Before the rise of the political and theoretical project of ‘queer’ (which, in my estimation, is a second-wave millennial project begun in the 1990s), scholarly and performative lesbian practices were situated within and against feminist scholarship. Early on, the agenda was to establish lesbian visibility and, in consequence, to reveal and deconstruct the structures of representation, on the stage and on the page. Indeed, the context for lesbian work was intentionally composed of women, misunderstood as separatism, while actually creating a fully gendered notion of surrogation. By this I mean to gesture to Joseph Roach's notion of surrogation as ‘improvized narratives of authenticity and priority’ that can ‘congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’.Footnote ¹ In situating lesbian visibility strictly within the gendered category of women, a genealogy and authenticity were invoked for its representation that were removed from the violence of binary logics of gender.

In the transnational context, which, in this case, is within the Feminist Working Group of IFTR, the issue of visibility continued to set the agenda for lesbian work, even while, in the US, visibility politics had already been thoroughly disciplined by scholars like Peggy Phelan, who, in her book literally titled Unmarked, set out an anti-visibility project in favour of more oscillating, unstable and interwoven notions of identification.Footnote ² In the earlier years of my participation in the IFTR group, some invitations to speak indicated that, in order to bring women's rights to the fore, lesbian politics would need to be closeted, and so I declined. While understanding the violent restrictions on emerging feminist struggles in other cultures, I could not participate in sacrificial rites before the altar of heteronormativity in order to consolidate an international feminist critique. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I felt raw from the painful friction produced by the scrubbing out of earlier lesbian works as essentialist, and by the continuing violence against lesbians in numerous cultures, including my own, and yet was nonetheless not soothed by the antiseptic salve of European male philosophers that was being imported into both queer and feminist thought.

Perhaps the continuing project of visibility within my work was fostered by these transnational invitations along with my sense of loyalty to a genealogy of lesbian practices that would pre-date the rise of Judith Butler, who emerged from the thighs of Lacan and Foucault. Of course, ‘genealogy’ itself is a Foucauldian term, once understood as a correction to the notion of history, but now, in twenty-first-century queer/LGBT practices, it, along with other birthing metaphors, has come full circle, pointing once again to their more traditional referents: families and children. We could call it the move toward same-sex mommy visibility, a project quite different from the earlier project of lesbian visibility. One need only consider the move away from that brilliant self-portrait by Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Pervert, in 1994.Footnote ³ Opie poses for a formal portrait with a black leather S/M mask on her head, needles in her arms, and the word ‘pervert’ cut into her chest. Skip now to the twenty-first century, in which Opie shoots Self-Portrait/Nursing,Footnote ⁴ with a naked baby boy at her breast. Opie's photographs can be perceived as iconic road signs on the way to other same-sex mommy representations, such as the movie The Kids Are All Right,Footnote ⁵ replete with Volvo station wagon. And the Volvo, that emblem of Swedish socialist and intellectual liberality, also meant, as it had in Sweden, that those children could be raised within a legally married same-sex union.

So if the queer critique actively post-dated projects of lesbian visibility, the move toward legalized civil unions of ‘same-sex’ partners post-dates queer. The term ‘queer’, after all, still retains the affective notion of ‘shaming’. On the one hand, the term signifies a history of social shaming, carefully theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the 1990s;Footnote ⁶ on the other hand, the term invites a broad array of non-normative practices to shelter under its umbrella, as illustrated in Michael Warner's 1993 anthology Fear of a Queer Planet.Footnote ⁷ The term ‘queer’ extends beyond same-sex unions, beyond LGBT-identified subcultures, out into the definition proffered by the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, in which queer is an interpretive lens through which one may view cultural artefacts and activist events as queerly performative. All of these significations of queer currently pale behind the drive, in the US and other nations, to ratify same-sex marriage through judicial means. This drive toward civil rights is neither inclusive, in the sense of broad queer coalitions, nor affective, as in the studies of identificatory psychic mechanisms. Nor does the focus on civil unions and the re-establishment of the exclusive rights of the family articulate with the earlier embrace of perversion, as in the iconic Opie self-portrait, or in my own article, ‘Tracking the Vampire’ – first published, tellingly, in the Queer Theory volume of differences, edited by Teresa de Lauretis.Footnote ⁸ If the contemporary critical theories will follow the major activist agenda, then the LGBT critical discourse must address the juridical.

Judith Butler's work did take a turn toward explicitly juridical discourses (following Foucault) in the early 1990s, even launching the term the ‘juridical subject’. Butler's work was accompanied by other scholarly articles that took up specific cases, such as queer interpretations of sodomy laws (Lawrence v. Texas) and, in the US, culminated in a focus on DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act. LGBT-specific programmes in law schools have emerged, such as the Williams Project at UCLA, and OUTLAW in several law schools across the country. Critical anthologies around the topic of same-sex marriage have appeared, such as Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships,Footnote ⁹ that include discussions of constitutional law and set up conditions of the normative for same-sex partners as included in the discourse of basic human rights. Un-queer, this discourse is aimed at establishing same-sex unions as within the normative, in order to secure the same civil protections and privileges as others. One could say that the discourse is now canny rather than uncanny, normative rather than non-normative.

Still, certain sparks set small fires in unexpected sheltered spaces: the case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act was brought by Edith Windsor, who was in a long-term butch–femme relationship without children and that, Edie loves to relate, was focused on hot sex. The article in the New Yorker titled ‘The Perfect Wife’ relates how Edie, seventy-seven years old at the time of the case, had to be repeatedly cautioned by her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, not to talk publicly about sex: ‘All I needed was Antonin Scalia reading about Edie and Thea's butch–femme escapades.’Footnote ¹⁰ And the scholarly discourse has followed that interdiction.

Butch–femme politics have been superseded in the twenty-first-century discourse, performances and activist movements by a focus on the transman – transgendered transformations from female to male. Interpretive articles by Judith-now-Jack Halberstam on the nature of masculinities track the performances of drag kings, transman competitions and solo performance artwork. Transman performances also link to transnational, diasporic cultural and class differences, as in the work of D’Loco Kid, whose trans performances are situated within the Sri Lankan diaspora. Yet I cannot find a way back to a sense of an international feminist coalition through the process of reconstructive surgery and the performance of masculinity. This path does not satisfy my own longing to stand together with other issues of women's rights, even if within the heteronormative economy.

When I do find useful strategies for linking LGBT concerns with the broader issues of women's rights and critiques of gendered practices of post-coloniality, they reside in the work of feminist scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Sharon Holland, Jisha Menon and Gayatri Gopinath, to name a few.

So then I hear the calling, again, of the IFTR Feminist Working Group, with its several-year project on affect and activism in neoliberal times, while I still feel that in order to get beyond the old visibility struggles, I would need to join the Queer Futures Working Group. If the Feminist Group offers the secure context of women, the Queer Futures group offers engagement with practitioners and scholars who are both affirming and challenging ‘queer’ visibility practices. Indeed, futures are key to the present and to the past, as the late José Muñoz inscribed in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.Footnote ¹¹

But frankly, beyond these affairs with conferences, I basically long for the long-gone lesbian bar scene, in which erotics and perversion determined the performative discourse, for neither juridical subjects nor post-colonial ones seem to articulate their critique through camping it up. The long wind of those male philosophers blows through their careful attentiveness to institutionalized violence or normalized civil rights. Sincerity may be the appropriate address to the civil, but it is just not hot.