TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism
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    • An Interview with Carol Anne Douglas
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    • Feminism in the Work of Michele Pred
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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
    • 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
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        • Presage
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        • And the Hawk Flies
        • Birds of a Feather
        • Proper Adornment
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        • Algonquin Anthology
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        • First Cousins: A Suite of Poems
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        • Snake I Come
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        • The First Six Months of Survival
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      • Issue 14: "Preoccupation" >
        • Wheatpastes
        • An Editorial: "It's not time to worry yet."
        • Courage
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        • Sleeping. Dreaming.
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        • A Feminist Editorial on Death
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        • Cycle
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        • Twins and M/Others: A Survival Story
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        • Dissociation
        • 27.2727273 Readers
        • The Nomad
        • Manifesto
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        • Chinatown, Death, and Women
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        • Whitney
        • In the Shadow of Mumtaz
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        • The Egg Broke
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        • Because We Must Lose You
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      • Issue 12: "Southwestern Voices" >
        • Issue 12 Editorial: "Southwestern Voices"
        • Trojan Horses in the Desert
        • You Can See the Silence
        • Fleeing Oklahoma
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        • Our Lady
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        • It Has Become Our Will: Onward with Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
        • A Conversation with bell hooks
        • Gertrude Stein, Hitler, and Vichy-France
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        • Eclipse of Hope
        • I Lied
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        • Translations of Poems by Shez
        • In Memoriam: Christa Wolf
      • Issue 11: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct," #2 >
        • Editorial_11
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        • We Live as Two Lesbians
        • PrognostiKate
        • Dinosaurs & Haircuts: A Performance Monologue
        • To Be Real
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        • Ending Patriarchy
        • The Revolutionary Is the One who Begins Again
        • Always a Lesbian
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        • No One Lives Her Life
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        • Oscar of Between
        • Michele Causse
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      • 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
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        • 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
        • Young Pagan Goddess
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        • 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
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        • 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
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      • Issue 5: The Resurrection Issue (2/2007) >
        • Waiting for Sappho
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        • 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
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        • The Making of Power
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        • The Essential Angel: Tillie Olsen
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      • Issue 4: The Wonderful & The Terrible (9/2006) >
        • Cunctipotence
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        • 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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My Mid-term Exam in Lesbian Theory and Practice: Discuss the question "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" as if your life depended on it.

Deborah Yaffe 


That depends on what we mean by "lesbians," doesn't it. (Whatever happened to the simple questions with simple answers? What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!)

If by "lesbian" we mean a 1970s version of a woman-identified-woman,* we should remember that extinction is an evolutionary consequence of failure to adapt to changing conditions, so that successful reproduction does not take place often enough to replenish the species. ("Lesbians reproduce by ear." One of my favourite Nicole Brossard quotes.)

Women are no longer having the conversations that would reproduce lesbian feminism of the sort that many of us remember with rueful fondness. We've lost out in the competition for cultural credence to the girls just want to have fun"/ "we're just like everyone else and we deserve equality" lot. Before the convergence of the Women's Liberation Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement that gave rise to lesbian feminism, lesbians were criminalized, pathologized, despised, subject without recourse to every manner of violence and degradation. During the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s and early 80s, lesbian feminists created complex and intersecting cultural formats – social, literary, political, sexual, musical, theatrical – in which the theme, "What/who is a lesbian?" always played a role. For a fleeting moment, there was even a stunning reversal in which lesbians became the emblematic normative Healthy Woman, with nonlesbians encouraged to do serious consciousness raising around their differences from lesbians. Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres set it out brilliantly. (Hmmmm. Did the lesbian feminist revolution fail because most women don't read French?)

That cultural blip having ended sometime in the later 1980s, or mid-90s, or early 2000s, depending on where you lived, lesbian feminists are again despised and pitied: with the howlingly painful twist that it's younger queer-identified women who look at us and shake their heads. But as gobsmacked and hurt and bewildered as I have often felt in the past decade or so, I have to acknowledge that part of the problem has been with my own naïve expectations, which I'll address further along. First I have to ponder a bit more the new realities.

Maybe lesbians aren't going extinct but have become ex-tinct? Drained of colour? (Perhaps as a species, we are now in the midst of some wild, unforeseen mutations?)

As a socio-political category we are no longer interesting. At least in Victoria, BC, (which is all I can talk about; if I've learned anything from the demise of the Women's Liberation Movement, it's the necessity of avoiding huge generalities about all women everywhere always) most of the time our lives are unremarkable.

