An Appetite for Activism: The Lesbian Avengers and the Queer Politics of Visibility

Abstract

The Lesbian Avengers, an activist group of the early 1990s, utilized rhetorics of visibility to draw attention to lesbian issues, highlighting their gendered and sexualized bodies. Coinciding with the emergence of lesbian chic in popular culture, the Avengers complicated the bodily abstraction presumed in public discourse by flaunting a sexual excessiveness that could not be contained by a heteronormative economy of desire. Premised on displacement, the Avengers’ visibility therefore productively queers the politics of visibility.