FEMINIST RIGHTS AND LESBIAN LIBERTIES

Monday, 03 October 2011 13:27

 

Guests speakers   Joan Nestle and Dianne Otto

Moderated by   Adriana Zaharijevic and Lepa Mladjenovic

Organized by   Center for Women’s Studies, Belgrade

Reconstruction Women’s Fund, Belgrade

Cultural center REX

25 April 2011 Belgrade

edited transcript   Jodie Pandey

 

Zoe: Good evening and welcome to tonight’s lecture on feminist rights and lesbian liberties. First, I would like to thank you all; my name is Zoe Gudovic and I am from the Reconstruction Women’s Fund. And then I must thank the Rex Cultural Center  for this space in which we are all gathered; thank you Dusica Parezanovic and all the others who are our hosts this evening.  Also I would like to thank all of you who came, who decided to spend this afternoon with our “legends”--the translators, the lecturers, and  the moderators. Our guests are Joan Nestle, writer, poet, feminist, lesbian and Dianne Otto who is a feminist law professor and author of many articles on women’s human rights. She will talk this evening about her history with feminism and women’s studies. The moderators are Lepa Mladjenovic, our very own legend and Adriana Zaharijevic.  Danijela Zivkovic will help with the translation for you, translating English to Serbian, and Nina Djurdjevic Filipovic will translate your questions from Serbian to English, and also she will help Joan and Dianne to understand our conversations. What you are seeing behind me is a slide presentation of the work that Dianne and Joan do which has been kindly prepared by friends including Shebar Windstone. The accompanying music  is the voice of the lesbian singer, K.D. Lang, for which we thank Labris and Jelena Vasiljevic. So enjoy. I imagine there will be many questions, and  we will have time for discussion later in the evening; that will be the time to ask these amazing women who are here with us anything that interests you. Again, we thank you very much for coming.

 

Adriana: In the beginning of February, Lepa Mladjenovic, known to all, sent me an email, asking if the Women’s Studies Center would like to bring us together, Joan Nestle and Dianne Otto, and she asked if I knew who Joan Nestle was, so I said, absolutely surprised by the question, but even more by the fact that someone so huge, so important and so recognizable would come to this country,  “Of course I know who Joan Nestle is. How wouldn’t I know.” Then we started to make plans to organize a lecture initially at the Faculty of Political Science where all the Women’s Studies lectures are held.  However, because of the Easter vacation we couldn’t do it there, so we found a perhaps better, more interesting and more intimate space than the one that was originally thought of – this one where we are now.

Now Lepa and I have discussed in what manner we should introduce the women who are with us this evening. For the beginning I want to say that this is a public conversation, so feel free and feel that you have the possibility, the right-- we are going to talk about rights in different ways-- to interrupt this discussion, or these monologues, so we can have this conversation together. Now, back to the introductions. Lepa asked me how I knew about Joan, so I told her that in 2004 when I was writing one of my first texts about prostitution which was to be published with “ Voice of Difference” I ran into something  called the Sex Wars for the first time. I think the Sex Wars is something that starts in the eighties and ends up with Queer theory—at least that is a thesis I would be ready to defend. And among those who participated in and created that something, that is not either totally theoretical nor practical, but represents a joint moment of activism and theory is Joan Nestle, who is here with us this evening, and her friends.

Now, I am thinking about the way in which this is an enormous event for the Women’s Studies Center, in what way this really is a happening, how tonight we have the opportunity to not just talk about and teach the history of feminism but to really have  embodiments of that history of feminism, someone who introduced key terms, who imposed key terms, like Joan Nestle did in the 80s when she made the Butch-Femme world of the fifties part of the conversation. I will let Lepa to talk about Joan in a more emotional, friendly way, in a bit, but now I would  like to say few words about Dianne. In her initial email Lepa mentioned to me that Joan Nestle would come with her partner, Dianne Otto. That name sounded familiar to me and I found myself thinking where had I seen it before. It turned out that Slavica Stojanovic, the director of The Reconstruction Women’s Fund, which made this evening possible, had had the idea in 2006  to translate Cynthia Rothschild’s book, “Written Out,” a book about how sexuality is used to attack women’s organizing.  And today, I searched that translation I did years ago and found Dianne Otto was one of the women who participated in the creation of that book.

