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    • An Interview with Carol Anne Douglas
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    • An Interview with Sharon Doubiago
    • Confrontation with the Rapist
    • Defense Attorney's Lament
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    • A Review of Donna Prinzmetal's Snow White
    • Laws of Kissing If Newton Were a Woman
    • Two Poems by Judith Terzi
    • One of the Cronettes
    • Inspiration
  • Previous Issues
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      • Issue 16: "Feminisms" >
        • Toward a Theory and Praxis of Sustainable Feminism
        • Feminisms: Inclusion as a Radical Act
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        • Three Ekphrastic Poems
        • Braids
        • Medusa
        • Who's Coming Along: Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and Collaboration Today
        • We had rituals we didn't know what for
        • A Brief History of a Feminist Mind
        • Marge Piercy: On Feminism, Politics, and Writing
        • Lack of Cover
        • Refresh
        • Crabby Apples
        • A Place of Storytelling and Sustenance: Molly Sutton Kiefer's Nestuary
        • When She Was Two
        • Margaret Sanger Speaks
        • A Song for Maman Dantor
        • Listen
        • Abiquiu
        • Changing
        • Barbie at Rest
        • When We Crack, Let's Do It Together
        • Duel
        • Domestic Constellation
        • America the Beautiful
        • Death of a Valkyrie
        • Old Woman Who Grieves War
        • I Read My Death in the Winter Stars
        • Femenina Sube: My Aquarian Age
        • The Straight Mind at Work at the Heart of Queer Theory
        • Journal: In the Bois de Vincennes
        • Landlady Emily Carr
        • Scenario For a New Agenda
        • I Could Do That
      • Issue 15: "Animal Instincts" >
        • Women. Horse. Mountain.
        • My Pre-Feminist Animal Instincts
        • Our Animal Selves
        • Presage
        • Animal Self
        • Comings and Goings
        • And the Hawk Flies
        • Birds of a Feather
        • Proper Adornment
        • Reverie
        • Algonquin Anthology
        • Sea Stars
        • Immortal
        • Spirit Horse
        • First Cousins: A Suite of Poems
        • Bird of Prey
        • Crows
        • Harpy
        • Snake I Come
        • Approaching the Gate
        • Horses in Winter
        • "Domestic Terrorist"
        • Homeless
        • Displacement
        • The Mornings After
        • Gust of Win
        • Squirrel Dick
        • Cats
        • Frankie
        • Worms
        • Animal Cracker
        • I Don't Believe in Marriage
        • Drawing on the Dream
        • The Cow with a Human Face
        • Orangutans at the Jardin des Plantes
        • Abattoir
        • In for Life
        • I Am Shark
        • Giving Voice to Bear
        • Threshold Crossing
        • The Mark of the Bear
        • Discernment Is All
        • Bears at Midnight
        • The Musky Scent of Bear
        • Baggage
        • The End of Our Friendship
        • Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile
        • The White Dog
        • White Dog/Blue Pearls
        • Baby Dream #15
        • Baby Dream #39
        • Fish Songs
        • Today I Fished
        • The Surgeon's Territory
        • Boudoir Portrait
        • The First Six Months of Survival
        • P for Patience
        • French Pout
        • My Next Girlfriend
        • Winter Solstice
      • Issue 14: "Preoccupation" >
        • Wheatpastes
        • An Editorial: "It's not time to worry yet."
        • Courage
        • Dispirited
        • Voices
        • Falling
        • Sunset #2
        • Cut You Out
        • Brooding
        • Planetary
        • Sleeping. Dreaming.
        • Drama with the Neighbor
        • Woman to Woman
        • The Conspiracy of Chores
        • Murder
        • White Sunset Through a Mesquite Tree
        • Patricia Cornflake's Lesbian Lifestyle
        • Doldrums, Horse Latitudes, and Tropics
        • A Woman Poet's Critique of Words Too Commonly Spoken
        • Memory's Witness
        • Finding Edges
        • Oh, That Bed! That Bed!
        • Mother, Daughter
        • Here We Are
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        • Virtue
        • The Canary
        • White Sunset #3
        • Flow
        • Citrus
        • The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands
        • Occupy Wall Street Poster
        • The Tent
        • Occupy Me!
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        • The Poison Our Grandmothers and Mothers Drank
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        • Issue 12 Editorial: "Southwestern Voices"
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        • In Memoriam: Christa Wolf
      • Issue 11: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct," #2 >
        • Editorial_11
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        • We Live as Two Lesbians
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        • Dinosaurs & Haircuts: A Performance Monologue
        • To Be Real
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        • The Revolutionary Is the One who Begins Again
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        • No One Lives Her Life
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        • Oscar of Between
        • Michele Causse
        • Jill Johnston
      • Issue 10: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" #1 >
        • Editorials
        • Before and after Sappho: Logos
        • On Living with a Poem for 20 Years: Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking to Death"
        • And Will Rise? Notes on Lesbian ExtinctionNew Page
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        • Letter for Cynthia Rich
        • Dispatches from an Australian Radicalesbianfeminist
        • No Longer Burning
        • Reinvention and the Everyday
        • The Personal is Political
        • Notes on Reinvention and Extinction
        • Dyke on a Haybale: A Lesbian Teen in Kansas Speaks Out
        • Gay Trans and the Queering in Between
        • Lesbian Lament
        • The Inconvenient Truth about Teena Brandon
        • Who Says We're Extinct?
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        • Notes on Contributors
      • Issue 9: Thinking of Goddesses >
        • Vulture Medicine Augury
        • When hens were flying and god was not yet born
        • Canoeing our Way back to the Divine Feminine in Taino Spirituality
        • Testify
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        • Amaterasu- The Great Eastern Sun Goddess of Peace
        • What is Goddess? Toward an ontology of women giving birth. . .
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        • I Saw a Woman Dance
        • The Edible Parts
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        • Re-membering an Interrupted Conversation:the Mother/Virgin Split
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      • Issue 6: The Art of the Possible >
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        • The Loudest Self
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In Memoriam: Monique Wittig

