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Letters from Our Readers

Liber Review

I just finished reading issue 1 of LIBER cover-to-cover. What a wonderful contribution to the conversation! Half of it seemed to have been written directly to me. Thank you! I was especially pleased & surprised to find Charis Caputo—who wrote one of my favorite reviews of Women’s Liberation!, the anthology I edited with Honor Moore—discussing in “Just Go” some of the same subjects I wrote about in my 1993 essay “Women Writers of the Beat

Missionaries: Sex in the Nineties Was Crazy, Right?

Michelle Tea

Priscilla & Elvis Herselvis, San Francisco, 1991. Photo by Phyllis Christopher. AT AGE TWENTY, estranged from my family back in Boston, I ran away to the desert with Kym, my opinionated and authoritative girlfriend who, being like five years older, seemed to know how to live. Kym, like me, had recently gone gay with gusto. I would follow her anywhere: Provincetown, Tucson, back to Provincetown, then back to Tucson, where I flipped a coin to

Radical Form: On Faith Ringgold and Suzanne Lacy

Jillian Steinhauer

Faith Ringgold: American People, 2022. Exhibition view. New Museum, New York. Photo by Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum. © Faith Ringgold/ARS. One day, in the summer of 1972, Faith Ringgold visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. As an artist living in New York City, Ringgold had been making powerfully expressive figurative paintings about race in the United States for just under a decade —works like American People Series #20: Die (1967), a twelve-foot-long mural that depicts

What Kind of Person Has an Abortion

Jennifer Baumgardner

Florence Rice Florence Rice had an abortion in the 1930s. I was sixteen when I had my daughter. They put her in my arms and she looked at me like, If you don’t want me, then I don’t want you either! You know, she just had that look, and I fell in love with her then. I began to dream about giving her the opportunities that I never had. Later on, I sort of went

Arguing with My Father-in-Law about ‘My Bed’

Meg Daly

The artist at her exhibition Tracey Emin “My Bed’”/JMW Turner at Turner Contemporary, 2017 2018. Photo by Stephen White; courtesy Turner Contemporary. My in-laws live in the north of England. Their modest semi-detached home is decorated tastefully with trinkets from their world travels, family photos, and a few replicas of notable artworks. I love the juxtaposition of viewpoints when I’m in their house. Inside, my eyes bounce from the Mondrian-inspired glass door, a miniature painting

Abject d’Art

Alexander Bondoc

DURING THE QUARANTINE phase of the pandemic, New York City was deathly quiet. In this silence, I began to discover my own genderqueerness, which manifested by way of playing with clothing, adjusting the height of my heels, and picking up nail art. Two years later, I’m still playing around with nail art, but the experiment has blossomed into a research-based art praxis connecting the history of nail art to queer theory and phenomenology. I’ve leaned

Nice White Ladies

Anastasia Higginbotham

WOMEN AND HONOR: Some Notes on Lying, an immense work of fourteen pages by the lesbian poet and white feminist Adrienne Rich, begins with a clarification in parentheses at the top of page one: “These notes are concerned with relationships between and among women.” Drawn from remarks Rich made at a writers workshop in 1975, Women and Honor was published two years later by Pittsburgh-based press Motheroot (RIP). My copy from Cleis Press was given

Your Body is a Battleground

Jennifer Baumgardner

At the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, Loretta Ross, Toni Bond, and others coined the evocative term reproductive justice to make clear that women have human rights, including the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have” safely, and with our government playing an affirmative role in manifesting these rights. Women (aka human beings with human rights) have the power to give

Greatest Hits in Feminist Publishing

Jennifer Baumgardner

with assistance from CATHARINE STIMPSON, SHANE SNOWDON, BARBARA SMITH, and ANDI ZEISLER 1790–1792 In 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft anonymously pens A Vindication of the Rights of Men. It’s all rave reviews and hot sales until her name is added to the second edition and, overnight, the text is derided as overly emotional. The following year, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is published under her name, and a feminist philosopher is born. 1843 Margaret

Sarah Kane: Her Plays are Violent and Disgusting (and Got Me Through the Pandemic)

Noelle McManus

North Yorkshire, UK; Methuen Drama, 2008, 288 pp., $25.95, paperback A short synopsis of English playwright Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted: Tabloid journalist Ian and his much-younger girlfriend, Cate, check into a hotel room. Ian makes several racist and homophobic comments and berates Cate’s intelligence. They discuss what seems to be a war going on around them. He coerces her into uncomfortable, violent sexual acts. She escapes through the bathroom window. A soldier bursts into

Issues

Letters from Our Readers

Missionaries: Sex in the Nineties Was Crazy, Right?

Radical Form: On Faith Ringgold and Suzanne Lacy

What Kind of Person Has an Abortion

Arguing with My Father-in-Law about ‘My Bed’

Abject d’Art

Nice White Ladies

Your Body is a Battleground

Greatest Hits in Feminist Publishing

Sarah Kane: Her Plays are Violent and Disgusting (and Got Me Through the Pandemic)

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