“Making up lost time: contemporary lesbian writing and the invention of history.” Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, edited by David Alderson and Linda R. From this point, trying to find a prefix for the literary sub-genre sails too close to flippancy, facetiousness, or downright disrespect.ĭoan, Laura, and Sarah Waters. How about ‘ Dykepunk’? Well, that exists too, but as a self-definition by ‘riot grrrunge’ band C-Rex.

One can be driven mad searching for a handy, one-word definition of an emerging genre or sub-genre. So not a neologism after all, but certainly a new usage, as ‘cyberpunk’ and ‘steampunk’ are divergent literary concepts. Fast forward a couple of days to 1 st December, and I found an anthology of five homoerotic cyberpunk stories, edited by Cecilia Tan and Kelly Kincaid, under the title Queerpunk. The algorithms of search engines are peculiar things, however. Queerpunk: A genre in which an imagined or imaginary lesbian sub-culture exists or flourishes in a historical period where there is no record of such a sub-culture esp. Did we have a new coining? Had I invented a word? Waters’ Victorian setting drew comparison with the speculative history of novels in the Steampunk genre, which in turn led me to ask whether Waters had, in fact, invented ‘Queerpunk’.Ī quick dash to Google revealed no such compound noun. To summarise the chapter – which is difficult to do whilst doing justice to it, of course – it legitimised, in the light of there being very little historical record on which to base a lesbian ‘genealogy’, the constructing of imaginary cultures, communities, and situations in the past, such as Diana’s coterie in Tipping the Velvet.

On 28 th November 2017 our 20c Queer Fiction seminar group was discussing Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters, in the light of her and Laura Doan’s chapter ‘Making up lost time: contemporary lesbian writing and the invention of history’, from Territories of Desire.

Queerpunk by Cecilia Tan