about this issue
"The Meaning of Our Love for Women is What We Have Constantly to Expand" read the title of an essay by Adrienne Rich written in the '70s. Have we expanded the meaning of this love in the years since, and if so, how? Given cultural phenomena like "The L Word" and "Queer as Folk" is it still possible to argue that love between women is a powerful force for healing and political change? That lesbian desire is qualitatively different from heterosexual or homosexual desire? This issue contains essays, poems, and narrative accounts.
editorial
The material collected in this "love and lust" issue, in addition to being formally diverse, demonstrates a wide range of content and opinion. There is blushing brand new love alongside love that has stood the test of time. There is bitter irony alongside lyrical rhapsody. Several writers cast a critical (not to say jaundiced) eye on the conventions of romantic love. While sexual desire is seen as transformative if not healing in some pieces, one writer celebrates committed love between women in which sex is more or less beside the point. Another, by way of her narrator, warns: "OUR BODY IS NOT POLITICAL but liable to play the worst tricks on us." In short, collected here are precisely the strong, thoughtful, passionate, wayward and heterogeneous feminist voices that Trivia came into existence to publish and to foster.
As a response to the questions put forward in our call for submissions, this collection of voices is more suggestive than conclusive, and we hope it will serve to generate much more fine writing on the subject of love and lust. For this reason, and because we received far more material for this issue than we were able to publish, we've decided to extend this conversation into the next few issues. In addition to receiving a visual makeover since the last issue, Trivia has morphed from a four-person collective to a two-person editorial team. Though we miss our departed collective members, we can't help but feel the hand of destiny at work here. We are ex-founders and editors of two of the longest-running radical feminist magazines ever in existence. We feel well positioned, well qualified, and very committed to establishing and sustaining /Trivia: Voices of Feminism / as a leading political and literary voice for women in the twenty-first century. Lise Weil Harriet Ellenberger Quite a few of you have written to us saying how much you wish you could read this publication in print. We ourselves have long nursed the desire to revive a print journal, yet neither of us wants to revisit the ardours of putting out a regular publication. We've been thinking hard about this issue and have come up with a solution. Within the next two years, and hopefully at regular intervals after that, we plan to put out an anthology of the best articles collected in /Trivia: Voices of Feminism/ archive issue.
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