Picture
Julia Balén

On January 3rd, 2003, we lost a dear friend and colleague, and the world lost one of its greatest writers and thinkers, Monique Wittig. She went for a walk in her beloved Sabino Canyon on that sunny winter day. I can hear her talking with the birds, rabbits, and lizards as they stopped to consider her French. We had taken many such walks together over the twelve years since she had first come to Tucson, shared many dinners and conversations long into the night. She had become my dearest friend. Strangely, the morning of the day she died, my partner and I went out to find "lesbos" scrawled across the camper shell of our truck. In retrospect it seemed an odd omen.

Amazingly few people in our relatively quiet valley knew that one of the 20th century’s most innovative writers had lived in Tucson since 1990, or that she taught at the University of Arizona in Women’s Studies; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Studies; French and Creative Writing. This suited her desire for solitude. Many who did know were too awed by her work to take her classes or to get to know her. As department adviser, I often had to urge intimidated students to take her classes—daring them to work with her. Those who did become her students often took every class they could with her thereafter and have described working with her as a life-changing experience. Even faculty members have admitted being awed and unable to bring themselves to reach out to her. For those of us who invited her into our lives, there was no better friend in the world.

Wittig will be remembered throughout the world for, among other things, being a winner of the prix Médicis, France’s most prestigious prize for writers, for her first novel, L¹Opoponax. The New York Times Book Review wrote, "In both form and content The Opoponax is a revolutionary story." One of its most revolutionary aspects is her use of pronouns, a project she developed throughout her oeuvre. Resisting language’s insistent generalization of the masculine and particularization of the feminine, Wittig brilliantly and effectively used the non-gendered pronoun "one" to articulate lesbian childhood experiences as the general. This allowed her to, in her own words, "locate the characters outside of the social division by sexes and annul it for the duration of the book. Claude Simon expressed evidence of her success when he wrote in his 1964 review of the book, "I see, I breathe, I chew, I feel through her eyes, her mouth, her hands, her skin." He, in effect, became lesbian—for the moment, neither man nor woman. All of her fiction continued this project of resisting what she came to call "the mark of gender."

The materialist revitalization of language, particularly pronouns, so central to her works makes translation difficult, if not impossible. Unfortunately she had no say in how her novels were translated and, while she was generally pleased with the quality of the English translations, the pronouns remain a serious problem in two novels in particular. In The Opoponax the translator used “you” instead of “one” even though, as she has noted, the use of “one” in English is no heavier than in French; and in Les Guérillères the feminine plural “elle” is most often translated as “the women” rather than “they”—both of which offer a different valence than the feminine plural “elle.” In spite of these problems, her poetic play with language still produces an effective universalization of lesbian subjectivity. In The Straight Mind and Other Essays, the one book she published first in English, she explains the theory behind her writing practice. She describes the battle that she felt Djuna Barnes’ work effectively wages and, in doing so, describes her own work:

[The lesbian] poet generally has a hard battle to wage, for, step by step, word by word, she must create her own context in a world in which, as soon as she appears, bends every effort to make her disappear. The battle is hard because she must wage it on two fronts: on the formal level with the questions being debated at the moment in literary history, and on the conceptual level against the that-goes-without-saying of the straight mind.

