The mermaid is a hybrid being, a product of human imagination that has dual potentiality; she can... more The mermaid is a hybrid being, a product of human imagination that has dual potentiality; she can either uphold or challenge heteropatriarchal and able-bodied norms. She also has the potential to highlight human relations with more-thanhuman life. This paper explores the process of becoming mermaid in four performances that reinforce and/or challenge normate embodiment to varying degrees. One, at Weeki Wachee Springs, remains firmly tied to normate white heteropatriarchal values. Another, the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, is a multivalent performance that both affirms and challenges dominant norms of embodiment. The others, solo performances by Amber DiPietra and Hanna Cormick, highlight the humanity of disabled people and the kinship among human animals and our morethan-human kin. The mermaid is a hybrid being, a product of human imagination that has dual potentiality; she can either uphold or challenge heteropatriarchal norms and what Rosemarie Garland Thomson describes as the normate (1996, 8). The mermaid refuses the human/nonhuman binary. This refusal can cleave two ways. It has the potential to reinforce normate settler colonial heteropatriarchal views of humanity and animality; however, it can also provide Becoming Mermaid: Exploring Human and More-Than-Human Relation...
This article explores the interweaving of successes and failures
at trans-inclusive women’s festi... more This article explores the interweaving of successes and failures at trans-inclusive women’s festivals. I analyze conflicts that occurred at the Mystical Womxn’s Magic Festival and the Ohio Lesbian Festival. In the process, I demonstrate that working across racial and gender divides in these spaces is possible but only if we understand that solidarity is processual and relational but also, quite simply, hard work. This labor requires acknowledging that failures are an integral part of the praxis of forging alliances. By failures, I am primarily referring to moments of insensitivity, casual macroaggressions, lack of deep listening, and other common occurrences of harm. Ultimately, I argue that solidarity is a journey not an end point and that a crucial aspect of the journey is grappling with collective and personal failures along the way.
This article explores a small city's response to the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017... more This article explores a small city's response to the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017. Love, Resilience, Action Ypsilanti (LRAY) focused on community-building and the social justice history of Ypsilanti, Michigan to create a queer-affirming feminist event that intentionally referenced and diverged from national Women's Marches. In exploring intersectional social justice organising by a queer-dominated feminist group, I argue that organisers' emphasis on communal care in combination with direct action reflected an affinity-based understanding of community characteristic of this particular small progressive rustbelt city. This example demonstrates the importance of including small cities in urban LGBTQ research.
This article focuses on one of the most controversial and longest lasting lesbian feminist events... more This article focuses on one of the most controversial and longest lasting lesbian feminist events, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest), frequently considered to be the iconic radical lesbian feminist holdout against social shifts in conversations about gender. I explore negotiations and conflicts about gender and sexuality that occurred at MichFest, especially organizing by a group calling themselves Transgender Women Belong Here. By examining the complexity of feminist and queer ideas present at MichFest in its final decade I argue that even in a site identified with a rigid understanding of lesbian feminist separatism, feminism remained complex and contested well into the 21st century.
In this mosaic, three of us assemble writings about an international arts-based research symposiu... more In this mosaic, three of us assemble writings about an international arts-based research symposium, Disability/Culture: New Grounds (The University of Michigan Initiative on Disability Studies Conference, February 2015).
This introduction explores three key themes that emerge in the
contributions to this issue about ... more This introduction explores three key themes that emerge in the contributions to this issue about Lesbian Organizations and Organizing: the difficulty of defining who is included and excluded in lesbian organizing, the role of community-building and maintenance, and the importance of history in understanding current organizing.
The mermaid is a hybrid being, a product of human imagination that has dual potentiality; she can... more The mermaid is a hybrid being, a product of human imagination that has dual potentiality; she can either uphold or challenge heteropatriarchal and able-bodied norms. She also has the potential to highlight human relations with more-thanhuman life. This paper explores the process of becoming mermaid in four performances that reinforce and/or challenge normate embodiment to varying degrees. One, at Weeki Wachee Springs, remains firmly tied to normate white heteropatriarchal values. Another, the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, is a multivalent performance that both affirms and challenges dominant norms of embodiment. The others, solo performances by Amber DiPietra and Hanna Cormick, highlight the humanity of disabled people and the kinship among human animals and our morethan-human kin. The mermaid is a hybrid being, a product of human imagination that has dual potentiality; she can either uphold or challenge heteropatriarchal norms and what Rosemarie Garland Thomson describes as the normate (1996, 8). The mermaid refuses the human/nonhuman binary. This refusal can cleave two ways. It has the potential to reinforce normate settler colonial heteropatriarchal views of humanity and animality; however, it can also provide Becoming Mermaid: Exploring Human and More-Than-Human Relation...
