Veronika Koller’s new book, Lesbian discourses: Images of a community, walks a difficult line with aplomb. Any examination of language as it might connect to identity necessarily grapples with the problem of specificity. How can we talk in general terms about identities that are necessarily fragmented, overlapping, and shifting? This book walks that line by taking a sociohistorical perspective on textual representations of community as produced by self-identified members of the aggregate in question. In this case, Koller is interested in images of lesbian communities and uses the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to explore those images.
Koller sets out to answer the broad question of whether or not there is any continuity in the ways in which images of lesbian communities in the United States and Great Britain have been created in nonfictional texts. (Koller alternates between using the singular and the plural for the noun “community.” I prefer the plural, though I recognize the rhetorical position Koller wishes to take by using the singular.) She also seeks to understand the ways in which images of lesbian communities have changed over time and to locate those changes within specific sociohistorical realities.
The intended audience for this text is likely to be other scholars working in the area of language and sexuality, and more generally within qualitative sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. It pairs nicely with another recent book, New perspectives on language and sexual identity, by Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson (Reference Morrish and Sauntson2007), in that both offer views into the ways in which lesbians garner discursive resources to create and present versions of themselves as lesbian. Unlike Morris & Sauntson, however, Lesbian discourses links language specifically to lesbians. As the only book-length treatment available that does so, it is of particular note because lesbians are often rendered invisible and inaudible by a focus on heterosexuals in studies of language and gender, and on gay men in studies of language and sexuality.
The book consists of seven chapters, beginning with a brief introduction followed by a more theoretically oriented chapter. Four data chapters, each linked to a specific decade, follow these two chapters. A concluding chapter ties the various analytic and methodological strands together, revisits the basic questions, and provides summary answers. Each data chapter consists of the analysis of two texts chosen for the ways in which they are paradigmatic illustrations of lesbian communities within the decade of focus rather than how they are representations of communities in that decade. This is a subtle and powerful analytic choice and allows Koller to make generalizations about the ways in which lesbian communities are represented, while at the same time highlighting the specificity of any given text.
Each of the data chapters has a similar, rather formulaic structure in which the social and historical context is laid out, the texts are presented, their modes of distribution are discussed, and some of their linguistic characteristics are analyzed. The historical image progresses from 1970s lesbian feminism and lesbian separatism to the lesbian “sex wars” of the 1980s. From there, the image moves to the problems of identity politics and more general heterogeneity within lesbian communities in the 1990s and ends with an increasingly prevalent individualism and consumerism that emerges in the early 2000s. The focus throughout is on the ways in which these specific texts construct general images of lesbian communities, and it is this emphasis that mitigates the rather artificial division of time into decades. At some level, the temporal boundaries are less important than the fact that the texts create images of community over the course of time.
The eight texts vary in terms of a host of characteristics, ranging from a mimeographed copy of a speech to an entry from a personal weblog, and include individual, diary-style voices as well as various combinations of voices. Each text is analyzed according to seven analytic rubrics: the social actors involved, the social evaluation that is attached to those actors and their apparent behavior, the kinds of actions the actors are represented as engaging in, the linguistic modalities that are most prevalent, the kinds of interdiscursive links the text makes to other texts and other historical periods, the use of metaphors within the text, and the gestalt image of lesbian communities that emerges from the text.
This formulaic structure has both benefits and costs. On the one hand, texts from very different sociohistorical contexts can be compared across roughly equivalent terms of analysis. On the other hand, not all the texts concern the points highlighted by the seven rubrics to equal degrees or in equivalent ways; thus, some of the analytic points feel a bit forced and detract somewhat from the more general claims about both the continuity and the changes in the construction of images of lesbian communities. The most powerful aspects of the discussions involve the sociohistorical contexts in which the texts were created and the interdiscursive links to previous decades and to other discourses circulating about lesbians during the same period.
The first two chapters lay out the basic analytic framework for the book and point out some of the potential pitfalls of the approaches taken. Generally speaking, the book makes use of a variety of theoretical and methodological positions in addition to CDA, including more general theories of the connection between language and identity. Importantly, Koller links these theoretical paradigms explicitly to Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities. The book is also firmly grounded in social constructivism. Koller sidesteps engaging in the debates of the late 1990s among scholars of language and sexuality (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2004; Cameron & Kulick Reference Cameron and Kulick2003; see Queen Reference Queen2007 for a detailed account of this debate). Instead, Koller demonstrates a general shift across time from a vision of community as entailing largely homogeneous characteristics among its members to one that recognizes, indeed insists upon, significant heterogeneity.
The lesbian communities of the 1970s are linked politically to the emergence of the New Left and, especially, second-wave feminism and the gay liberation movement. The two texts selected to exemplify this decade both present a community that is based on collective political and social action. This image decenters matters of sexuality and sex, and it is these matters that become the primary locus of community images in the 1980s. Koller selects a text focused on butch/femme dynamics and one on lesbian sadomasochistic practices to show the ways in which some lesbians challenged what they perceived to be a lesbian feminist orthodoxy during the 1970s, particularly as oriented toward women who wished to celebrate female masculinity. These texts, in turn, prefigure an ongoing tension between images of lesbian communities that focus on collectivity and images that seek to highlight heterogeneity. It is these images that dominate the texts selected to represent the 1990s, each of which specifically juxtaposes the lesbian feminism of the 1970s with the politics of social–sexual diversity among lesbians during the 1980s. This tension gives way in the texts of the 2000s to increasing images linked to the corporate marketing of lesbian identities, an identification in which individual differences among lesbians are highlighted and celebrated. This celebration leads to shifting away from collective politics and identity and toward consumption and corporatized cultures. The 2000s also sees the rise of politically conservative lesbians who fully reject communal political and social action, a stark reversal of the lesbian feminism of the 1970s.
In focusing on texts that are explicitly about representing lesbians rather than on conversational interactions among or about lesbians, Koller is able to get around many of the critiques of identity that have questioned much of the work on language and sexuality. At the same time, many of those critiques were in the back of my mind as I read this book, because I found it difficult to evaluate how comparable these texts really were and how representative they were of the time periods they were chosen to exemplify. Nonetheless, they clearly represent some specific aspects of the discourses that swirl around matters of lesbian identities (or identities generally), and they are clearly part of an ongoing, loosely associated set of narratives about lesbians in their communities.
By tracing how lesbian communities are positioned in these texts through the use of specific pronouns, modalities, metaphors, choices about explicit and implicit actors and actions, and interdiscursive indexes to previous textual moments, Koller provides an intriguing sociocultural and discursive pastiche that indicates how different moments in the cultural life of imagined communities may connect, contest, and constitute one another. I don’t know of any other project of CDA or work on language among sexual minorities that attempts this particular kind of collage. Koller’s work is impressive, showing how shifting images of community are linked both to the specific discursive and linguistic means through which they are constructed and to the shifting social, economic, and political moments in which they are created.
