The Icelandic Lesbian Association — The Intersectionality of Gender And Sexual Orientation in 1980s Rights Movements

The Icelandic Lesbian Association: The Intersectionality of Gender and Sexual Orientation in 1980s Rights Movements In the West, the twentieth century was a time when homosexuals were constructed as a social group and ascribed particular traits. This development can partly be traced to modern urbanisation which provided shelter for an underground platform necessary for the creation of the gay liberation movement of the 60s and 70s. In sparsely populated Iceland, however, homosexual communities emerged much later than among the urbanised, modernised societies of neighbouring countries. Here, the first indications of lesbian social spaces appeared around 1970, and even in the 1980s these remained largely ignored by the dominant discourse. In 1985, however, several lesbians founded the Icelandic Lesbian Association (Íslensk-lesbíska), partly as a platform for lesbian issues. With an eye both to bridging the gap between the women’s and homosexual rights movements of the time and to fostering activities based on the integration of gender and sexual orientation, the Association rented a space in the so-called Women’s House (Kvennahúsið) in downtown Reykjavík. This article analyses the Association’s undertakings within the framework of the history of sexuality, deploying theories of subjectivity and intersectionality in order to clarify the social conditions of Icelandic lesbians, the formation of a lesbian subjectivity, and the potential for an integrated lesbian feminism during those years of the 1980s when lesbians were beginning to form a social group in this country. The article concludes that the Icelandic Lesbian Association became an important forum for the shaping of the lesbian subject within an Icelandic context, as well as for the agency which was instrumental in its construction. No other forum existed for activism based on the intersectionality of gender and sexual orientation, because the leading association of Icelandic homosexuals, Samtökin ‘78, was unprepared for this kind of integration while struggling with the HIV epidemic. As for the women’s rights movement, its ideology, which was based on the idea of the mutuality of women’s experiences, marginalised lesbians by considering their issues as unique to them and therefore outside the movement’s field of interest. The upshot is that even today, thirty years later, the Icelandic Lesbian Association is the only organisation in the history of the Icelandic women’s and queer rights movements which has based its activism on the intersectionality of gender and sexual orientation.