ABSTRACT
In her Preface to Are Girls Necessary? Julie Abraham succinctly describes what is perhaps the most crucial, and undoubtedly the most enduring, dilemma of contemporary lesbian literary scholarship:
Given policing by the spirits of various ages, and given the centrality of interpretation—especially interpretation as not-lesbian—to the process of policing, how might we now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, at a moment of unprecedented possibility for lesbian cultural production, criticism, and theory, identify a lesbian text or a lesbian literature?
(p. xiii)