My current research addresses the intersections of feminist, queer, and critical race theories, focusing in particular on how lesbian feminists during the 1970s and 1980s developed a coalitional conception of intersectionality by imagining radical futures premised on racial and sexual accountability.
In my book project, tentatively titled Politics as Sinister Wisdom: Lesbian Feminism Beyond 'The Waves,’ I link the tendentious historical relationship between “lesbian” and “queer” politics with these paradigmatic questions about coalition-building by recovering the project of lesbian feminism. First, I argue that the historical relationship between lesbian politics of the 1970s and 80s, on the one hand, and the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s, on the other, is often told as a progressive account, wherein we move from a lesbian politics of identity as sameness, to a radically democratic queer politics. However, in so doing, many feminist and queer theorists have allowed the deeply political and relational understanding of identity that predominated during the 1980s to recede from view. Second, I argue that this narrative has mischaracterized lesbian politics as essentialist, thereby foreclosing the lessons of accountability that lesbian politics could teach us. And finally, I offer a reconstructed account of the central claims of a diverse group of lesbian feminists during the 1970s and 80s, arguing that for much of its history, lesbians have promoted a uniquely reparative political praxis – a praxis for which queer theory is almost exclusively credited today. I use a relatively forgotten lesbian political archive, the literary and political magazine Sinister Wisdom, to argue that lesbians – and particularly lesbians of color – have left us with incredibly rich resources through which to think about building mutually accountable coalitions from within relations of inequality.
Image: Cover Art, Sinister Wisdom Issue 1, 1976. Art by Marianne Lieberman.
Publications
Articles
Gambino, Elena. (Forthcoming). “‘Red Roots’ of Solidarity: Paula Gunn Allen and the Queer Audiences of Intellectual Sovereignty.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Gambino, Elena. (2021). “Politics as Sinister Wisdom: Reparation and Responsibility in Lesbian Feminism.” Contemporary Political Theory (online first): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fs41296-020-00457-7
Gambino, Elena. (2019). “A More Thorough Resistance”? Coalition, Critique, and the Intersectional Promise of Queer Theory. Political Theory 48(2): 218-244. DOI: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591719853642
Other
Book Review, Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive, by Clare Hemmings. (2020) Political Theory online first. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720934411
Book Review, Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority, by Davina Cooper. (2020). Perspectives on Politics 18(2): pp. 600-602. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720000936
Book Review, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriére Lake Against the State, by Shiri Pasternak. (2019). Critical Ethnic Studies, 5(1).