'Making' History: Archives and Activism in British Lesbian Literature, 1984-2003.

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In the late 1980s, the children's book Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin served as the pretext for a homophobic public discourse, culminating in the introduction of Section 28, which explicitly centred literature as a site of LGBTQ+ identity and visibility. The moral panic around the 'acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship' was a direct reaction against a decade of feminist and LGBTQ+ activism around patriarchal andheteronormative social dynamics. This historical moment is where my research begins. Starting from this specific attack on queer literary expression and historical education, I aim to trace a network of lesbian authors who, in addition to their ongoing involvement in both queer and feminist activist spheres, attempted to resist the government-sanctioned suppression of queer visibility by rooting literary expression in an explicitly lesbian history. Built around archival approaches, I examine how these communities worked to construct historical narratives through discrete inclusions and exclusions.An understanding of this recent history is crucial to debates on queer and trans rights in the present. My research - rooted in archives, outlined below - will bring together work of textual recovery with a recontextualisation of lesbian fiction and lesbian literary production. The combination of archival and literary approaches enables me to re-examine the construction of queer history and to work on the recovery of novel perspectives. Archives not only reveal background on the conception and dissemination of literature, but illuminate the gaps of works which were not published or were subject to censorship. The potential of recovery demonstrates how this project will itself actively partake in the processes of historicisation and reconfiguration.Fundamentally, this project aims to learn from late 20th-century endeavours in LGBTQ+ literary history to consider the potential of a historical approach in tackling contemporary issues within intersectional feminist movements. While feminist publishing and history-making of this period have been subject to sustained critical attention, concurrent efforts of lesbian history have rarely been explored as a distinct project. By exploring a moment in time whose effects are still felt in Britain today, I aim to answer the question of how publishing networks facilitated the production and dissemination of specifically lesbian historical narratives. With a particular focus on literary history, I will consider how fictional work responded to this turn to historical grounding and represented archival and publishing efforts. These questions are tied together by an attention to the role of power dynamics and exclusionary ideologies in both the historical narratives themselves and their dissemination.