There was nothing that could go without saying to Monique Wittig’s mind; nothing left unquestioned or unchallenged. This did not make her life easy, but her refusal to accept anything that-goes-without-saying made her thinking radically unique and challenging. Wittig took Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that "one is not born a woman" a step further, via Marx, to claim that lesbians are not women because they do not participate in the gender/class system of male/female. She fought not for recognition of minority status but to render dichotomies like male/female or majority/minority meaningless.

Monique Wittig’s work is taught throughout women’s studies, LGBT and queer studies, and French literature. She remains a leading force in feminist and queer theory throughout the world, with contemporary work relying on her brilliant resistance to heteronormativity. It is important to note that she had serious disagreements with queer theory, particularly the ways in which some prominent scholars have misread and misused her work to articulate concepts of power with which she did not agree.

As writers and scholars go, she certainly had reason to be elitist: her substantial oeuvre has been translated into at least 12 languages; she produced a play, The Constant Journey, and her story, “The Girl,” was produced in film by her partner, Sande Zeig. Nevertheless, she lived what she believed at every level of her life, preferring reasoned argument over power plays and remaining staunchly anti-elitist, even within institutional frameworks like the University of Arizona.

Wittig will also be remembered as a co-founder of the feminist movement in France, and of some famous groups such as Les Féministes Révolutionnaires and Les Gouines Rouges (the Red Dykes). She caused a great stir in Paris when she and several comrades placed a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe with a banner that read: “There is someone more unknown than the unknown soldier--his wife.” Many of us will remember always the delicacy and strength with which she challenged us to better thinking and writing, her willingness to listen with an open and intelligent heart, her love for simple but elegant food, and her ferocious attentiveness to language and its material effects.

She had many plans: a script for another film with her partner, Sande Zeig; an article for English speakers about her latest publication, Paris-la-politique that she and I had been developing over the year and, no doubt, spending time in Sabino Canyon. While we mourn a life lost too early, the rich projects unfinished, we are grateful to have such a peerless body of work by which to remember her.

First published in The Women’s Review of Books, January 2004, Vol. XXI, No. 4.

Remembering Wittig Je n’ai pas trouvé de morale à ma fable mais seulement comme en filigranele tracé d'un principe qui les résume tous et qui est: ni dieux ni déesses, ni maîtres ni maîtresses.
                                                     Monique Wittig, Paris-la-politique

(I have not found a moral to my fable but only, like a watermark, the trace of a principle which summarizes all and that is: neither gods nor goddesses, neither masters nor mistresses. Translation by Julia Balén)

One says that Monique Wittig’s slender fingers dark eyes teeth heart shining knees are all ashes and dust. That all are laid to rest. One is silent. One packs champagne cheese tomatoes oil basil bread to the canyon where Wittig walked to hear the eight beat call of the cactus wrens playing among saguaros watches the light against rock walls for just the right shade of yellow pink orange purple kicks sand onto rocks onto sand. One’s boot is dusty.

They lay flowers and weep and re-member her texts in the piecemeal order of their aching thoughts. They say Wittig changed our lives changed the meaning the way things could mean that lesbians are not women. Wittig teaches us to make language new make it carry new meaning so that words work like a Trojan horse and gender is impossible. They say we will consume the words to make Wittig our own to remember Wittig. They will laugh at their own circles and leave balloons, emptied of their hot air, to the wind and dust.

You are gone to m/e. The only body I can retrieve from the bowels of death is the texts you have left behind. The only kisses and embraces words. I take each word in m/y mouth to roll round m/y tongue between m/y teeth and cheeks and chew. Each bite is bitter and I cannot get enough. I search for answers to m/y grief and find only deeper longing at this taste of your presence. The echo of your voice reverberating with words your words in m/y head, m/y heart, m/y hands.

One they we you I will suffer no windbags no gods or goddesses in your memory.

First published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, vol 6:2, 2005, 1-2.


