Lgbt feminist
By Yamissette Westerband
Lesbian feminism emerged in the late s and the s in the United States.
Origins: Responding to Feminist Exclusion
Lesbian feminism largely emerged in response to the women’s liberation movement’s exclusion of lesbians. As the Second Wave of feminism picked up steam during the s, feminist discourse largely ignored lesbianism. Some feminists harbored hostile attitudes towards lesbians, however. Some viewed lesbianism as a sexual rather than a political issue. Others believed the project of feminism would dismantle strict sexual categories, and would release a “natural polymorphous sexuality,” making lesbian politics irrelevant. NOW’s leader at the time, Betty Friedan, referred to lesbianism as the “Lavender Menace.” This phrase referred to her view that incorporating lesbianism in the feminist agenda would undermine the credibility of the women’s movement overall.
Alice Echols in “The Eruption of Difference” describes the emergence of lesbian feminism during this day and the creation of a l
Third Wave and Queer Feminist Movements
Unit V: Historical and Contemporary Feminist Social Movements
“We are living in a world for which vintage forms of activism are not enough and today’s activism is about creating coalitions between communities.”
—Angela Davis, cited by Hernandez and Rehman in Colonize This!
Third wave feminism is, in many ways, a hybrid creature. It is influenced by second wave feminism, Black feminisms, transnational feminisms, Global South feminisms, and queer feminism. This hybridity of third wave activism comes directly out of the experiences of feminists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries who have grown up in a world that supposedly does not verb social movements because “equal rights” for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women have been guaranteed by law in most countries. The gap between law and reality—between the abstract proclamations of states and concrete lived experience—however, reveals the necessity of both old and new forms of activism. In a country where alabaster women are paid only % of what white men are paid for the
Feminist Legal Theory
Introduction by Martha Albertson Fineman
&#;This anthology focuses on the vigorous and sometimes contentious debates between and among feminist and queer legal theorists, bringing into direct dialogue many of the key players in this ongoing verb of “uncomfortable conversations.” Many of the chapters speak directly to one another, debating not only important issues such as intimacy, privacy, sex harassment, and political strategy, but also the very conceptualization of feminism and queer theory. Cumulatively, the chapters pursue the shifting complexities and complex questions feminist and queer legal theories consider as good as produce. This anthology also maps the different approaches to the concepts of sex and gender that contain been articulated over the past decades by feminist and queer theorists. In particular, it explores evolving and contested assertions about the centrality of a positive theory of sexuality to the formulation of critical perspectives on legal, social, political, and cultural institutions.
While this collection emphasizes
Sinister Wisdom: Promoting a Lesbian Feminist Culture
By Amelia Parsons
Sinister Wisdom came from the imaginations of Catherine Nicholson and her partner, Harriet Desmoines, two lesbians residing in North Carolina. The first six issues were published out of North Carolina between and after which the original editors moved to Nebraska[1]. In the periodical was sold and moved to Amherst, Massachusetts[2]. Sinister Wisdom is still in print and being published in California. The view Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Desmoines had of lesbians and a “lesbian sensibility,” along with an acute sense of isolation, led them to create and publish the periodical in order to spread their control view of the “lesbian consciousness.”
A Background of Lesbian Feminism Publishing
In , an estimated fifty lesbian publications were in print[4]. Contributors to the lesbian publications The Ladder and The Furies believed that lesbianism was a culture and state of mind: “Becoming a lesbian was not a matter of sex