This article explores the interweaving of successes and failures
at trans-inclusive women’s festi... more This article explores the interweaving of successes and failures at trans-inclusive women’s festivals. I analyze conflicts that occurred at the Mystical Womxn’s Magic Festival and the Ohio Lesbian Festival. In the process, I demonstrate that working across racial and gender divides in these spaces is possible but only if we understand that solidarity is processual and relational but also, quite simply, hard work. This labor requires acknowledging that failures are an integral part of the praxis of forging alliances. By failures, I am primarily referring to moments of insensitivity, casual macroaggressions, lack of deep listening, and other common occurrences of harm. Ultimately, I argue that solidarity is a journey not an end point and that a crucial aspect of the journey is grappling with collective and personal failures along the way.
This article explores a small city's response to the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017... more This article explores a small city's response to the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017. Love, Resilience, Action Ypsilanti (LRAY) focused on community-building and the social justice history of Ypsilanti, Michigan to create a queer-affirming feminist event that intentionally referenced and diverged from national Women's Marches. In exploring intersectional social justice organising by a queer-dominated feminist group, I argue that organisers' emphasis on communal care in combination with direct action reflected an affinity-based understanding of community characteristic of this particular small progressive rustbelt city. This example demonstrates the importance of including small cities in urban LGBTQ research.
This article focuses on one of the most controversial and longest lasting lesbian feminist events... more This article focuses on one of the most controversial and longest lasting lesbian feminist events, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest), frequently considered to be the iconic radical lesbian feminist holdout against social shifts in conversations about gender. I explore negotiations and conflicts about gender and sexuality that occurred at MichFest, especially organizing by a group calling themselves Transgender Women Belong Here. By examining the complexity of feminist and queer ideas present at MichFest in its final decade I argue that even in a site identified with a rigid understanding of lesbian feminist separatism, feminism remained complex and contested well into the 21st century.
In this mosaic, three of us assemble writings about an international arts-based research symposiu... more In this mosaic, three of us assemble writings about an international arts-based research symposium, Disability/Culture: New Grounds (The University of Michigan Initiative on Disability Studies Conference, February 2015).
This introduction explores three key themes that emerge in the
contributions to this issue about ... more This introduction explores three key themes that emerge in the contributions to this issue about Lesbian Organizations and Organizing: the difficulty of defining who is included and excluded in lesbian organizing, the role of community-building and maintenance, and the importance of history in understanding current organizing.
This book examines how women’s public demonstrations claim and transform public space. Focusing o... more This book examines how women’s public demonstrations claim and transform public space. Focusing on seven examples--Take Back the Night Marches, Dyke Marches, SlutWalks, Women in Black Vigils, CODEPINK direct actions, the March for Women’s Lives, and the Million Mom March--the book explores the ways that women use gender to physically and affective transform public space, through a process of “holding space” for each other. Marching Dykes, Liberated Sluts, and Concerned Mothers is organized into three sections addressing key foci of feminist public demonstration: sexuality, war and militarism, and citizenship norms and practices. Each section includes multiple, related chapters along with an introduction providing a brief overview of the issue and contextual links between the chapters. Throughout, the analyses emphasize the utopic impulse of public demonstration.
AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, THE CALLS OF U.S. GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS FOR greater security measures an... more AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, THE CALLS OF U.S. GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS FOR greater security measures and retribution for the lives and resources lost during the attacks elicited a range of responses within the United States. Although many people were angry and fearful of additional attacks, others were frustrated with the retaliatory and often racist rhetoric calling for war and for greater domestic surveillance, and dismayed that the ongoing neoliberal reduction of public space had found a new justification. (1) Many from this latter constituency took to the streets in protest of the invasion of Afghanistan, the dwindling civil liberties at home, the proposed (and later realized) military offensive against Iraq, and the disaster capitalism accompanying these invasions. In the United States and worldwide, the demonstrations reached their peak immediately before and just after the United States invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. Much of the energy of the U.S. antiwar movement dissipated after the 2004 presidential election, which reinstated the administration that led the country into an always contested and increasingly unpopular war. This article considers the antiwar movement in Santa Barbara, California, initiated during the buildup to the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a case study for exploring the use and creation of public spaces by antiwar activists, the different visions of activism and social life within the movement, and the impact of relationships to institutional power on the interactions between individuals and dissenting groups. This analysis occurs at the edges of dominant studies of social movements, as it addresses public space and the geographical dimensions of social activism. (2) Emphasizing space has numerous merits, including the possibility to focus on the interactions among different groups of people during public demonstrations. Although we recognize that most, if not all, public demonstrations, including those discussed in this article, are part of broader social movements, we emphasize spatial and power dynamics rather than political opportunities, collective identities, or resource mobilization in order to address aspects of social movements that are often undertheorized in existing literature. (3) In particular, we discuss the utilization, theorization, and politicization of space by diverse constituencies in Santa Barbara protests against the latest U.S.-Iraq war. Moving beyond the usual state-versus-dissenter binary, this article deconstructs the unitary categories of "citizen" and "dissenter," discussing the ways in which different groups make distinct claims and have diverse imaginaries concerning the use of space. At the same time that public protest has been incorporated into the liberal state and routinized through the permit process, it has also become less effective at accommodating more radical positions against the war and the economic and security crises brought on by corporate globalization (Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005). Additionally, the demographics and history of Santa Barbara, including the presence of a large research university, largely predetermined the level of cross-racial and cross-class political collaboration that took place. Therefore, we use Jesse Mumm's (2008) concept of "intimate segregation" to highlight the ways in which marginalized people (particularly people organizing via queer, racial and ethnic, gender, and feminist identities), through creative organizing strategies and reappropriation of public space, articulate and enact forms of dissident citizenship distinct from more mainstream, and often explicitly patriotic, forms of protest. Mumm emphasizes how people occupy space differently and come to understand their place. In his example of gentrification in a Chicago neighborhood, "white people begin to internalize [segregation] as they learn to police local spaces, social life, and neighborhood narratives in order to maximize their privilege" (Ibid. …
The article explores how two dyke marches, Oakland's Sistahs Steppin&amp... more The article explores how two dyke marches, Oakland's Sistahs Steppin' in Pride: An East Bay Dyke March and Festival and the New York City Dyke March, enacted alternative models of social relationships. It compares the predominantly black Sistahs Steppin' in Pride's reaffirmation of connections among queer women with the intentional performance of deviance by a white-dominated group in New York
Just before 5:30 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, five women gathered outside the central Man... more Just before 5:30 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, five women gathered outside the central Manhattan Public Library where Forty-First Street meets Fifth Avenue. All wore black, some head to toe, some with bare shoulders and arms. They formed a silent line facing rush hour pedestrian and automobile traffic holding a large black banner reading, "Women in Black Against War." At one edge of the small group a woman handed fliers to passersby. The first lines of the handout asserted, "Women in Black New York stand in silent vigil to protest war, rape as a tool of war, ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses all over the world. We are silent because mere words cannot express the tragedy that wars and hatred bring. We refuse to add to the cacophony of empty statements that are spoken with the best intentions yet may be erased or go unheard under the sound of a passing ambulance or a bomb exploding nearby." Over the course of an hour a few more women joined the group. At one point the group numbered eight-all participants over thirty, most over fifty, and all white save for one Black woman appearing to be in her fifties. Most onlookers were also silent. Some took fliers. Others nodded in agreement. Many kept walking, some giving the silent women a quick glimpse. One younger woman en route to somewhere else spontaneously stopped and stood for a few minutes. Passengers on commuter buses observed the vigil from the comfort of air-conditioned seats. A few people verbally asserted their support. Still fewer made disparaging comments.This small group transformed a tiny section of concrete in Manhattan's vast urban landscape into a site for quiet contemplation in the midst of late afternoon busyness. Their attire marked them as separate from locals in business suits and fashionable black, and tourists in summer tank tops and shorts. Together, their silence, immobility, and monotonie black outfits, along with the seriousness of their