“Lesbians are not women,” declared lesbian feminist theorist Monique Wittig (1980, 111). Wittig’s statement captures a persistent problem that the figure of the lesbian illuminates, bringing to light the frictions between sex, gender, and sexuality as well as nature, culture, and embodiment. If lesbians are not women, what on earth are they? One might reasonably assume that the term lesbian names a type of woman. And yet that has proven to be anything but a straightforward assumption. If the relationship between lesbian and woman is not self-evident, why is that? If those two terms can’t be resolved by the logics of synonymy or hierarchy, why not? What vectors of identity, experience, and embodiment organize the difference between lesbian and woman? Wittig’s statement implicates the lesbian in an intersectional matrix of difference. Unpacking her provocation requires a recognition that sex and gender have a complicated relation, shaped by race, ability, class, religion, and region, among other aspects of subjectivity and experience. The history of the lesbian as keyword is thus necessarily a history of the uneven terrain of oppression and struggle in which this figure has taken on different meanings in different times and places for different people. While Wittig proposed...