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While Lesbian Studies is established as a commodity in the academic marketplace, its disciplinary contours are rather more obscure-and even more problematically, its disciplinary genealogy remains somewhat crude. The dominant genealogy of Lesbian Studies might best be characterized as a 'collision model,' a battle between politics and theory, even though much existing scholarship draws on both Lesbian-Feminist Theory and Queer Theory.1 This article proposes that the tools and methods of a sub-field called 'Lesbian Cultural History' might be useful in generating other historical accounts of the origins and evolution of Lesbian Studies. Such a project is vital because the writing of our disciplinary History clarifies how we envision a disciplinary future.

If we are serious about producing knowledge of the past in all its complexity—that is, as something we think that we know already as well as pastness in all its radical strangeness—it is vital to grasp the epistemological consequences in conceptualizing practices in oppositional terms, a tendency pervasive among historians and queer specialists alike. Using the case of Alan Turing to unpick this oppositional logic reveals the paralyzing effects of polarization but also, and perhaps more urgently, the paramount importance in forging any number of pathways in creating queer narratives of pastness, including the unmaking of history. Accounting for the messiness and complexity of our movements through the labyrinth of history and memory calls for recognizing the boundaries of praxis as delineated and mutable, conflicting and intertwined.