"Erotic Knowledge examines lesbian feminist writings from the 1970s to the 1990s in the context of the tremendous creative and political ferment that gave rise to the US lesbian feminist movement, a scene in which women from different walks of life engaged in independent publishing and cultural work together in hopes that celebrating love between women might cultivate new political possibilities. Drawing on works by Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Maria Lugones, Amber Hollibaugh, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Elena Gambino argues that lesbian feminist thought offered a theory of power rooted in a critique of arrogant perception. Lesbian feminist thinkers sought to uproot this arrogant perception, whether it manifested in racist or classist bias, in favor of embodied practices of solidarity, intimacy, accountability, and coalition, a set of beliefs that Gambino terms "erotic knowledge." Through archival research on womens liberation conferences, publications, and writings, Gambino produces a complex and often fraught picture of the emergence of identity politics within lesbian feminism, which eventually gave way to a split between a culturalist tendency and a more explicitly political tendency within the movement. Though in recent decades lesbian feminism has been dismissed as bioessentialist and exclusionary, Erotic Knowledge passionately illustrates how relevant the central debates and conflicts of lesbian feminism remain to contemporary feminist organizing"-- Provided by publisher.