ABSTRACT
Eleanor Butler, Sarah Ponsonby, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, Valentine Ackland, Vita Sackville-West. A ‘pot-pourri’ of women’s names; a collection of images, of faces, hands and bodies, of portraits and photographs, iconographies of white, European women in this century and the last.1 Tainted and stigmatized, set aside and marginalized or regarded as oddities and eccentrics, these women are nevertheless survivors, the visible remnants of a largely invisible tradition-lesbianism. Their ‘masculinization’, their habit of’ cross-dressing’, the rumours of ‘inversion’ and the allegations of ‘unnatural practices’ which surrounded them, differentiated them from ‘real’ women and cast them into the role of deviants. What do their one-dimensional images hold for lesbians in the late twentieth century? What significance can we assign to them in the era of Section 28 and the attack on positive imagery2? In what ways do their portraits influence both the construction of our personal identities and the creation of lesbian traditions, histories and mythologies?
