ABSTRACT
My current lesbian friends [are] all of them younger than me, all could be my daughters. (interview with Vivienne Pearson)
The previous chapter outlined the challenges that were mounted to the model of a homogeneous lesbian community that had been constructed and reproduced in the 1970s. As a result of those challenges, models of a lesbian community became increasingly diverse, with the 1990s showing inherent fragmentation of, and contradiction within, lesbian communities and their discourses. This chapter will demonstrate how ‘the increasingly complex, fragmented but also dynamic nature of collective identities’ (Triandafyllidou & Wodak 2003, p. 209) mapped out in two specifi c texts. The fi rst of these is an interview conducted with Sheila Jeffreys (see Example B in Chapter 3) for one of the fi rst lesbian lifestyles magazines to be published in Britain. The community is there shown as marked by a quasi-generational confl ict, even though the interview partners are actually of the same age. Reversely, the then twenty-year-old author of Example F, a text from a personal homepage, advocates lesbian separatism, a political strategy that dates back to the 1970s and will be discussed in some detail in the present chapter. However, both texts refl ect the ongoing commercialization and individualization of lesbian communities in the UK and the US and are therefore paradigmatic of the decade.
