Lily's Lavender Library

A college students deep dive into the gay part of the library 

[lilyslavenderlibrary]

Cisness, in contrast, has no material basis of its own, only the one it attains via its imbrication in sexual difference. This may sound counterintuitive, because the ideology’s relation to the physical structure of our bodies produces the impression of a real basis in chromosome, flesh, follicle, hormone, muscle, and organ. But consider the following concrete, material example: a vagina is a structure composed of skin, mucous membrane, muscle, and other tissues. Its functions are real, are important, and require attention. Further, the possessor’s relation to this structure is so laden with ideology that she might feel, even on the highly affecting level of sensation and bodily self-awareness, that this structure actually grounds her sex identity. In the negative, she may experience her vagina, for example, as the source of her body’s vulnerability to rape. But we know that vaginas, in themselves, are no more vulnerable to or inviting of sexual assault than other bodily structures that can be penetrated. We know this because people without vaginas are also vulnerable to rape and disproportionately so, according to certain group-forming attributes. Transwomen, racialized people, gay men whose gender expression communicates (or is interpreted as) effeminacy, incarcerated people, enslaved people, workers in a subordinate labor position, children, disabled people, people who are economically precarious and/or experiencing homelessness, sex workers, gender-nonconforming and trans masculine people whose trans status is known or has been revealed: all of these populations are disproportionately vulnerable to rape and are not categorically defined by having vaginas. What is the quality that explains this disproportionate vulnerability across these vastly disparate social categories among people with all forms of genitals and combinations of secondary sexual characteristics? The answer to this question is the rapist’s perception of their victim as actually, properly, or potentially socially positioned as powerless. This social positioning is then reinforced in its relation to the feminine through the use of the tactic of sexual assault with its historically produced relation to the feminine. That is to say, the production of disproportionate vulnerability to assault is the rapist’s enforcement and reproduction of the ideology of sexual difference. This social positioning has defined the category woman historically, but its effects have never been limited to those assigned female at birth, to those who identify as women, or even to those socially recognized as women.

Emma Heaney, "Introduction: Sexual Difference Without Cisness" Feminism Against Cisness, pg 11-12.

[gatheringbones]

[“… the American construction of modern heterosexuality was inseparable from white-supremacist gender norms. White male social reformers, who possessed far greater power and authority than civil rights and feminist activists, defined healthy heterosexual marriage in their own image and according to their own interests. Marital rape may have been discouraged by white male marriage experts of the twentieth century, but their emphasis on men’s entitlement to women’s emotional and reproductive labor, and women’s ostensibly innate vulnerability, virtue, and tendency toward self-sacrifice, ensured that modern heterosexuality served the interests of white supremacy. As the Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers illuminates, whites treated Black people with such dehumanizing, “ungendering” brutality during slavery and its aftermath that whites effectively barred Black men from the kind of patriarchal power that constituted masculinity and Black women from the kind of purity and fragility that constituted femininity. Slavery and anti-Black racism positioned Black people outside the boundaries of a white gender binary, as threats not only to white ideas about normative masculinity and femininity but also to white men and women’s unity with each other. Illustrating the inseparability of modern heterosexuality and white supremacy, many early white feminists based their arguments for nonviolent marriage and women’s rights on the claim that bringing white women closer to equality with their husbands would ensure that white people remained a united front against Black civil rights. If white men forged egalitarian, companionate bonds with white women, they argued, then white women would offer race loyalty in return.

In sum, eugenicists, sexologists, and social reformers of the early twentieth century ushered in three concepts that would become enduring features of the heterosexual-repair industry. First, they exposed the ubiquity of violence and mutual loathing in heterosexual relationships but also reassured their readers that these were natural impulses in need of simple management. Rape could be curtailed by sexual and anatomical education. Mutual disgust could be diminished by better hygiene and beautification of the body. Communication between the sexes could be improved if couples read and discussed, together, the right marital literature written by knowledgeable guides. Second, they secured their own role and the role of expert white professionals more generally—physicians, sexologists, and later, psychologists—in defining modern heterosexuality and repairing heterosexual problems. By naming men’s and women’s ignorance of the unique temperament and anatomy of the opposite sex as the source of straight couples’ problems—rather than, say, patriarchy and white supremacy—early promoters of modern heteroromance introduced self-help projects, guided by marriage experts, as the new normal. Heterosexual desire and mutual likability did not come naturally, they acknowledged, but could be cultivated with the proper tools. Last, they accepted the premise that women and men often found each other’s bodies undesirable and hence advocated for the consumption of beauty products that help stimulate opposite-sex desire. Laying the foundation for the midcentury explosion of beauty interventions targeted to women attempting to appear “fresh” and “lovely” for their husbands while laboring at home, eugenicist advocates for hygienic and modern marriage offered soaps, perfumes, makeup, douching, and other consumer goods as keys to happy heterosexuality. They made explicit that heterosexual marriage was no longer a labor contract in which both parties showed up “as is” but an ongoing affective project requiring access to precise tools and information that would build mutual affection.

