Wars and Thinking

"What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion."——Radicalesbians, "The Woman-Identified Woman," 1970

"The realm of human sex, gender and procreation has been subjected to, and changed by, relentless social activity for millennia. Sex as we know it—gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood—is itself a social product."——Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on a Political Economy of Sex," 1975

"Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama."——Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic," 1978

"Thus the lesbian has to be something else—a not woman, a not man, a product of society, not a product of nature—for there is no nature in society."——Monique Wittig, "One is Not Born a Woman," 1980

"I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman's life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously explored genital sexual experience with another woman."——Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," 1980

"What is the relationship between sexuality and gender? What is our stake in maintaining a still relatively rigid gender dichotomy in sexual temperament and behavior? What is the relationship between sexual fantasy and sexual acts? What is our rational control over fantasy and do we think there should be a sexual ethics that extends to fantasy? . . . How malleable is sexual taste? In other words, how set are our individual scripts for sexual arousal?"—— Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson, Introduction to Powers of Desire: the Politics of Sexuality, 1983

"Heterosexuality, I now think, is invented in discourse as that which is outside discourse. It's manufactured in a particular discourse as that which is universal. It's constructed in a historically specific discourse as that which is outside of time. It was constructed quite recently as that which is old: heterosexuality is an invented tradition."——Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, 1995

"From the beginning of wars in this region from '91 on, I felt that I have to invent Ten Thousand ways to let my lesbian desire breathe. At some moments during the last 8 years, it was not easy for me to put in words how do I feel when making love with a woman and in the back there is a radio with the news of war. Killed or expelled or other fascist acts. In my room, I would not be able to stand up from the bed, leave the desired bodies and switch off the news, because I thought respect to the killed I will show by not switching off the radio . . . reading Adrienne Rich, "Litany for Survival," by Audre Lorde and essays of Joan Nestle kept the light of my soul in wartime alive."——Lepa Mladjenovic, in a private correspondence, Belgrade, 1999

American bombs are falling on Baghdad; seven Iraqi women and children are killed by young frightened American soldiers; Rumsfield grins his death-mask smile, "I wish I was the author of this war plan, it is going so well." I sit in my new home in Melbourne, Australia, driven here by breast cancer, landlord greed, and my love for a Melbourne woman. Several months ago when the Journal of Women's History extended me the invitation to join this project of rereading, rethinking, I was hesitant to say yes—I have never been a student in or taught a women's studies class. I have been retired from formal teaching—I am now an Honorary Fellow in the English department at the university here, mentoring a small group of post-graduate students—for nine years. I have no empirical data to anchor my judgments about how important Rich's essay has been over the ensuing years. This seems to be...