- Rachel Corbman "Holly Near on Tour for the National Women’s Studies Association:
Women’s Music and the History of Women’s Studies" - Rachel Stonecipher “Sighting and Citing the Lesbian in Live Music Performance”
- Jessica Pruett "You Treat Me Like Your Boyfriend”: Tegan and Sara’s Bid for Lesbian Pop Stardom"
Moderator: Mairead Sullivan
There is a growing body of queer feminist scholarship that is interested in the recent history of lesbian feminism, as well as the continued resonance of lesbian identities and cultures in the current moment (Cvetkovich 2003, Enke 2007, Freeman 2010, Hesford 2013, Huffer 2013, Traub 2015, Wiley 2016, Hobson 2016, Hogan 2016, Bessette 2017, Beins 2017). Popular culture studies, however, has remained largely insulated from this scholarly trend, in part because many lesbian cultural productions have assumed an oppositional relationship to popular culture. In this panel, we offer interdisciplinary perspectives that consider the production and consumption of lesbian music and musical performances. Focusing on a U.S. context, and spanning the 1970s to the present, the papers on this panel cumulatively trace the emergence of the women's music movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the ways in which this genre continues to shape expectations for lesbian performers today, and the complicated ways in which lesbian and queer identified women "read" lesbian sensibilities into live music performances.
