ABSTRACT

This article examines an instructive moment in the archive of Feminary, a periodical that began in 1969 as a local feminist newsletter for the Triangle region of North Carolina. In 1979, the editorial collective announced a shift in focus toward “a feminist journal for the South emphasizing the lesbian vision.” I argue that through this turn, the Feminary Collective experiments with lesbian and southern as discursive laboratories for shaping what I refer to as backward-onward community-formation—a praxis that requires confronting and acknowledging historical specificity and experiential limits while also imagining new possibilities for social movement. Instead of framing southernness and lesbianism as fixed identities, the Collective treats them as multivalent, slippery markers that resist closure, produce ambivalence, and contain vast relational and political potential. Moreover, this article discusses the Collective’s configuration of the U.S. South as a spatial and temporal avenue for confronting the experiential and institutionalized afterlives of slavery and for critiquing the white-washed classism of literary conventions. The article’s methodology includes close readings of material from the Collective’s nationally-circulated journal, as well as discussions of excerpts from the oral histories of two former members of the Collective, one of which was conducted for the purposes of this project.

摘要

本文考察了Feminary档案中的一个有启发性的时刻，该期刊始于 1969 年，当时是北卡罗来纳州三角地区的当地女权主义通讯。1979 年，该编辑集体宣布将重点转向“强调女同性恋愿景的南方女权主义期刊”。我认为，通过这一转变，女同性恋和南方人作为话语实验室进行实验，以塑造我所说的向后向前的社区形成——一种需要面对和承认历史特殊性和经验限制的实践，同时也想象新的可能性社会运动。而不是框定南方和女同性恋作为固定的身份，集体将它们视为多价的、光滑的标记，它们抵制封闭、产生矛盾，并包含巨大的关系和政治潜力。此外，本文讨论了集体对美国南部的配置，作为对抗奴隶制的经验性和制度化来世以及批判文学惯例的粉饰阶级主义的空间和时间途径。这篇文章的方法包括仔细阅读集体在全国发行的期刊中的材料，以及对集体前两名成员口述历史的摘录的讨论，其中一个是为了这个项目的目的而进行的。