A quick (yet somehow exhaustive) memory inventory of where I glimpsed feminism while growing up in Fargo in the 1970s and 1980s: My purple, clothbound Free to Be . . . You and Me book and accompanying record My Judy Blume books, especially Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Forever Mom’s subscription to Ms. The first Simon & Schuster edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, where I read about masturbation, lesbians, and abortion Mom’s
I’ve been reading and loving Marilyn Hacker’s poetry ever since her first book, Presentation Piece (1974), which means just about my entire adult life. I can’t think of another poet who combines so many opposites: she’s a swashbuckling formalist, a love poet who’s obsessed with politics, a Francophile (she’s lived in Paris for many years) whose continuous self-making is quintessentially American. Whether she’s writing about lesbian love or croissants in the shop down the block or
I just finished reading issue 1 of LIBER cover-to-cover. What a wonderful contribution to the conversation! Half of it seemed to have been written directly to me. Thank you! I was especially pleased & surprised to find Charis Caputo—who wrote one of my favorite reviews of Women’s Liberation!, the anthology I edited with Honor Moore—discussing in “Just Go” some of the same subjects I wrote about in my 1993 essay “Women Writers of the Beat
Priscilla & Elvis Herselvis, San Francisco, 1991. Photo by Phyllis Christopher. AT AGE TWENTY, estranged from my family back in Boston, I ran away to the desert with Kym, my opinionated and authoritative girlfriend who, being like five years older, seemed to know how to live. Kym, like me, had recently gone gay with gusto. I would follow her anywhere: Provincetown, Tucson, back to Provincetown, then back to Tucson, where I flipped a coin to
Faith Ringgold: American People, 2022. Exhibition view. New Museum, New York. Photo by Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum. © Faith Ringgold/ARS. One day, in the summer of 1972, Faith Ringgold visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. As an artist living in New York City, Ringgold had been making powerfully expressive figurative paintings about race in the United States for just under a decade —works like American People Series #20: Die (1967), a twelve-foot-long mural that depicts
Florence Rice Florence Rice had an abortion in the 1930s. I was sixteen when I had my daughter. They put her in my arms and she looked at me like, If you don’t want me, then I don’t want you either! You know, she just had that look, and I fell in love with her then. I began to dream about giving her the opportunities that I never had. Later on, I sort of went
The artist at her exhibition Tracey Emin “My Bed’”/JMW Turner at Turner Contemporary, 2017 2018. Photo by Stephen White; courtesy Turner Contemporary. My in-laws live in the north of England. Their modest semi-detached home is decorated tastefully with trinkets from their world travels, family photos, and a few replicas of notable artworks. I love the juxtaposition of viewpoints when I’m in their house. Inside, my eyes bounce from the Mondrian-inspired glass door, a miniature painting
DURING THE QUARANTINE phase of the pandemic, New York City was deathly quiet. In this silence, I began to discover my own genderqueerness, which manifested by way of playing with clothing, adjusting the height of my heels, and picking up nail art. Two years later, I’m still playing around with nail art, but the experiment has blossomed into a research-based art praxis connecting the history of nail art to queer theory and phenomenology. I’ve leaned
WOMEN AND HONOR: Some Notes on Lying, an immense work of fourteen pages by the lesbian poet and white feminist Adrienne Rich, begins with a clarification in parentheses at the top of page one: “These notes are concerned with relationships between and among women.” Drawn from remarks Rich made at a writers workshop in 1975, Women and Honor was published two years later by Pittsburgh-based press Motheroot (RIP). My copy from Cleis Press was given
At the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, Loretta Ross, Toni Bond, and others coined the evocative term reproductive justice to make clear that women have human rights, including the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have” safely, and with our government playing an affirmative role in manifesting these rights. Women (aka human beings with human rights) have the power to give
