ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which white lesbian feminist writers of the 1980s and 1990s marginalized the work of Black lesbian writers as well as scholarship about Black lesbian literature in the emerging field of lesbian and queer studies. Black lesbian writers responded to this marginalization with creative, theoretical, and scholarly writing that laid bare the particularities of their experiences. Allen names and interrogates the overwhelming whiteness of lesbian studies and subverts it with a close analysis of the work of several Black lesbian writers. She contends with the ways in which white lesbian writers’ and scholars’ commitment to whiteness created a literary culture that tokenized one or two Black lesbian writers while excluding the overwhelming majority.
