All Over the Map
I could recommend Erica Rutherford based solely for the book’s wealth of vibrant photos. However, it’s the story of Rutherford’s life and the analysis of her works that make the book so worthwhile. I suspect …
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The French Evolution of Identities
As far as I know, “lesbienne” first appears in print with its current denotation in neurologist Jules Cotard’s Études médicales (1870). He was part of a wave of European neuropsychiatrists obsessed with the “sexual perversions,” including “sexual inversion.” Historian Tamara Chaplin opens Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France with this 19th-century context for the emergence of lesbian identity. However, her rich documentation of Belle-Époque dance halls and women’s cabarets brings to life a world of lesbians who bypassed the shaming pathologization of homosexuality.
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First to Riot: The Girls of Los Guilucos
The Los Guilucos incident came amid a national wave of prison riots. Twenty-five major inmate uprisings had taken place in the previous year at institutions across the nation. After a massive disturbance involving more than 2,000 men incarcerated at the Southern Michigan Prison, Warden Julian Frisbie told the press that homosexuality was responsible for 98 percent of disciplinary problems.
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Picturing Kindred Spirits
AS QUEER PEOPLE, we seldom learn our community’s history through the same channels as our straight siblings. Instead, we must seek it out ourselves and either rely on published histories or piece together our own research. Finding LGBT historical figures before the mid-20th century who were not white, cisgender, or bestowed with significant privilege is especially difficult. Queer historical figures often fall into two categories: those who had the safety or social cachet to tell their own stories, or those whose lives were recorded only because they were caught, institutionalized, or sensationalized. More Butch Heroes, Ria Brodell’s sequel to their 2018 book Butch Heroes, uncovers and memorializes historical gender-nonconforming figures, affirming that queer and trans lives today are not new but the continuation of a once-hidden legacy.
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Treacherous Intersections
Organized in six parts, Black Panther Woman contains many revelations. Besides describing Huggins’s family background, the first part details her rejection of her mother’s Old Testament Christianity and the early self-protective thought practices she developed to cope with her father’s physically abusive behavior.
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A Graphic Plan to Beat Late Capitalism
In Spent, her fifth semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Bechdel has a successful TV series based on her previous graphic novel Death and Taxidermy, which is streaming on Schmamazon (after Amazon, of course).
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The First Lesbian Image-Makers
THE EMERGENCE of both the lesbian and the woman artist as recognizable demographics in 19th-century Europe and the United States was the product of revolutionary developments in the realms of civil rights and image-making. The ascent of the first feminist movements, the opening of art academies to women, and the democratization of photography converged to create new conditions of possibility.
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Reclaiming Canadian Lesbian Art
The Impressionist painter Florence Carlyle (1864–1923) is the first homosexual artist on record in Canadian history. Her œuvre reveals an unrelenting interest in the erotic and emotional lives of women, especially of her lover Judith Hastings. Take, for instance, The Threshold of 1912 (Figure 1), a chef-d’œuvre of Canadian Impressionism.
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A ‘Quantum Biography’ of Audre Lorde
A photograph of Lorde in front of a blackboard on which is written “Women are powerful and dangerous” has become a familiar, widely shared image. In response to attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and women’s and LGBT rights, the words of the self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” have lately gone viral, turning her into an online superstar.
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A Pioneer’s Progress
The crises faced by Cather’s characters seem remarkably similar to those of our own times. If all you know of her work is the novels you read in high school, these essays might motivate you to read the rest of her œuvre. Rereading her novels, I’m struck by how relevant they remain, and how women like Lena, Ántonia, Thea, Lucy, and Alexandra face many of the same struggles as do women today.
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