The myth of lesbian generation loss: Finding intergenerational solidarities in digital sexual selfhood projects

Abstract

The contemporary preoccupation with lesbian’s potential obsolescence relies on implicit assumptions about the (ir)relevance of lesbian feminism to younger generations. In this article, we use the metaphor of “generation loss” to conceptualize the Gordian knot of affective and ideological ties that lie beneath this preoccupation. Contrary to the narrative of generation loss, we show how young people have begun to take up and share lesbian feminist concepts on social media platforms like TikTok. They do so in the name of resituating lesbian as a political project rather than an exclusionary demographic category. Instead of painting over lesbian feminism with the broad brushes of whiteness and trans-exclusivity, some young lesbians seek out other voices in the archive to debate whether and how this history might be recuperated as a challenge to white, cisnormative heteropatriarchy. Far from finding irrelevance, many revisiting lesbian feminism are excited to discover theories of gender, sexuality, and power that can be adapted to relocate lesbian to more durable and less essentializing territory than its current, narrowly biopolitical home. This presents a crucial opportunity to build bridges across generations and collectively resist the cooptation of lesbians as agents of white supremacist and transphobic political agendas.

Keywords:

• Post-lesbian
• social media
• lesbian feminism
• transgender lesbians
• black lesbians

Notes

1 This account is solely used for viewing content, not producing it, so our views of the lesbian feminist hashtag did not in turn push our content into users’ FYPs, which might incur undue influence on the research field (Duguay & Gold-Apel, 2023).

2 Although good faith conversations appear to be in short supply online—and all the more so as algos exacerbate the use of politically motivated bot accounts to spread misinformation and panic—we observed plenty of opportunities beneath all the noise.

3 The use of “baby gay” to refer to newly out queer people—of all ages, but especially young ones—has been around since at least the 1990s, but “pandemic baby gay” is a new, and we would argue, meaningfully distinct variation from what the slang term stood for in decades past; the pandemic qualifier adds an implicit reference to LGBTQ self-making in the context of physical isolation and increased online connection.

4 See TikTok search results for This Bridge Called My Back for more on how nonblack feminists of color enter the conversation.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Cati Connell

Cati Connell is an associate professor of sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Boston University. She is the author of A Few Good Gays: The Gendered Compromises Behind Military Inclusion (2023, University of California Press) and the PI of the Lesbian Project, a multi-method data collection initiative on lesbian lives (www.lesbianproject.us).

iO Fields

iO Fields is the Community Engagement Coordinator at LGBTQ Senior Housing, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts. They have a BA in psychology with a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Boston University. Their work and research are dedicated to diverse queer identities, housing justice, and gender.

Elliot Chudyk

Elliot Chudyk is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria. They have a PhD in sociology from Boston University; broadly speaking, their research specialities are in gender, sexuality, work/organizations, and qualitative methods.