The Personal Is Archival

Chapter 4 investigates Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell stories—via particular lesbians—of lesbian cultures past. The chapter’s turn to a lesbian filmmaker is an assertion that the preservationist impulse that accompanied much AIDS activism was genealogically connected to and politically aligned with feminist historiographical practice and body politics. The queer body politics of the AIDS crisis, politics rooted in the care of queer bodies, draws from the feminist politics and cinema originating in second-wave feminism. The chapter argues, then, that the lesbian body politics established in Hammer’s cinema, beginning in the 1970s, informed queer filmmakers’ activist approach to filmmaking during the AIDS crisis. Through readings of Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), Welcome to This House (2015), and Lover/Other (2006), this chapter argues that a distinctly lesbian-feminist aesthetic does not exist independently of a distinctly queer one.

1973: Memories of a Lesbian Body – Reading Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien through Deleuze and Guattari's le corps sans organes

This article reads Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (1973) through Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of le corps sans organes (the body without organs; BwO) and devenir-femme, devenir-animal (becoming-woman, becoming-animal) in order to illuminate both Wittig's formal and figurative concerns and her larger literary objectives. The dismembered and dismember- ing lesbian lovers that Wittig describes in Le Corps lesbien illustrate a process of becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-other that leads to a becoming-minoritarian and a renunciation of stratification and subjectification in the body without organs. This process is a celebration of dispersed, multiplicitous identity that exists in haecceities. Wittig's lesbian lovers undergo various becomings in the text to illustrate the multiplicity of possibilities as they move towards the BwO, and the text as a whole uses this BwO to resist and dismantle the hetero-patriarchal order.

PERFORMATIVE SUBJECTHOODS: LESBIAN REPRESENTATIONS IN SPLIT BRITCHES’ BELLE REPRIEVE

Emerging postmodern theories of gender and sexuality frame the terms in which society has understood these concepts in an evolutionary way throughout history. The last century has witnessed the radical changes carried out mainly by feminist and LGTB movements. On the other hand, the theater, a subversive space where it is possible to experiment with different forms of subjecthood and communication, has been the laboratory in which it has been attempted to give a plastic form to these new currents of thought. In this sense, the work of Split Britches is remarkable for the innovative ways of bringing the abject to the political forefront. From the lesbian body to drag representation, Belle Reprieve (1991) is developed under the queer premise to dismantle heteropatriarchal hegemony and the binary gender system.

On Being a Black Sexual Intellectual

This chapter provides a critical reading of Cheryl Clarke's second volume of poetry, Living as a Lesbian. Situating this text within the larger context of black women's poetry, Green argues that its erotic aesthetic works to critique the historic erasure of the black lesbian body in the discourse of African American life as it simultaneously pushes toward and away from theories of sexuality that limit and thus reduce black women’s linguistic economies to metaphors of sexual desire.

Fucking the Body, Rewriting the Text: Proto-Queer Embodiment through Textual Drag in Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (1973)

Inspired by Judith Butler's conceptualization of drag as ‘gender parody’, I develop the conceptual frame of ‘textual drag’ in order to define and examine the relationship between parody, satire and gender. I test this frame by reading two seminal feminist works, Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (The Lesbian Body) (1973). Both texts lend themselves particularly persuasively to analysis with this frame, as they each use parodic strategies to facilitate proto-queer satirical critiques of reductive gender norms. Orlando deploys an exaggerated nineteenth-century biographical style, which foregrounds the protagonist's gender fluidity and her developing critique of the norms and systems that surround her, while Le Corps lesbien rewrites canonical romance narratives from a lesbian perspective, challenging the heterosexism inherent in these narratives and providing new modes of thinking about gender, desire and sexual interaction.