ABSTRACT
This chapter talks with interest conversations with and among other lesbians in the profession about whether there might be a lesbian aesthetic, that is, a preference for certain kinds of music that somehow reflected the patterns of lesbian desire or lesbian pleasure. Consequently, "lesbian sexuality" channels pleasure much more diffusely than the phallic economy, admitting as sexual— that is, as valid currency in the exchange of pleasure that acts out or reinforces intimacy—pleasures and sites of pleasure beyond the usual ones. "Being" "lesbian" is a position which scrambles the usual components of "man" and "woman" and celebrates the scrambling. Arguably, these questions have nothing to do with a "lesbian relationship with music." But they are placed in the universe of thought at a point easily reached when the point of departure for thinking about either music or sex is an experience outside the phallic economy.