About the author

Associate Professor and Faculty Director for the Center for Multicultural Engagement at California State University Channel Islands, Julia Balén has a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies with a focus on issues of embodiment and power relations and has published on feminist, lesbian, and queer theory and practice in an anti-racist/classist context. Some representative publications include: “Erotics, Agency, and Social Movement: Communities of Sexuality and Musicality in LGBT Choruses” in The Queer Community: Continuing the Struggle for Social Justice, ed. Richard G. Johnson III, (San Diego, CA: Birkdale Publishers, 2009) and “Practicing What We Teach” in Women’s Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins (Rutgers University Press, 2005). 

For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.     
"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.
There are new mountains." (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986)
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    • Radical: A Tribute to Barbara Mor
    • Radical Lesbian Feminism in Practice
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    • Ascension of St. Thomas: The Sensual Immortals
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    • Some Women
    • Hunting Woman
    • Unplugging Your Inner Patriarchy
    • She Who Carries the Seeds
    • Allison Merriweather: A Suite of Images
    • Localized Deafness: A Suite of Poems
    • Naked in the Woods
    • An Interview with Carol Anne Douglas
    • Imagining Differently: Revisiting Radical Feminism
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    • Who the Hell Is Rosie Méndez?
    • First Responder Who Only Fainted During Training Videos
    • Index of Jobs for Women
    • Screwnomics
    • Menstruation
    • Merkin Art: A Suite of Pussies
    • "A Witch, A Cat Woman": Cat Woman's Patriarchal Roots
    • Feminism in the Work of Michele Pred
    • Lucky Girl
    • The Social, Cultural, and Political Necessity of Anne Sexton
    • An Interview with Sharon Doubiago
    • Confrontation with the Rapist
    • Defense Attorney's Lament
    • Entertainment for Men
    • Greve Series / White Works
    • A Review of Donna Prinzmetal's Snow White
    • Laws of Kissing If Newton Were a Woman
    • Two Poems by Judith Terzi
    • One of the Cronettes
    • Inspiration
  • Previous Issues
    • Voices of Feminism >
      • Issue 16: "Feminisms" >
        • Toward a Theory and Praxis of Sustainable Feminism
        • Feminisms: Inclusion as a Radical Act
        • Grace
        • Three Ekphrastic Poems
        • Braids
        • Medusa
        • Who's Coming Along: Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and Collaboration Today
        • We had rituals we didn't know what for
        • A Brief History of a Feminist Mind
        • Marge Piercy: On Feminism, Politics, and Writing
        • Lack of Cover
        • Refresh
        • Crabby Apples
        • A Place of Storytelling and Sustenance: Molly Sutton Kiefer's Nestuary
        • When She Was Two
        • Margaret Sanger Speaks
        • A Song for Maman Dantor
        • Listen
        • Abiquiu
        • Changing
        • Barbie at Rest
        • When We Crack, Let's Do It Together
        • Duel
        • Domestic Constellation
        • America the Beautiful
        • Death of a Valkyrie
        • Old Woman Who Grieves War
        • I Read My Death in the Winter Stars
        • Femenina Sube: My Aquarian Age
        • The Straight Mind at Work at the Heart of Queer Theory
        • Journal: In the Bois de Vincennes
        • Landlady Emily Carr
        • Scenario For a New Agenda
        • I Could Do That
      • Issue 15: "Animal Instincts" >
        • Women. Horse. Mountain.
        • My Pre-Feminist Animal Instincts
        • Our Animal Selves
        • Presage
        • Animal Self
        • Comings and Goings
        • And the Hawk Flies
        • Birds of a Feather
        • Proper Adornment
        • Reverie
        • Algonquin Anthology
        • Sea Stars
        • Immortal
        • Spirit Horse
        • First Cousins: A Suite of Poems
        • Bird of Prey
        • Crows
        • Harpy
        • Snake I Come
        • Approaching the Gate
        • Horses in Winter
        • "Domestic Terrorist"
        • Homeless
        • Displacement
        • The Mornings After
        • Gust of Win
        • Squirrel Dick
        • Cats
        • Frankie
        • Worms
        • Animal Cracker
        • I Don't Believe in Marriage
        • Drawing on the Dream
        • The Cow with a Human Face
        • Orangutans at the Jardin des Plantes
        • Abattoir
        • In for Life
        • I Am Shark
        • Giving Voice to Bear
        • Threshold Crossing
