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Lesbian Research

Lesbian research is inquiry that focuses on the lives, experiences, and meanings of those who are socially identified as lesbians; this identity label is temporal, culturally determined, and socially constructed. Today, lesbian refers to women who are primarily sexually and romantically attracted to other women. Lesbian research is indebted to the advances and insights of feminism, a movement for social justice centered on women. Reflecting this historic connection, lesbian research has attempted to redress the imbalance of attention to dominant groups in traditional inquiry by calling attention to and countering the invisibility of lesbians through sustained investigation. This approach is aligned with a range of curriculum studies orientations including social reconstruction, feminist critique and gender analysis, reconceptualization, critical perspectives, autobiography and biography, and more recently, queer theory.

Lesbian Research and Social Movements

Lesbian research, with other identity-specific inquiry domains, represents the growth and successes of identity-based social movements for justice beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the 1980s, including Black power, the Chicano movement, women's and gay liberation, disability rights, and the American Indian movement. Participants in these movements fought to gain rights and access to social institutions, including higher education, and to establish interdisciplinary departments and programs of study focused on the often ignored and obscured histories and daily lives of these and other minoritized groups. For example, Black, Chicano, and ethnic studies programs preceded the first women's studies program in the United States, which was established in 1970. Women's studies provided an academic home for the social analyses catalyzed by and emerging from the women's liberation movement, in particular through radical feminist consciousness-raising groups initiated in the 1960s, where women rapped about their lives to share personal experiences and recognize common conditions and patterns in what formerly seemed like individual and isolated problems.

Popular Education: Personal and Political

The strategy of consciousness-raising reflects the common use of popular education methods in social justice movement organizing, as for example, at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which was cofounded by Myles Horton and Don West and modeled after adult rural high schools in Denmark started in the 19th century, and played an important role in labor and civil rights organizing. Highlander's Citizenship Schools, which taught African Americans to read so that they could vote, were led by Esau Williams, Bernice Robinson, and Septima Clark, Highlander's Education Director, and started in 1954. Civil rights activists also built on popular education ideas when they developed a curriculum for Freedom Schools opened during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer; it posed a series of questions for students to discuss in groups:

What does the majority culture have that we want?

What does the majority culture have that we do not want?

What do we have that we want to keep?

As popular education did at the time of the civil rights and early Black power movements, women's movement consciousness-raising used personal reflection and testimony and analyses of social norms to begin to develop new feminist theory and plans of action against the oppression of all women, perhaps best characterized by the feminist catchphrase, “The Personal is Political.” In 1970, Robin Morgan included a description of consciousness-raising attributed to Kathie Sarachild in the germinal compilation, Sisterhood is Powerful. The volume, together with Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, two 1980s edited volumes, can serve as a model of the evolving curriculum of women's liberation movement thought at the time; all include work by and about lesbians.

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