I will say a few words about Di, a scholar who is very important for feminist legal thinking. Dianne Otto is a law professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She was involved in the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements in the 1970s. She was a community worker for many years, working with homeless young people and with victims of domestic violence, before she went to University to study law when she was 37 years old. She is one of the people who created the Draft of the General Comment on Equality of Women for the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for the UN. She also participated in writing the Draft of General Recommendations about Treaty Obligations for CEDAW. She has published widely in the field of feminist legal thinking, and most recently she has an essay in “International Human Rights Law,” a book published by Oxford University in 2010. She teaches international human rights law and several subjects focusing on issues of gender and sexuality in international law. She met Joan in 1998 when she was studying in New York for her doctorate, and invited her to attend a class with her on Law and Sexuality, which was a line of seduction that Joan could not resist. They have been together ever since.

Now, here is Lepa to introduce Joan in the way only she can do, friendly and emotional.

 

Lepa: Good evening. I am tonight The Happy Lesbian, I have been especially happy for past three days as my dream has come true: one of the lesbians whom I adore to read already two decades, who I love, and who became my friend is here with her beloved, and that’s absolutely fantastic. So I wish this evening to especially greet all lesbians, trans women, queer women, bisexual women, and all of those who live a different desire then heterosexual, because our existence is not yet welcomed in this sexist society.  To remember past … we had a feminist group back in the eighties and one of its members, Sladjana Markovic, who has been living abroad for many years, brought in one day that remarkable text of Joan Nestle named “My Mother Liked to Fuck.” I read it immediately and it brought a completely different dimension into my feminist lesbian life. In an amazing and simple way, Joan wrote about her own lesbian desire and about her mother’s heterosexual desire. The relation between a mother who liked to fuck men, and the daughter who desires women is written in such a way that it opened a whole new world for me, a radical feminist at time. I immediately looked up the other books Joan had written and began to read further. Later on I realized that Joan Nestle writes about lesbian desire in almost all of her texts. After that, I started to love using that term. She has written and edited nine books and half of those have lesbian desire in their title.

Let me tell you the history of how Joan and I began our friendship. As many of you know, some of us lesbians were active antifascists and antiwar activists during the wartime and we were deeply disturbed by killings and ethnic cleansing in the war. I had this situation that I felt that I was living different lives. On one hand, I stood every Wednesday with Women in Black against Milosevic’s regime, I would get up in the morning Wednesdays, put on black clothes although I don’t like black, but I wore them, because with black color we were showing opposition to fascism that we could not wipe off. Then I went to counseling work with women who were survivors of violence by men and exile, and that was yet another different existence. Not in connection to lesbian desire.  To complicate things even more, on Friday evenings I went to lesbian gatherings, where no one wanted to talk about the war at that time.  It was very difficult for me to put my lesbian desire, my antiwar politics and my work with women who suffered from male violence, all in one place. The only place I could be complete, bring all the parts of myself together, was my flat where I made love to women. What was important in that time was that I had to get a little long wave radio on batteries to listen to the news from the war zones. As some of you know, no war news could be found on any Serbian radio stations, and so we listened to Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle German Radio news, and similar.  This means we got no news about crimes done against citizens in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in Vukovar, Dubrovnik, Visegrad, Srebrenica, and all the other places where the war was raging, unless we listened to foreign news.

Now what was also important was that I was keeping close to me a few feminist writers who had written about the complexity of lesbian existence. I was carrying Audre Lorde, her poem “The Litany of Survival,” which gave me strength, I was reading Adrienne Rich to get means how to analyze the world I live in. And I was constantly reading Joan Nestle, to remind myself that lesbian desire exists in my life, that my lesbian desire is taken seriously by someone in spite the war, and that I had a right to lesbian love in the wartime. I dreamed that one day I would write to her just how important all her words were for me, and I did so, ten years later when I wrote email to Joan. I was writing that e-mail for three days, you know when you want to write something to the woman you love and who changed your life. I told her, among other things, that I had this profound dilemma when making love in a room with woman, should I keep that little radio, I mentioned earlier, with death tolls news on, or shall turn it off.  I knew she would be the only one on the world to understand how deeply I was torn between lesbian desire lovemaking including shame and guilt with it, and political commitment to respect killed in the war in my name.  I sent that email and received her answer the next day. I cried for half an hour when I read it, because yes Joan understood and validated every word I said with loving lesbian recognition …and how excited I was that we had finally spoken.  Our friendship has lasted ever since.

