Lesbian sightings: scoping for dykes in Boucher and Cosmo

In Cosmopolitan magazine and in the work of the eighteenth-century French painter François Boucher, lesbians are visible, but nobody seems to notice. The operation of covert invisibility in such disparate cultural products suggests that the closet metaphor and the common idea that queer visibility generates queer empowerment must be retained but rethought. It also suggests that queer scholars and activists can benefit from occasionally working as historical-specificity outlaws, which here brings into focus the distinct ideological affects of each product, as well as some shared ones that demand our attention, including the disarticulation of female political activism, and the promotion rather than subversion of hetero-hegemony.