Lady @Lady@cat.family

lesbianism today isn't what it was in the 80s, sure, but it's also not what it was in the 00s. i don't buy into the idea that words and movements can only travel the path of normalization in one direction. in fact i think it is precisely the fact that everybody thinks they know what lesbianism is which gives it radical potential for imagining something which isn't.

« Agamben explains, "For everyone a moment comes in which she or he must utter this I can, which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this 'I can' does not mean anything—yet it marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality." For countless feminists in the 1970s, lesbian existence was that formidable force shining a light on the way to a better future.

In bringing together many women of disparate backgrounds, both physically and virtually (in instances of written, audio cassette, or video cassette correspondence), feminist media not only offered representations of lesbian potentiality but facilitated experiences of it. There is a scene near the end of Joanna Russ's science fiction novel ‘The Female Man’ (1975) in which the protagonist Joanna describes acting on her fantasies about her friend Laur as tantamount to creating her own reality—"an impossible project." After kneeling behind Laur's chair as she reads, Joanna kisses Laur's neck and then over her ear and cheek to her mouth, knowing that at any second Laur will rebuke her and "the world will be itself again." Except Laur kisses her back. In this moment, reality for Joanna is torn wide open, and she tells the reader, "If this is possible, anything is possible." Such experiences of potentiality were incredibly common in the 1970s due to lesbian feminism's growing luster. In Russ's novel, Joanna and Laur eventually get stoned and make "awkward, self-conscious love," but "nothing that happened afterward," Joanna tells us, "was as important to me (in an unhuman way) as that first, awful wrench of the mind." » this could be us but you playin

honestly though i think this author is far too resigned to the death of radical lesbianism; do you really expect us to just keep coming up with new words forever

« Attempts in the 1970s to represent queer women's sexualities across media did more than simply ask their viewers to identify with their lesbian characters or celebrate the lives of particular identitarian subjects. While occasionally ontological, lesbian representation was also epistemological, interested not only in what "lesbian" was but also in thinking through what "lesbian" could do to divert and subvert patriarchy and heterosexism. More than mere negation, "becoming lesbian," for many feminists, precipitated "a welcome and joyful expansion of their sexual and emotional vocabularies." »

« I appreciate the aesthetic but that's all I got from this film. It was like one of those "moodboard" posts I see on tumblr sometimes. »

« Perhaps due to avant-garde film studies' indebtedness to art history and literary studies, biography plays an integral role in much of avant-garde film scholarship. When combined with traditional understandings of feminist and gay and lesbian politics, whereby declaring allegiance and identification with such causes (or, at least, knowledge of filmmaker's sexual practices, despite any disavowal, as in the case of Kenneth Anger) is given precedence, many women's experimental films that might otherwise be read as "lesbian" have not been. » make it gay

« For Atkinson and other "political lesbians," lesbian potentiality was a generic potentiality. It did not precipitate from the lived experiences and knowledges of lesbians in the present. Such a radical feminist approach to lesbian existence becomes a temporal problem, the lesbian existing almost outside of time itself and therefore not truly existing as anything more than a concept. » this is a valid critique although i question the insinuation that there were no political lesbians who were also lived-experience lesbians

quit with the playful “we both know better”-ism; you can’t criticize someone for not appreciating fucking in its whole breadth and then defer on the question of how you like to fuck

« Although incredibly limited in its articulation of what produces sexual pleasure, » academics should not be allowed to write this phrase without a lengthy footnote about what unarticulated sexual pleasures they think are missing

what is “coming upside”

coming inside
coming out
coming upside
coming down

somehow we went from “feminism just means being really good friends with other women!” with a wink to “feminism just means being really good friends with other women!” with no wink

90s fashion was bad but 90s fashion on gay women was bad in a way that i want to fuck

this author is claiming that lesbianism effectively ended in the 90s as a coherent political concept but i would like to submit as a counterargument that dykes in the 90s were really fucking hot

(i’m reading a book by a young person on lesbian feminism, and realizing that my feelings on the subject might actually be part of a Pattern of young female-and-female-adjacent queer studies majors looking to the 70s and 80s with interest instead of dismissal)

young millennials and zoomers do not care about your fake queer/lesbian binary and they will make being a dyke cool again

watch out kids, lesbianism is coming back

« “Americans were playing a basic game — ‘Trump wants dirt on Biden,’” says Suriya Jayanti, chief of energy policy at the American Embassy in Kyiv at the time. “What was actually going on in Ukraine was this crazy web of shifting alliances and oligarch pockets and horse trading and back-stabbing, and in our American myopia we had limited understanding that if a tree falls in the forest and America is not there to hear it, it still falls.” » you’d think we would have learned this lesson a while ago, yet

« This week, Mr. Biden and the White House Twitter feed boasted that the president had delivered a large increase in Social Security checks to retirees this year. That increase is an adjustment for cost of living — and it is the result of prices rising faster on Mr. Biden’s watch than they have in four decades » lmao that’s one way to spin it

tryna get better for my comrades

people just, like… don’t keep their drafts…