A01=Elena Gambino
accountability
Adrienne Rich
affect
Amber Hollibaugh
archives
arrogant perception
arrogant power
audience
Audre Lorde
Author_Elena Gambino
Category=JBSF11
Category=JBSJ
Category=JPA
Cherrie Moraga
Counterintimacy
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feminist shelf-making
feminist waves
Hannah Arendt
hauntology
historical methods
institution-building
intersectional accountability
intersectional ethics
intersectionality
intimacy
June Jordan
Lauren Berlant
Lesbian feminism
Michel Foucault
Minnie Bruce Pratt
political theory
publicity
queer history
sexology
spatiality
The Black Unicorn
the erotic
untimeliness
vocation
Will to remember
Women in Print
World-building
Zionism
Product details
- ISBN 9781478038689
- Weight: 286g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Erotic Knowledge explores how US lesbian feminists raised questions about the political stakes of sexual freedom, how their distinctive political vocabularies informed coalition- and institution-building in ways that strain against contemporary queer and feminist assumptions, and how these alternative grammars were left behind in the decades since lesbian feminism’s remarkable surge in the 1970s. Elena Gambino makes the case that the past of US lesbian feminism is rich in resources not only for rethinking vital questions of sexual freedom in the present, but also for incorporating these questions into a broader understanding of the silencing effects of disciplinary historical knowledge. Drawing on archival sources typically ignored in political theory, such as lesbian feminist poetry, literary criticism, and the publications of small presses and periodicals, Gambino argues that the full extent of lesbian feminists’ contributions should be seen as a distinctive form of political analysis that which can guide lesbian feminist interventions in sexual intimacy, epistemology, and institution-building.
Elena Gambino is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
