Preliminary Programme

The sexual politics of late 20th and early 21st century Britain witnessed a move away from lesbian revolution and towards ‘homonormative’ lesbian assimilation (Duggan, 2002). This paper explores the changing forms of lesbian intimacy engendered by these developments, through a close study of a lesbian community.
From the early 1980s, lesbians began to move to the small rural town of Todmorden in West Yorkshire and create an intentional, visible community. A close-knit community of care operated through systems such as a childcare rota, newsletter, telephone tree, events (including the longstanding Women’s Disco) and structured support in times of need. A community based on lesbian identity promoted forms of queer intimacy outside of the nuclear family unit. These systems of care were grounded in both the theory of radical feminism and the practical necessity to be each other’s ‘family’ in a time of marginalisation and oppression. This paper explores what happens to these forms of intimacy when lesbian identity becomes integrated into mainstream social structures, as demonstrated by legal landmarks such as the Adoption and Children Act (2002), Civil Partnership Act (2004) and Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act (2013). How have conceptualisations of intimacy in lesbian community changed, and how does this feel? Based on over twenty-five oral history interviews with lesbians moving to the Todmorden and Hebden Bridge area from 1981 onwards, this study of lesbian community exposes the queer intimacies that have been lost as well as gained over this period of dramatic social change. (Show less)

Between the 1940s and 1970s, British women married at increasingly younger ages and marriage rates rose steadily, becoming virtually universal in the 1960s. Historians have long noted the idealisation of family life in the post-war period and the cultural and social emphasis on marriage and motherhood as fundamental to women’s social role. Familial and peer-group pressures on young women to marry in the 1950s and 1960s, combined with a widespread lack of awareness of same-sex desire as a possibility for women, prompted significant numbers of women, who were attracted to other women or who later identified as lesbian, to marry men and have children with them. Drawing on accounts by married lesbians published in lesbian magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s, this paper will explore the ways in which these women made sense of their situation and the choices available to them. Claire Langhamer has noted the impact of discourses of romantic love and selfhood on women’s expectations of marriage at this time, arguing that love was increasingly regarded as a transformative experience and a route to self-fulfilment. This paper will consider how married lesbians engaged with concepts of love and selfhood in their decisions about whether to remain married, conduct secret or open same-sex affairs or leave their husbands. It will suggest that the ways in which these women approached the agonising choices they were faced with demonstrate the ongoing tensions between older notions of duty and responsibility and new narratives of love and autonomy in post-war Britain. (Show less)

During the early 1970s, as Rebecca Jennings has shown, many lesbian feminists attempted to create new forms of intimacy based on lesbian feminist critiques of patriarchy and the institution of heterosexuality. A particular site of struggle was the monogamous couple, viewed as politically suspect because it apparently mimicked the commodification and possession of a woman that was seen as the foundation of heterosexual marriage. In this context, the correct alternative was non-monogamy, no matter how much emotional pain it might cause. By the 1980s, however, an array of lesbian subcultures had developed in Britain, drawing inspiration from a wider range of sources including home-made videos, zines, periodicals, books, music, and gay men’s culture, all of which could be encountered at film festivals, alternative bookshops, lesbian centres, lesbian and gay pride marches, and in pubs and clubs. This paper explores the shifting ideas about love and sex for lesbians between the 1970s and 1980s. It examines the sources for those ideas and considers how understandings of class, race, and disability impacted expressions of intimacy as well as lesbian community norms around embracing polyamory or choosing to be exclusive with one sexual partner as a political choice. (Show less)

Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1832), the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, were already celebrities when Anne Lister (who herself later became a lesbian icon) visited them in 1822. Lister, like many of their visitors, was curious to learn more about their elopement from Ireland and the nature of their relationship. In the two hundred years since, the Ladies and their home in Llangollen continued to represent successful, long-lasting same-sex love between women for many queer people, including writers and activists. In the 1930s, a suffragist woman doctor was inspired to write a biography of the Ladies after meeting their ghosts in their old home, while 1960s lesbian visitors continued to visit and ‘pay silent homage’ despite the neglected appearance of the house.

For historians, the ghostly presence of the past and its uses in the present day raises questions – do we identify with the queer past as being similar to today or do we accept its profound unknowability; a debate which is particularly pertinent for popular and public history. This paper will explore how queer interest in and pilgrimage to places such as Plas Newydd (the Ladies’ home) are still materially evident at such historic sites, as well as in LGBTQ accounts of past figures and their homes. Focussing on mid-late twentieth century chronologies of the Ladies and others, I will discuss some of the ways in which these layers of the past have been used to celebrate lesbian desires, build LGBTQ identities and create queer heritage. (Show less)

On March 18, 1989, the London Fat Women’s Group (LFWG) convened the first National Fat Women’s Conference (NFWC) in the UK. Throughout the day, 170 women attended various workshops exploring how fatphobia manifested itself in British lives. The goal of the conference was to identify and to combat systemic fat oppression. Three workshops were held exclusively for fat lesbians, one of which crafted the Fat Dykes Statement. Fat lesbians played a key role in the group and at the conference, articulating how they were doubly oppressed by their size and sexuality. While the NFWC represented an apotheosis of fat, lesbian liberation in Britain at that time, it drew and expanded upon a rich legacy of fat, lesbian activism in the UK.

This paper will examine how fat queers sexuality and how sexuality queers fat. The interactions between these two identities have been little explored within British queer, feminist, and social histories despite the wealth of primary evidence which exists on the topic. Focusing on fat lesbian activism in 1980s-early 1990s Britain, my paper will elucidate the intersections of queer and fat history which are too often treated as mutually exclusive. (Show less)