Redrawing the lesbian: The memory of lesbian feminism in Kate Charlesworth’s Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide

Abstract

Kate Charlesworth’s graphic narrative Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide (2019), part memoir and part documentary of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex life and activism in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 2019, remembers the time when the LGBTQI+ and feminist movements met and influenced each other deeply, namely in lesbian feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on feminist historiography and memory studies, this article discusses the role the figure of the lesbian has played in the collective memory of lesbian feminism. With a focus on the expressive capacities of comics, it examines how the work revisits this figure at a time when women’s and LGBTQI+ rights face a backlash led by anti-gender campaigners, some of whom draw on discourses associated with lesbian feminism. It concludes that the work challenges dominant narratives about the relationship between lesbian, queer, and trans feminism and enables a reconsideration of these movements as parts of a common political project.