The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon by Jaime Harker (review)

Jaime Harker's compelling book, The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, is an important contribution to scholarship in three fields: southern studies, feminist history and theory, and queer theory. Harker intertwines autobiographical narratives and contemporary ruminations on the South with her analysis, in a move that both makes clear the position she occupies and well clarifies the stakes of her insights. Indeed, the queer literary canon might seem obscure to some, but Harker draws in the reader with vignettes, such as the one that opens the introduction: a young Harker stumbles into Charis Books, one of the oldest feminist bookstores in the nation, in Atlanta, Georgia, and discovers books published by Naiad Press, the lesbian publishing house based in Tallahassee, Florida. This chance encounter introduced Harker to the "distinctive and fascinating" southern gay culture, and this story makes the texts analyzed seem less obscure and more accessible (p. 1). By placing herself into the narrative, the reader cannot dismiss the subjects of analysis as marginal or unimportant because Harker explains how she encountered these texts and the impact they had on her sense of self. She describes the book as "part memoir, part literary history and criticism, but it is, finally, a love letter to the South—my South, going on fifteen years now, full of sexual deviants and political radicals, scalawags and carpetbaggers, potheads and drunkards, embracing racial mixing, excess, and unadulterated kindness" (p. 16).

The Lesbian South is organized into four chapters, each of which explores a different facet of queer women's organizing and community formation in the South. Chapter 1 explores the women in print movement (an understudied element of the women's liberation movement) through a cohort of southern lesbian feminists who used print culture to define and debate the meanings of southernness and queerness. Chapter 2, "The Radical South: Politics and the Lesbian Feminist Imaginary," explores the antiracist coalitions that southern lesbians engaged in during the 1980s. Chapter 3, "Queer Sexuality and the Lesbian Feminist South," grapples with the many nonnormative sexualities in "the archive of southern lesbian feminism," including incest, polyandry, rape, and intergenerational sex (p. 3). The fourth chapter, "Women's Space, Queer Space: Communes, Landykes, and Queer Contact Zones in the Lesbian Feminist South," examines the landyke movement through its appearance in the archive of southern lesbian feminism.

Through it all, The Lesbian South is engaging and thoughtful, and it gives the reader much to ponder. For example, one of the major contributions of the book is a more nuanced depiction of lesbian feminism—a movement that Harker acknowledges has "a terrible reputation" (p. 12). Whereas some contemporary feminists and queer theorists deride lesbian feminism as being essentialist and transphobic, Harker asks readers to take a more nuanced look at the movement in order to appreciate its contributions. In addition, The Lesbian South makes a powerful intervention into feminist history and queer studies by highlighting the South as a nexus for lesbian women's organizing and publishing. This is an important contribution since this region (and particularly nonurban spaces therein) often gets left out of scholarly (and popular) conversations about queer political organizing. The Lesbian South uncovers a forgotten past wherein lesbians remade southernness as a site of transgressive sexuality, intersectional radicalism, and liberatory space.