We couldn’t have been more excited when Lambda Magazine approached us to talk about discrimination from a lesbian perspective. It gives us, EL*C team members, the chance to reflect on our accomplishments since the birth of the project in 2016, our 2017 Vienna conference as well as the current state of affairs. A quick ‘tour d’horizon’ and it’s safe to say that lesbian visibility work remains as crucial as ever in 2021!
Let us start from the beginning: the Eurocentralasian Lesbian* Community (EL*C) started out from a self-organised event focusing on lesbian issues, which, as about 70 lesbian activists from all over Europe and Central Asia agreed, were too scarcely addressed in the wider sectors of LGBTIQ* movement or human rights spaces. With this moment came the birth of the EL*C idea; from there we had to implement. This first step/layer was needed in order to self-reflect and take a perspective on next moves for lesbians across Europe and Central Asia.
This is not to say that lesbian organising had not taken place before the EL*C, quite the opposite! We owe so much more than is even expressible to lesbian activists from previous generations. Only what happened to too many of them is in fact symptomatic of the causes we are fighting so hard to bring forth with EL*C: absolute exhaustion from lack of funding, lack of being taken into account or lack of historical recognition, and lack of genuine support. Naturally, in this money-driven world, volunteer work is only sustainable for a certain amount of time. So, in other words, bringing forward these said issues to stakeholders on a regular basis is a follow up (second) layer, which is much needed to guarantee breaking away from remaining shackles. This layer also serves as our archive and herstory work. Without this layer of lesbian visibility, we risk repeating the cycle of exhaustion too often seen within the lesbian movement!
After four years of organising and empowering the lesbian movement, we are often still shocked at the work that lies ahead. What has been confirmed by now even only four years into our project is that if we don’t bring up lesbian issues on the table/agenda, there is very little chance that others will do so. History shows that it isn’t enough to rely on the women’s rights or the umbrella LGBTIQ* movements to bring lesbian issues forward. The experiences we face are so specific that in a sense only lesbians can bring these to the forefront in a manner that will carry effective change for the better. Our job, however, is not to lose sight of other specificities such as race, class, (dis-)ability, religion, ethnicity and/or refugee status that influence the lives of so many of us lesbians.
The need to push forward lesbian issues on the table/agenda is not brought up from a victim position. On the contrary, it feels very powerful and impactful to know that often times the omission isn’t even deliberate, it’s rather a matter or raising awareness and presenting a lesbian perspective. One concrete and very timely example of everyday lesbian erasure can be seen with the way in which the Berlinale reported on the 185 German actors coming out: initially, there was no ‘lesbian’ to be found in the description of the campaign, while there was clear reference to gay and trans actors! This particular example shows the potential amount of work there is to be done around tracking and monitoring the ways institutions, in this case a leading European cultural institution, contribute to or refrain from lesbian visibility. The role of allies is clearly seen here: we need such institutions to be our allies because they carry such vast influence on public opinion. Reversely or in parallel, the EL*C also has a key role to play around allyship with anti-racist, anti-capitalist and eco-feminist movements/ struggles.
Again, we’ll never say it enough: lesbian visibility work remains as crucial as ever in 2021! What has changed perhaps since lesbian organising in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s is the amount of new and diverse spaces where this lesbian visibility work must be carried out. Within human rights discourse, within social justice movements, towards the detractors commonly called ‘anti-gender’ movements, with the vast and growing array of stakeholders at local, regional and global levels. And needless to say that all of these places and spaces are to be dealt with online, offline – in private, in public etc. Across sectors: law enforcement, media, education, the workplace, A.I., health. Here we want to give a short example that illustrates the need for continuous tracking and addressing of lesbian erasure: how is it that in 2021, one of us in the team was recently asked by a gynaecologist if she had ever seen one before their meeting since apparently her being a lesbian would have somehow freed her from any preventative yearly check-ups for breast or other gynecologial cancers! The list could go on and on. This daily work of tracking lesbian erasure can be seen in a sense as the third layer or stream of work that is urgent around lesbian issues. Moreover with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic our lesbian communities have endured hard times on top of the daily struggles experienced prior to this global health crisis. Indeed, the pandemic has exacerbated already existing structural discrimination and ignited inflammatory rhetorics. So the work on lesbian visibility continues as strongly as ever for us as an organisation fighting for lesbian rights, visibility and wellbeing. The ultimate goal being that lesbians be included in all forms of pandemic-response work that is being undertaken: data collection, funding, and community support! And this here represents our additional and most recent layer of visibility work that was started in 2020 and that we will carry on for as long as it is needed.
Finally, we would only partially be reflecting the work that is needed around lesbian visibility if we didn’t turn the mirror internally and take in the strength coming from our diversity. This part is the cherry on the cake of our lesbian visibility work since it gives us the chance every day to discover and get inspired by the limitless potential of being a lesbian genius in this world!
