Frances Doughty on the importance of personal relationships to the history of lesbian feminism:
“If gossip is accurate, it’s history.”
22.12.2025 22:28
👍 2
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
Frances Doughty on the importance of personal relationships to the history of lesbian feminism:
“If gossip is accurate, it’s history.”
State of the field review titled queer and trans histories of disability
page proofs! coming out in GLQ
Longhaired tabby lounging in the sunshine with her paws stretched out
Princess Artie 👑
Nathaniel meeting poodles with glasses
Nathaniel’s reflection in one of the poodle’s glasses
Nathaniel made some friends at the Phoenix Flea
Cat upside down in a sunspot
she’s having a great time rolling around in the sun
a cat licking her lips
cat sitting our pet sitter’s cat
Blue box sent priority mail from Vito Russo to Joan Nestle
A reel with holding and MMRC written on it
Today I learned that Vito Russo sent a copy of Coni Beeson’s Holding (1971) to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the 1980s. The film was originally part of the collection of the Multi Media Resource Library, a sex ed distribution service run by two Methodist ministers in SF
If an attractive young woman a third my age didn't want to date me, then why did she ask me for feedback on an economics paper?
by Larry Summers
Perennial favorite
a longhaired tabby with a fluffy belly and the words “and don’t forget about…”
the AI on my sister’s phone made a video instructing us all not to forget about Artie’s belly. Never Forget.
Jed is making their way through the sex researcher Gershon Legman’s multi volume work on dirty jokes, periodically emerging from their reading to share facts, such as, “did you know that 34.5 used to be slang for cunnilingus because it is half of 69?”
Artie keeps plaintively meowing at her reflection. I am worried that she thinks my phone background is a photo of her nemesis, mirror cat.
Flyer for Chris Vargas lecture on Nov 17, 6 pm, Grant Street Studios
Yay! @chrisevargas.bsky.social is coming to ASU
there are too many Rachels at this trans comedy fundraiser for Palestine in Brooklyn. Someone keeps calling for a “Rachel” to pick up their weed infused vegan food but there were two other Rachels before it was my food.
Lesbian Lives Film Program
Small white dyke in vegan leather jacket holds postcard for Tip/Alli with their own face on it.
TIP/ALLI sneak peek at Lesbian Lives NYC tomorrow!! We’ve got postcards for those curious about the film/pining for their very own @rachelcorbman.bsky.social pinup, so if that’s you come on by!! 👯♀️📽️🌈🚀
CALL FOR PAPERS Deadline: March 1, 2026 Feminists are no strangers to crisis. In the context of rapidly escalating population-threatening catastrophes—the global rise of fascism; war and genocide; climate crisis and Indigenous dispossession; sharp rises in unhoused, migrant, and refugee populations and their subsequent criminalization; increased normalization and legalization of gendered and sexual violence; lethal threats to public and reproductive health; the upward distribution of resources and wealth; and the crisis of the university—feminist theorizing feels both as urgent and as under threat as it was during the dawning of women’s studies as an academic enterprise. This special issue invites contributions theorizing and responding to crisis. Where and how do we locate crisis (or crises)? What enables crisis conditions, and how do we—feminists and feminism—survive them? Feminist, queer, and trans theorists are uniquely positioned to offer critical readings of crisis within the longer temporal frame of slow violence and everyday brutality. Guest Editors: Jih-Fei Cheng (Scripps College), Cati Connell (Boston University), and Gowri Vijayakumar (Brandeis University). For the full call for papers and submission instructions, visit www.signsjournal.org/cfp
Signs is seeking submissions for a new special issue: "Crisis," edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Cati Connell, and Gowri Vijayakumar. For the full CFP go to signsjournal.org/for-authors/...
Rejected everywhere, staged as a hoax, and finally published in a lesbian sex mag — Sarah Schulman’s “A Short Story About a Penis” has quite a history. Rachel Corbman uncovers its fascinating legacy in Signs’ new issue: check it out here! (sub. req’d):
🚨🚨 My dear friend and fellow academic, the Palestinian American sociologist @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social has been taken by the Cook County Sheriff near Chicago. They have not mirandized her. Please signal boost. All eyes on Broadview for Eman and the community she was defending 🚨🚨
Cover of signs
In March 1983, Sarah Schulman finished a draft of a short story about a lesbian who wakes up one day with a penis, descriptively titled “A Short Story About a Penis.” Though now a well-known writer, Schulman enjoyed limited success placing her fiction as a young writer in the early 1980s. In the middle of the feminist sex wars, “A Short Story About a Penis” racked up rejections from every significant lesbian literary magazine before finally appearing in On Our Backs, a newly launched lesbian sex magazine, in March 1986. While still struggling to place her story, Schulman created a performance piece to vent her frustration with the lesbian publishing scene. In her performance, Schulman read “A Short Story About a Penis,” which, she claimed, was the recently discovered work of a long-forgotten lesbian writer from the 1930s. In this article, I reconstruct the history of “A Short Story About a Penis” based on conversations with Schulman and the archival footprint of the performance in her personal papers. In offering an intellectual history of Schulman’s thinking on gender, sexuality, lesbian identity, and history, this article places Schulman within a genealogy of what came to be known as queer and trans, without obscuring the fraught history of lesbian in the 1980s.
The lesbian studies issue of @signsjournal.org is on the internet! It includes my article about Sarah Schulman’s slideshow about a fake lesbian writer & her real short story about a lesbian who wakes up with a penis.
Queer archives not only contain our past but help unlock community. @ainopihlak.bsky.social gathers terrific insights from @arquives.ca, @rachelcorbman.bsky.social, @invisiblehistories.bsky.social, @ottawatranslibrary.bsky.social, and @leatherarchives.bsky.social.
My article, “The Comedy of Chris E. Vargas: Trans Play at the Tipping Point,” is out now with CAMERA OBSCURA! 👯♂️🦜🦄📚 Shoot me a message if you’re having trouble accessing ;)
Longhaired tabby and spaniel sitting on the couch
We have assembled to root on the Valks in their first playoff game 💜🪽🏀⚔️🐣
Close up of Longhaired tabby’s face
Close up of Longhaired tabby’s face
Close up of Longhaired tabby’s face
selfies
Black and white photo of a white lady with her fluffy cat
Frances Simpson (1857-1926) wrote a column called Practical Pussyology, which is what WGSS should really be called
Keeping it meta: my article about a 1979 special issue of Frontiers was just published in Frontiers’ special issue for the 50th anniversary of Frontiers
muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...
My interview about lesbians and cats in a German magazine
I’m actually really big in Germany
Artie a longhaired tabby on the couch next to Chase Gregory’s book As If!
research assistant
