political lesbianism

Ka-ching! Aw, did you hear that? It was the last of 80 raffle tickets sold off from the Lesbian Herstory Archives Benefit Art Auction! That means if you didn't pick up your ticket in time, you don't get to take home one of 80 works of art by 80 lesbian artists. The good news is that if you're in New York City this weekend, you can still view the works on display and support the archive at the door. (That way, it's like you won ALL of the art!)

The rest of us can view a few of the works online at Own This City, where I found the above photo, "Battaglia al Castello di Civitella Ranieri" by Patricia Cronin, and mark down a trip to the archives the next time we find ourselves in Park Slope.

More about the archive after the jump!

 

Feminists have long struggled with some non-feminist’s notions that our mantra is man hating. While that is not true of feminists as a whole, that was the main focus of a movement in the UK in the late 1970s. Called Revolutionary Feminism and lead by Sheila Jeffreys, the movement advocated political lesbianism and the complete denouncing of heterosexual relationships, which they felt was the only ultimate way to liberation. It did not matter if you slept with women or not; to be a true feminist, to them, was to be a lesbian. In 1979, they wrote Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism, which further pushed the Revolutionary Feminists into embodying that man-hating stereotype, which the media and non-feminists latched on to in an attempt to discredit the feminist agenda in general. Yet their impact on the feminist movement was much larger than the controversy that surrounded them for their literature and ideals. Read more after the jump!