Introduction

Abstract

Jill Johnston’s life has often been treated as bifurcated, with the period when she was a dance and art critic in the 1950s and 1960s considered separate from her celebrity as a writer and provocateur of lesbian feminism. The introduction proposes that this split obscures the ways in which Johnston’s life in dance influenced her later work as a lesbian activist. It also proposes that Johnston is a fascinating example of how to study lesbian subjectivity, because she was adept at being both legible and not, clear and generatively messy. Throughout this inquiry, the chapter considers the relationship between lesbian history and the archive, exploring both Johnston’s time at the Dance Division of the New York Public Library, where she first began her work as a dance critic, and the author’s travels through a range of archives, including the Dance Division, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and the Jill Johnston Literary Archives.