Writing trash: Truth and the sexual outlaw's reinvention of lesbian identity

Kathleen Kennedy’s “Writing trash” reads Dorothy Allison’s Trash to examine how the “sexual outlaw” establishes a legitimate position within lesbian feminism. The published abstract identifies truth as the crucial currency in that struggle. Marginalized sexual subjects first argue that their desires are among several legitimate forms of lesbian sexuality; they may then claim that their stigmatized experience produces a truer account of lesbian identity than the one authorized by the cultural feminism dominant in the late 1970s.

This shift matters because an appeal to truth can both resist exclusion and create a new hierarchy. Testimony about class, sexuality, violence, and desire challenges an idealized lesbian subject, yet authenticity can become another test of who speaks for the group. Allison’s writing is therefore not merely an illustration placed beneath theory. Its literary form participates in making a subject legible: “trash” names social abjection while also becoming a position from which respectability, sexual normality, and the policing of lesbian identity can be contested.

Kennedy’s article is especially useful for studying the feminist sex wars without reducing them to a simple opposition between repression and freedom. It asks how outlaw status is narrated, who controls the meaning of experience, and why a claim to pluralism may develop into a claim to superior truth. The essay does not establish that every stigmatized practice is emancipatory, nor that truth claims should be abandoned. Instead, it shows identity politics as an argumentative field in which literature, social position, and sexual norms continually remake the boundaries of belonging.