From No Go to No Logo: Lesbian Lives and Rights in Chatelaine

Abstract

This study is a feminist cultural and critical analysis of articles about lesbians and their rights that appeared in Chatelaine magazine between 1966 and 2004. It explores the historical progression of their media representation, from an era when lesbians were pitied and barely tolerated, through a period when their struggles for their legal rights became paramount, to the turn of the present century when they were displaced by post-modern fashion statements about the “fluidity” of sexual orientation, and stripped of their identity politics. These shifts in media representation have had as much to do with marketing the magazine as with its liberal editors’ attempts to deal with lesbian lives and rights in ways that would appeal to readers. At the heart of this overview is a challenge to both the media and academia to reclaim lesbians in all their diversity in their real historical and contemporary contexts.