Each of these interventions set the stage for straight culture’s emergence as the romantic arm of misogyny, wherein the delicate coexistence of hate and love, the slap and the kiss, would come to represent the heteroerotic. But this era also initiated straight culture as a gendered mode of consumption in which the purchase of beauty products and relationship advice were vital to maintaining this delicate balance.”]

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

[gatheringbones]

judy grahn, from another mother tongue: gay words, gay worlds, 1984

[lilyslavenderlibrary]

The introduction to the first issue of The Ladder, a magazine founded by the first lesbian organization in the United States. Oct. 1956.

[lilyslavenderlibrary]

Today, we generally agree that straight people are those who “like” the other sex. This attraction is often understood to include mutual desire for intimate, romantic, love-based connection. These are such basic, defining features of contemporary heterosexuality that it can be tempting to imagine mutual desire and likability as the long-standing forces that have driven most heterosexual coupling. But historical evidence dispels us of this fantasy . . . Across time and place, most forms of heterosexual coupling have been organized around men’s ownership of women (their bodies, their work, their children) rather than their attraction to, or interest in, women. Women were men’s property, slaves, and laborers, and women produced heirs to whom men could pass on their lineage and possessions. Women were the people with whom men had procreative sex, and women of privilege (wealthy women, white women, women of high status) were sometimes perceived as delicate and virtuous, in need of men’s protection and seduction (as in medieval and Victorian traditions of courtly and chivalrous love). But in none of these arrangements was “liking” women, or regarding them as men’s most logical and beloved companions, a requirement in the way that contemporary straight culture now presumes—or at least strives. Liking women was hardly understood to be a fixed or defining feature of one’s identity or “sexual orientation.”

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

[thepuppyclub]

"Thus it is our historical task, and only ours, to define what we call oppression in materialist terms, to make it evident that women are a class, which is to say that the category “woman” as well as the category “man” are political and economic categories not eternal ones. Our fight aims to suppress men as a class, not through a genocidal, but a political struggle. Once the class “men” disappears, “women” as a class will disappear as well, for there are no slaves without masters. Our first task, it seems, is to always thoroughly dissociate “women”(the class within which we fight) and “woman,” the myth. For “woman” does not exist for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while “women” is the product of a social relationship. We felt this strongly when everywhere we refused to be called a “woman’s liberation movement.” Furthermore, we have to destroy the myth inside and outside ourselves. “Woman” is not each one of us, but the political and ideological formation which negates “women” (the product of a relation of exploitation). “Woman” is there to confuse us, to hide the reality “women.” In order to be aware of being a class and to become a class we first have to kill the myth of “woman” including its most seductive aspects (I think about Virginia Woolf when she said the first task of a woman writer is to kill “the angel in the house”). But to become a class we do not have to suppress our individual selves, and since no individual can be reduced to her/his oppression we are also confronted with the historical necessity of constituting ourselves as the individual subjects of our history as well. I believe this is the reason why all these attempts at “new” definitions of woman are blossoming now. What is at stake (and of course not only for women) is an individual definition as well as a class definition. For once one has acknowledged oppression, one needs to know and experience the fact that one can constitute oneself as a subject (as opposed to as object of oppression), that one can become someone in spite of oppression, that one has one’s own identity. There is no possible fight for someone deprived of an identity, no internal motivation for fighting, since, although I can fight only with others, first I fight for myself."

-- Monique WITTIG, "One is not born a woman" (1981).

[beaft]

“How to explain that “trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some - but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others it doesn’t? …How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK - desirable, even - whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?”

— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

[lilyslavenderlibrary]

Judith Butler's particular de-essentializing strategy helps pose the problem in an acute form. "Woman," in her view, is something one can never fully be, because there are no natural women. The illusion of a natural binarism of gender categories into "woman" and "man" is the result of repetitive (and panicked) performances of a unity between body, gender, and (heterosexual) desire. One consequence of this view is that neither femininity nor masculinity naturally belong to a particular sex. The illusion that femininity belongs to women in a way masculinity does not is simply the result of the compulsoriness of that particular gender performance for women. But it is open to women to perform otherwise. The "mannish" lesbian is, on this reading, neither imitating a man (because there is no real or natural man to imitate) nor necessarily being unwomanly. Butler notes that "in acting in a masculine way, she changes the very meaning of what it is to be a woman; indeed, she expands the meaning of what it means to be a woman to include a cultural possibility that it previously excluded."