As a movement, in the sense of lesbian feminist politics, we seem spent, except in small pockets here and there. That combination of radical feminist politics with lesbian passion – a total war against patriarchal language, culture, politics, economics, family – that was so thrilling in the 1970s and 1980s nowadays strikes most younger queer-identified women as quaint, or funny, or narrowly exclusive, or just sad. More lesbians today seem inspired by the possibilities of social inclusion and the social legitimacy of marriage and motherhood than by the possibilities of radical lesbian revolution. (Have we forgotten how to dream?)

It would be perverse to long for the wretched old days of constant fear; constant vulnerability to assault and incarceration; constant threat of loss of jobs, children, home, family, community esteem, and status as a normal human being. If today's urban Canadian version of lesbian life seems insipid, I'm not longing for recriminalization or remedicalization. Even with our Charter-based equality rights, there's a pool of unreconstructed and barely contained hatred that spills out wherever and whenever the social veneer stretches too thin to contain it. If I've learned anything from the 20th Century, it's not to take inclusion and equality for granted. I don't regret being able to share medical benefits with my partner or walk down the street together.

But-but-but…. How could anyone still "see lesbians as a vanguard"? When I look around my admittedly middle-class part of town, I see marriages, motherhood, and mortgages. Yet-yet-yet….I also think one can't meaningfully reject social institutions unless and until one could in fact be part of them.

The state of the radical lesbian feminist movement isn't disconnected from the state of feminism generally, and the current realities for lesbians aren't disconnected from the state of women generally. The gains of lesbians are a particular case of the gains of women in terms of our ability to earn a living, to attain social legitimacy and to nurture creativity without male patronage. And our losses are women's losses; the elusive radical possibilities have faded in the face of moderate but attainable liberal gains.

So maybe the current ascendancy of this relatively conservative moment is just something we have to live through. Maybe in another generation the lesbians will ask, "Is this all there is?" and start to create new movements with female passion somewhere near, if not at, the centre.

On the other hand (am I adequately conveying the strength of my ambivalences?)….We recently had a Lesbian Grandmothers' Tea – photos of the little darlings, food, and oceans of stories. There were biological grandmothers, partners of grandmothers, ex-partners of grandmothers who maintained contact with the ex and her children and grandchildren. In the midst of it, I had a little epiphany; we were probably the first generation of out lesbians to be adored as grandmothers. None of our children fretted about letting their babies stay with us and come under our influences. Au contraire, we were necessary and valued caregivers. What miraculous social changes! Who wouldn't embrace this?

The thing is, younger dykes or otherwise queer-identified people have to envision the changes they need from their own experiences. Of course, they don't want the movements we created, because they didn't grow up in our world. Their expectations arise, naturally, from their own environments. It makes no difference to younger dykes if I think texting is silly. It made no difference to me that older-style feminists thought consciousness-raising was frivolous. So there it is, the wheel turns, things change, evolution happens, species go extinct when they don't adapt to new conditions. (Or....Did we really think we were the end product of radical political evolution? Why is it so hard to accept change when change is what we wanted?)

When I think back to the glory years, I remember, as well as the thrill of it all, constant fighting, constant turmoil, floods of tears, constant reconfigurations of loyalties, issues of class, race, ethnicity, and disability, among others, constantly exploding all around us and rarely being brought to useful conclusions. I remember the never-ending discussions about S&M, lesbian porn, sex toys, gender presentation etc. in which everyone felt impelled to stake out and defend territory. I remember how hard lesbians tried to make collectivity work, to make nonmonogamy work, to live their politics flat out, all day every day, and how exhausting and dispiriting that could be.

Still, I never thought I'd see the day masses of women I think of as lesbians or dykes wouldn't be caught dead wearing the label. What for me was a lifeline to a wider, brighter, more meaningful world is for them a conservative (that is, middle-class, trans-phobic and dedicated to policing essentialist boundaries), boring, meaningless straitjacket. When I start to feel crazed, I just remember I'd never have considered wearing bloomers as a sign of freedom from constrictive clothing. We have to live in our own time.

Change is hard. Diversity is hard. We don't pay enough attention to history as part of the ongoing present. It's a darned shame we never quite pulled off the radical lesbian feminist revolution. Of course, none of the other liberatory movements of the time managed much better. Revolutions are notoriously elusive; even when they seem to be achieved, those achievements are fragile at best.