        • The Mark of the Bear
        • Discernment Is All
        • Bears at Midnight
        • The Musky Scent of Bear
        • Baggage
        • The End of Our Friendship
        • Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile
        • The White Dog
        • White Dog/Blue Pearls
        • Baby Dream #15
        • Baby Dream #39
        • Fish Songs
        • Today I Fished
        • The Surgeon's Territory
        • Boudoir Portrait
        • The First Six Months of Survival
        • P for Patience
        • French Pout
        • My Next Girlfriend
        • Winter Solstice
      • Issue 14: "Preoccupation" >
        • Wheatpastes
        • An Editorial: "It's not time to worry yet."
        • Courage
        • Dispirited
        • Voices
        • Falling
        • Sunset #2
        • Cut You Out
        • Brooding
        • Planetary
        • Sleeping. Dreaming.
        • Drama with the Neighbor
        • Woman to Woman
        • The Conspiracy of Chores
        • Murder
        • White Sunset Through a Mesquite Tree
        • Patricia Cornflake's Lesbian Lifestyle
        • Doldrums, Horse Latitudes, and Tropics
        • A Woman Poet's Critique of Words Too Commonly Spoken
        • Memory's Witness
        • Finding Edges
        • Oh, That Bed! That Bed!
        • Mother, Daughter
        • Here We Are
        • Crazy Jane Addams Occupies Hull's House
        • Virtue
        • The Canary
        • White Sunset #3
        • Flow
        • Citrus
        • The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands
        • Occupy Wall Street Poster
        • The Tent
        • Occupy Me!
        • (post)Occupation
        • The Poison Our Grandmothers and Mothers Drank
        • Hellish Clout
        • Tangle
        • The Bathing Scene from Marguerite Duras's "The Lover"
        • As I Lie
        • The Therapist
      • Issue 13: "Death" >
        • A Feminist Editorial on Death
        • Plucked
        • Chromosomal Geography
        • The Clinic
        • Offal
        • I Have Come to Show You Death
        • The Making of a Peaceful Death
        • Sayonara
        • Sitting in the Lap of God
        • Cycle
        • My Assailant
        • New Jersey Spring
        • Something Missing
        • Triptych: Art Essay on Death
        • The Heroes of Ecbatana
        • Jane is Dead
        • The Miscarriage
        • A Spiritual Death? The One-Eyed Doe...
        • Black Bears
        • Circus
        • The Road to Nowhere
        • American Jisei
        • Nothing to Lose
        • For Linda
        • For Ryan
        • Mindfall
        • Rest in Peace
        • Love Is Stronger Than Death
        • Twins and M/Others: A Survival Story
        • Due Diligence (A.K.A. Cracking Open Her Case)
        • Empirical Evidence
        • Dissociation
        • 27.2727273 Readers
        • The Nomad
        • Manifesto
        • Baby Island
        • Chinatown, Death, and Women
        • Surrounded by Death
        • Where Sanity Returned
        • Whitney
        • In the Shadow of Mumtaz
        • Of Woods
        • The Egg Broke
        • Playing with Dolls
        • Threadbare
        • Because We Must Lose You
        • Clock Time
        • Gynosis One: Samhain
        • The Last Trimester
        • Crossing
        • Tiny Eve
      • Issue 12: "Southwestern Voices" >
        • Issue 12 Editorial: "Southwestern Voices"
        • Trojan Horses in the Desert
        • You Can See the Silence
        • Fleeing Oklahoma
        • North Rim, Grand Canyon, AZ
        • Mobius Arch, Alabama Hills, CA
        • Vasquez Rocks Natural Area, CA
        • Our Lady
        • Mothers of Beauty
        • Talking Incest
        • Desire
        • Tales from the Health Club
        • Three Years Old Watching the Open Sky
        • The Missing Girls
        • It Has Become Our Will: Onward with Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
        • A Conversation with bell hooks
        • Gertrude Stein, Hitler, and Vichy-France
        • Tinker Tailor Soldier Stein
        • Organic Evolution
        • Eclipse of Hope
        • I Lied
        • First Apartment
        • Translations of Poems by Shez
        • In Memoriam: Christa Wolf
      • Issue 11: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct," #2 >
        • Editorial_11
        • Invisible Outline
        • We Live as Two Lesbians
        • PrognostiKate
        • Dinosaurs & Haircuts: A Performance Monologue
        • To Be Real
        • Matrices
        • Coming Into Word
        • Prince of Paris
        • Ending Patriarchy
        • The Revolutionary Is the One who Begins Again
        • Always a Lesbian
        • Anti- Rape
        • Walking the Moon
        • Entanglement
        • Women Alone
