplinary space within queer studies, while the latter continues to question the presumed coherence of its foundational category, owomen.O This collection will explore a complicated but increasingly apparent dilemma: If the social and aesthetic significance of the terms olesbianO and ofeministO can be said to derive from the same historical projects, or if the development of lesbian studies is understood in some sense as coextensive with the development of feminist studies, then how are contemporary scholars and critics participating in the emergence of a lesbian studies paradigm. Cross Purposes is an invitation to question alliances in the interests of reforming and strengthening them. This collection stands on the borders where identity politics sometimes falls through the cracks. Its objective is to see how and where to situate lesbianism in relation to feminism.