ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the historical context for contemporary analyses of queer and class. It argues that an intersectional approach to class, race, and gender has always been present in lesbian writing, performance, and organizing, and that this approach continues to inform lesbian writers’ thinking about queer politics. In recent years, class has been increasingly foregrounded in queer theoretical, political, and literary writing, as a critique of what some view to be the homonormative and assimilationist aims of contemporary queer organizing. This chapter recovers lesbian manifestos of the 1970s in the U.S. as powerful early precedents for these contemporary queer debates about class. The radical propositions found in Radicalesbians’ manifesto “The Woman-Identified Woman” (1970), The Furies’ Charlotte Bunch’s “Lesbians in Revolt” (1972), and “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977) are traced in the writing of contemporary lesbian writer Michelle Tea, whose text Valencia (2000) is used as a “case study” to demonstrate the continuity of queer class politics in radical lesbian feminist thinking. Focusing on not only the politics but also the effect of these early manifestos allows this chapter to trace and delineate both the ideas and the sentiment that “haunt” contemporary lesbian and queer writing.