The gender closet: lesbian disappearance under the sign "women." by Chesire Calhoum.

[bananapeppers]

undated Lesbian Avengers t-shirt at Wearing Gay History

front: “THE LESBIAN AVENGERS · SAN FRANCISCO · IT’S TIME FOR A FIERCE LESBIAN MOVEMENT · WE RECRUIT.”

back: “WE ARE NOT WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE, WE ARE THE APOCALYPSE · We will be your dream and their nightmare”

[henryclervals]

read gregory woods’ interpretation of 1984 last week and i literally haven’t stopped thinking of it since

[lgbtbooklr-deactivated20230404]

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there

Naomi Alderman, The Power (via lgbtbooklr)

[rohie-deactivated20191102]

“The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.

A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite is always voracious: her hunger always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist. If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut. If she wants emotional care-taking, she is a high-maintenance bitch or, worse, an “attention whore”: an amalgam of sex-hunger and care-hunger, greedy not only to be fucked and paid but, most unforgivably of all, to be noticed.”

— Hunger Makes Me, Jess Zimmerman

[blobdylan]

[outweek30]

Political cartoon by Daniel Sotomayor, OutWeek Magazine No. 3, July 10, 1989, p. 6.

Bowers v. Hardwick was a 1986 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional to ban consensual “sodomy,” leaving sexually active LGBT people vulnerable to criminal charges in many states. Hardwick wasn’t overturned until Lawrence v. Texas was decided in 2003.

[eroscestlavie]

Gran Fury, All People With Aids Are Innocent, 1988 

[enoughtohold]

The culmination of all this came in 1990, when as part of a generally controversial immigration bill, both houses accepted without a formal vote an amendment that completely repealed one of the most explicitly anti-gay provisions in American law: the amendment adopted in 1952, and strengthened in 1965, that prohibited any gay men or lesbians from coming to America as either permanent residents or even as tourists. In fact, the history of the gay and lesbian immigration exclusion is a good example both of how far we have come in the fight against prejudice and how far we have yet to go. An anti-gay provision was put into the immigration law in 1952, but unwilling to use indecorous language, the authors of that provision used the phrase “psychopathic personality” to designate homosexuals for exclusionary purposes. In 1965, fearful that the liberal Warren Court might find that language constitutionally inaccurate as a basis for excluding lesbians and gay men, the Johnson administration and the very liberal Congress, elected in 1964, collaborated to tighten the language, lest any lesbians or gay people slipped through the net. They added the phrase “sexual deviation.” The 1965 immigration law was generally regarded as a liberal one, and it was supported by all of the liberal organizations in America. The fact that this liberalization of immigration law included a tightening of the anti-gay and lesbian provision did not appear to make much difference to its supporters. A search of the appropriate records shows that at no point in the process was there any articulated opposition to including that effort to further strengthen the homophobic content of the immigration law. Twenty-five years later, when Congress next revised the illegal immigration law, an amendment that I offered at the House Judiciary Committee — to strike this anti-gay and lesbian language entirely from the law — was accepted with equally little controversy and was included in the House/Senate compromise version enacted at the end of that session. Obviously there were people in Congress at the time who vigorously opposed this repeal, but just as in 1965 when those who supported gay and lesbian rights felt that they lacked the political context in which to raise the issue, it was the bigots in 1990 who apparently felt there would be no point in trying to start a fight. Consequently, the section of the 1990 law repealing this enactment of prejudice passed as easily as the original enactment had twenty-five years earlier. At the same time, the 1990 bill repealed the provision of the law that had been successfully inserted by Senator Jesse Helms in 1986, which required that all people with HIV infections be excluded from immigrating to this country. The effect of replacing this provision was to give the president the authority to make regulations regarding people with HIV in exactly the same manner as with any other disease. In 1991, when this had taken effect, the public health officials in the Bush administration recommended to the president that he use his authority to drop the restriction from the law. But he refused to do so. The recommendation of his public health officials was not enough to counter the political pressure from the right wing, which proved itself to be the greater power in setting public health policy within this administration. And so, the fight goes on.

Barney Frank, foreword to the 1992 edition of Positively Gay: New Approaches to Gay and Lesbian Life, as reprinted in the 3rd edition (2001).

(via enoughtohold)

[ancient-mystery]

Fragments of Sappho, circa 630 - 580 BC. Translated by Anne Carson.

Follow my instagram for more: instagram.com/ancient_archives 

[lilyslavenderlibrary]

Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself. 

-Susan Stryker, in My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounx: Performing Transgender Rage. (1994)