demeanor, lent a ritualistic tone to their presence. Despite the surrounding bustle, they stood, rupturing the ordinary chaos around them and demonstrating solidarity with people far away. From a wealthy city in a prosperous and militarily aggressive nation, they silently used their gazes and bodies to evoke faraway events and refuse complicity with war-making. By reworking the silence expected of them as women in a male-dominated society, they sought to transform socially prescribed passivity into an active refusal to support or engage in violence.I approach this Women in Black (hereafter WiB) vigil, and another I discuss below, from a feminist perspective that emphasizes the transgressive potential of public disidentification, in Jose Esteban Munoz's sense of the term, with patriarchal expectations of women. For Munoz, disidentification inhabits something differently, in ways that maximize the potential for reworking toxic ideals, such as those that see politics as masculine and women as passive supporters of war-making (Munoz 1999). WiB s strategic deployment of silence demonstrates their astute analysis of gendered spatial conventions and their awareness of the limits of loud, often angry chanting to demonstrate a political position. Given the gravity of the situations they vigil to remember and contest, these public enactments are necessarily limited; nonetheless their limitations do not obliterate thenpossibility for intervention. On the contrary, their public performance of their solidaristic feelings demonstrates the shared humanity of participants and those suffering and dying during war and occupation.Using theoretical approaches to solidarity from Sandra Lee Bartky, Jodi Dean, Carol Gould, and Chandra Mohanty, this essay explores how WiB groups in the United States and United Kingdom express, in Barkty s terms, their "feeling-with" others, especially other women, experiencing war and occupation. In exploring one type of feeling-with, Bartky explains that "emotional infection as a builder of solidarity is promiscuous; its utility rests precisely in its capacity to unite feeling persons from a very wide spectrum of social locations" (2002,76). …
In this paper I discuss the rhetoric about family utilised by the advocates of California's ‘... more In this paper I discuss the rhetoric about family utilised by the advocates of California's ‘Protection of Marriage Initiative,’ Proposition 22, which appeared on the March 2000 primary election ballot. The viability of definitions of rights and family that presuppose heterosexuality used in this proposition show the connection between religion and politics in the United States. I argue here that the heterosexist belief that creates such laws also establishes heterosexist subjects who act upon such belief. In fact, heterosexist subjectivity is required in order for such legal initiatives to be successful.
ABSTRACT This introduction explores three key themes that emerge in the contributions to this iss... more ABSTRACT This introduction explores three key themes that emerge in the contributions to this issue about Lesbian Organizations and Organizing: the difficulty of defining who is included and excluded in lesbian organizing, the role of community-building and maintenance, and the importance of history in understanding current organizing.
This article focuses on one of the most controversial and longest lasting lesbian feminist events... more This article focuses on one of the most controversial and longest lasting lesbian feminist events, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest), frequently considered to be the iconic radical lesbian feminist holdout against social shifts in conversations about gender. I explore negotiations and conflicts about gender and sexuality that occurred at MichFest, especially organizing by a group calling themselves Transgender Women Belong Here. By examining the complexity of feminist and queer ideas present at MichFest in its final decade I argue that even in a site identified with a rigid understanding of lesbian feminist separatism, feminism remained complex and contested well into the 21st century.
The Strip was fueled by outcity money. It was where people from the ‘burbs came to feel decadent.... more The Strip was fueled by outcity money. It was where people from the ‘burbs came to feel decadent. The thok-thok sound in the air was the copter limos that bussed people in from the ‘burbs to the rooftop of the Strip. From there they would descend staircases that led down inside the buildings. With enough money, you could get a taste of the city without ever setting foot on its streets. –Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring1
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at trans-inclusive women’s festivals. I analyze conflicts that
occurred at the Mystical Womxn’s Magic Festival and the Ohio
Lesbian Festival. In the process, I demonstrate that working
across racial and gender divides in these spaces is possible
but only if we understand that solidarity is processual and
relational but also, quite simply, hard work. This labor requires
acknowledging that failures are an integral part of the praxis
of forging alliances. By failures, I am primarily referring to
moments of insensitivity, casual macroaggressions, lack of deep
listening, and other common occurrences of harm. Ultimately,
I argue that solidarity is a journey not an end point and that
a crucial aspect of the journey is grappling with collective and
personal failures along the way.
contributions to this issue about Lesbian Organizations and
Organizing: the difficulty of defining who is included and
excluded in lesbian organizing, the role of community-building
and maintenance, and the importance of history in understanding current organizing.
at trans-inclusive women’s festivals. I analyze conflicts that
occurred at the Mystical Womxn’s Magic Festival and the Ohio
Lesbian Festival. In the process, I demonstrate that working
across racial and gender divides in these spaces is possible
but only if we understand that solidarity is processual and
relational but also, quite simply, hard work. This labor requires
acknowledging that failures are an integral part of the praxis
of forging alliances. By failures, I am primarily referring to
moments of insensitivity, casual macroaggressions, lack of deep
listening, and other common occurrences of harm. Ultimately,
I argue that solidarity is a journey not an end point and that
a crucial aspect of the journey is grappling with collective and
personal failures along the way.
contributions to this issue about Lesbian Organizations and
Organizing: the difficulty of defining who is included and
excluded in lesbian organizing, the role of community-building
and maintenance, and the importance of history in understanding current organizing.