While it would be perverse to desire a return to the white-centric focus on lesbianism as a primary identity with all other social markers secondary, it seems equally perverse to me to reject the aim of solidarity that seems so lacking these days. Surely we can make community with other lesbians/dykes/queer women while still maintaining a more contemporary intersectional approach and without imposing futile criteria of who's in and who's out of the lesbian universe. The privatization of lesbian lives, which shows we are inescapably part of the larger societies in which we live, seems to me an absolute impoverishment.

It's not only that we have invented a world in which we appear as normalized female, taxpaying, solid citizens. My personal cohort has reinvented itself as home-owning middle-aged and elderly lesbians, drafters of Wills and Powers of Attorney, far more concerned about matters of personal health than overthrowing patriarchy in the near future. Not that we aren't still politically active, but we're more likely to circulate an on-line petition and send a cheque than to take to the streets, except for the annual Pride Parade, which is more of a fun celebration than a political action.

Can we keep the social inclusion but still function as radical agents of change? Can we enjoy our relatively pleasant lives and still work to end patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other social injustices? Of course we can. If simply living as out lesbians no longer signifies a challenge to patriarchy, then we can find or create other ways. We are, will be, and have always been radical not because of who we are but because of what we do.

The wheel turns. Meaning is temporary and contingent on the conditions that ground it. We can't keep saying everything was perfect for 2 months in 1974 and it's been downhill ever since. Nor can we let folks get away with that stunning canard that lesbian feminists were anti-sex. My goddess, if there was anything we were doing it was cramming in as much sex as we could. The liberation of female sexuality was one of the central features of radical feminist theory and practice. (No wonder we're so tired now.)

I do think we settled for too little. I don't buy the argument that we've somehow changed the fundamental meaning of marriage or queered heterosexuality by being incorporated into the dominant models. There must be something different between a retreat to an outmoded style of radical lesbian feminism and a capitulation to lesbian invisibility under the queer umbrella. I do expect that sooner or later, the little pockets of lesbian and queer-women's organizing going on all over the world will burst into the public consciousness in new ways that will allow us to make common cause when we in fact have common cause, or want to build common cause. And I expect the political reconfigurations will be accompanied by cultural reinvigorations that will somehow challenge and circumvent corporate control over cultural production. Certainly, the on-line universe will be part of the action. I hope the resurgent politics will come with a resurgence of personal, in-the-flesh forms of communication that can use social media without being restricted to them.

An inconclusive conclusion, then, will have to do me for now. To go from criminality, stigma and incarceration to unremarkable social normality in one generation isn't nothing. It's a huge achievement that we should be proud of, that wasn't handed to us, that we worked hard for. At the same time, inclusion isn't everything. It's not evenly distributed and it's not permanent, and we forget at our peril that it could be taken away even from the most privileged of us at any time. And all it does, even when it's fully effective, is to put us roughly on the same level as other women of our class, ethnicity, and circumstances. Given the level of climate change, economic breakdown, and gross injustice that characterizes our times, the lesbian who doesn't reinvent the world is likely to find herself hanging on by her nails to a pretty grim terrain.

Afterword

This has been the single hardest piece I've ever written. I've had a debilitating struggle to reconcile my wildly different feelings about the current lesbian scene and my own place in it. No matter how I frame the issues, part of me agrees and part of me disagrees. Maybe a state of radical confusion actually makes the most sense.

I don't think we can understand our own (or any) historical moment if we only focus in tightly on that moment. A longer and wider view gives a fuller, richer picture. After the revolutionary promise of the 1930s, the world witnessed ghastly slaughters and soul-destroying conformity before the revolutionary movements of the 1960s. Maybe most cultural epochs are simultaneously the best and the worst of times. I do feel a crazy, unfounded optimism about the future. If I live long enough, who knows what amazing liberatory mutations the dykes may unleash on an unsuspecting world?

* I've never been able to wean myself off the traditional spelling of the word "woman." Womban, wommon, and other versions have always made me laugh, not in a good way. So I use the standard version throughout.

About the Author

I did the classic Women's Liberation Movement arc from unexamined hetero to thoughtful bi to, upon falling madly in love 27 years ago with my current partner, considering myself a lesbian because I live a "lesbian life," which used to be a meaningful concept. I left the US in 1967. I've been involved in radical feminist politics since 1971 or thereabouts, originally in England, and in Victoria since I moved here in 1981. I was involved with the Everywomans Books collective from 1982 until its closure in 1997. I was the staffperson for the Victoria Status of Women Action Group 1986-1989. I taught Women's Studies1990-2004 at UVic, where I co-taught the first Lesbian Studies course with my now-deceased colleague and friend, Michele Pujol.


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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  • 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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