        • No One Lives Her Life
        • Coming Out of the Straightjacket
        • Oscar of Between
        • Michele Causse
        • Jill Johnston
      • Issue 10: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" #1 >
        • Editorials
        • Before and after Sappho: Logos
        • On Living with a Poem for 20 Years: Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking to Death"
        • And Will Rise? Notes on Lesbian ExtinctionNew Page
        • My Mid-term Exam in Lesbian Theory
        • Letter for Cynthia Rich
        • Dispatches from an Australian Radicalesbianfeminist
        • No Longer Burning
        • Reinvention and the Everyday
        • The Personal is Political
        • Notes on Reinvention and Extinction
        • Dyke on a Haybale: A Lesbian Teen in Kansas Speaks Out
        • Gay Trans and the Queering in Between
        • Lesbian Lament
        • The Inconvenient Truth about Teena Brandon
        • Who Says We're Extinct?
        • She Who
        • Lesbians Going All The Way
        • Trivia Saves Lives
        • Notes on Contributors
      • Issue 9: Thinking of Goddesses >
        • Vulture Medicine Augury
        • When hens were flying and god was not yet born
        • Canoeing our Way back to the Divine Feminine in Taino Spirituality
        • Testify
        • Young Pagan Goddess
        • Goddess is Metaformmic
        • For Want of a Goddess
        • Amaterasu- The Great Eastern Sun Goddess of Peace
        • What is Goddess? Toward an ontology of women giving birth. . .
        • Inanna Comes to Me in a Dream
        • First Blood Well The History of Bleeding
        • The Song of Lilith
        • Freedom Speaks Through Us
        • Dulce's Hands
        • Notes on contributors (9)
      • Issue 7/8: Unabashed Knowing >
        • Bad Manners All That Jazz
        • Hypatia
        • Amerika in 5 Parts
        • Screens: The War at Home
        • Invisible Nature
        • Woman-Woman Bonds in Prehistory
        • I Saw a Woman Dance
        • The Edible Parts
        • The Happy Hooker Revisisted
        • Re-membering an Interrupted Conversation:the Mother/Virgin Split
        • Notes on contributors (7/8)
      • Issue 6: The Art of the Possible >
        • The Aerial Lesbian Body: The Politics of Physical Expression
        • Wanting a Gun
        • Red Poppies Among the Ruings
        • Returning Home with Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia
        • Noah's Wife
        • Reclaiming the Spooky: Matilda Joslyn Gage and Mary Daly as Radical Pioneers of the Esoteric
        • Grand Right and Left
        • Notes on Contributors (6)
      • Issue 5: The Resurrection Issue (2/2007) >
        • Waiting for Sappho
        • A Song of Captain Joan
        • Blue Mojo
        • Why Do Something If it Can be Done
        • In Memoriam: Monique Wittig
        • The Loudest Self
        • Clear and Fierce
        • (B) Orderlands' Lullaby
        • Borderlands
        • akaDARKNESS: on Kathy Acker
        • Remembering Barbara Macdonald
        • The Making of Power
        • Octavia Butler: A note on Xenogenesis as a love story
        • The Essential Angel: Tillie Olsen
        • Carol's Hands
        • Notes on Contributors (5)
      • Issue 4: The Wonderful & The Terrible (9/2006) >
        • Cunctipotence
        • Global Lovers
        • Our Lot
        • Doe a Deer
        • Degendering Sex: Undoing Erotic Alienation
        • Seven Stages of Lesbian Desire (What's Truth Got to Do With It?)
        • That Easter
        • Amazon Grace: Read it Aloud
        • Athene, 2002-2005
        • Notes on Contributors (4)
      • Issue 3: Love & Lust (2/2006) >
        • Conversation with Michele Causse
        • Chloto 1978
        • The Woman with the Secret Name
        • She is Still Burning
        • In the Beginning
        • Sanctuary
        • When Sex is Not the Metaphor for Intimacy
        • Arielle
        • Quotidian Love
        • Leverett
        • After Sappho's Fragments Tips for Natural Disasters Said Before
        • A Lesbian is a Memoir
        • Notes on Contributors (3)
      • Issue 2: Memory (12/2005) >
        • The Lost Days of Columbus
        • Agenesias of the Orld World
        • The Power of the Earth Shake/Rousing
        • Return to Earth
        • Forces of Nature
        • The Beauty Shop
        • The Other Shore
        • Notes on Contributors (2)
      • Issue 1: The Body (10/2004) >
        • Lovesick
        • Guerilla Girl Ponders the Situation
        • The Secret Pornographies of Republicans. What's left? Preferably Knot
        • Communing with Bears
        • TRIVIA LIVES: Division Street
        • After Reading: Les Gueilleres
        • Notes on Contributors (1)
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