Writing the Plural: Sexual Fantasies

Introduction by Deborah Swedberg

A long time ago, in the fall of 1982, the second of the two years Eve was at Boston University, a group of 10–12 people got together to study feminist texts. A few of us, including Eve, had already been meeting for six months to discuss the novels of George Eliot; the change of focus, as well as the expansion of the group’s size, felt like a natural segue. Seven of those original twelve are sitting in front of you now: Mary Baine Campbell, Susan E. Carlisle, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Helaine Razovsky, Nancy Waring, Carolyn Williams, and myself, Deborah Swedberg.

Two people who were not with us at the very beginning—but almost, and ever since—are in the audience: Martha Sweezy and Beth O’Sullivan. Our newest member, Deedee Agee, was unable to make it here today.

We are all white and all women—in those two big ways we were a homogeneous group. But we brought other kinds of diversity to the scene: we ranged in age from late twenties to early forties; we were straight and lesbian (“queer” had not yet been rehabilitated); we were a mix of professors and graduate students, of academics and nonacademics—among us a boatbuilder and a child caretaker—some had partners, some did not.

We didn’t name ourselves until February 1983, when, at Eve’s suggestion, we became the ID 450 Collective. ID was the tag for women’s studies courses at that time, ID standing for “Interdisciplinary” but also obviously a double entendre. The number 450 was random, I think, and “collective” was how we were feeling in those exciting days of reading, talking, and eating together. Not surprisingly, again at Eve’s suggestion, we added a writing component to our festivities. I can’t remember how we chose our first subject to write about—sexual fantasies—but that unanimous choice led to an interesting way of structuring the writing process. We sat in a circle and collectively decided on a topic under the rubric of sexual fantasies, “Earth” or “Colors” for instance, and then all of us would write in longhand for about 20–30 minutes. When we were done, we would throw all the writings on the floor into the center of the circle and distribute them as randomly as possible. No writing was identified, and we tried not to recognize one another’s handwriting. Each piece would be read aloud, then, not by the person who wrote it. This experiment functioned not only to disguise our individual voices, enabling us to write more freely, but to construct a plural voice playfully circling the same topic. We later named the process “Writing the Plural,” and you will hear how much we were inspired by it. When Eve was still with us, we performed different versions of “Writing the Plural” twice: once at MLA at a panel Eve organized in 1984 and once at Amherst College in 1986 for a few of Eve’s classes. We also published several of the fantasies under our collective name in a lesbian sex magazine called Bad Attitude in 1987. For the record, I’d like to mention the names of those people who participated in writing some or all of the sexual fantasies but who are no longer with us for one reason or another: JoAnn Citron, Nancy Munger, Laura Phibbs, Patricia Yaeger, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

One last note before we begin the reading: we wrote sexual fantasies for one and a half years before moving on to other subjects in our now twenty-seven-year history. Not coincidentally, our change of focus coincided with Eve’s departure to Amherst. However, we briefly revisited the topic, when we gathered at Eve’s house for a meeting in 1987, by imagining queer encounters between such TV characters as Lucy and Ethel, or Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, thereby adding our voices to a long underground history of writing same-sex fantasies about figures in popular culture. Those pieces are too long to be represented here.

Today’s reading contains a new selection of the...