 

Adriana:  Thank you, Lepa. Since this is the first time that both Joan and Di have spoken together on the same platform, trying to talk about similar themes and subjects, this occasion is even more important. The key question for me was how to unite their two very different theoretical stories, very different works, here tonight. So one sentence came up to help us connect things tonight: “Fighting for the right to complicate the discussion.” I first heard it when watching the documentary about Joan’s life, “Hand on The Pulse” which I deeply recommend to all of you. I have the feeling that both Joan and Di will have a lot to share with us, on how to gain that right, and how is it possible that it is still not guaranteed in the 21st century, not only to us as women, feminists, lesbians, but simply to persons. I find it extremely interesting, and I wrote that in the email which I’ve sent to them, that we begin here with another statement, and that is the “right to desire” where Di can talk surely about the right, and Joan about the desire. In that sense, now I am giving the microphone to Di and Joan.

 

Dianne: Hi everyone. I would like to repeat, to begin with, many of the thanks that Zoe has already expressed. We are very grateful to the Women’s Reconstruction Fund, to Labris, to Lepa for setting all this up, to the Women’s Studies Center, to our wonderful translators and to everyone else. It has been so wonderful and so moving to be here and we have learned so much. We were both really thrilled that Adriana found a connection between our work in terms of both of us being interested in bringing complexity out into the open. I thought I would start our journey into that complexity by just telling you a little about the Women Studies course that I helped set up in 1972, which now seems so long ago, I don’t want to add up the years. I was a young student at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and I was so excited because I found feminism there, with several other students. We were all asking ourselves why are there no women in our history books, why  politics is just about what men in the public sphere had done, why does law barely talk about women. So we got together with some faculty and we insisted that the Politics Department offer a subject called Women Studies which we would run. Our theme was, as you might expect, that the personal is political. We also believed that knowledge is something that everyone has and that everyone has a right to contribute to and discuss knowledge, not just academics, so we invited women from the community as well as activists to come to do these studies as well as other students, which sounds a lot like your Women’s Studies Center--so over 30 years later, many of the same things are inspiring the establishment of your Center. But very quickly it got complicated. Because, of course we were in a academic institution, in a University, and the University said: you have to have assessments, you have to have a professor to make the assessment, to give the marks, you have to have rules about what is acceptable academic research, and what you get a certificate for. This is what I call the problem of institutionalization. We have to work with institutions, to change them, but we also have to maintain an existence outside of them as well. One of my challenges every day, now that I work in a university is to makes connections between what I teach and what activists are doing about the subjects that I’m teaching. So I want to open the question of complexity with how we deal with the institutions of the state and private institutions as well, and having an agenda that is about changing them without getting co-opted by them and overwhelmed by the way they want us to be. To connect with the conversation we were having on Saturday night, [in the Majestic Hotel, part of a day- long conference on lesbian activism in the region] as one young woman asked, how do we stay “monsters.” I hope you know what I mean by that.

 

Nina:  Please do elaborate.

 

Dianne: Ok. What I mean is how we keep resisting, how we stay radical, when it is not fashionable, how we keep our visions of a better world alive, and not just in the shape that the state and its institutions want us to think. To keep those visions alive, we can’t just be ‘respectable’. We must be brave enough to risk becoming ‘monsters’ in the eyes of the state. So that’s what I mean by monsters, we stick up for our visions of a better future even if it means taking risks, that we speak boldly even though we might face stigmatization or marginalization as a result. Joan always tells me to be more personal. Lepa would probably say: be more emotional. So just a little more personal. You know, when I realized in the early 1970s, when I first discovered feminist ideas, I started to see around me things I’ve never seen before, and I felt like I was totally transformed. I suddenly had a whole different life ahead of me than the life my conservative religious family had taught me to expect. And one of the things which helped me to make this change a reality was working with other feminists to create new spaces for women. So we created a Women’s Liberation Center with a meeting space and telephone. We publicized the number in the community and women were calling us every day, mostly about domestic violence which I had little experience with. To answer their needs, we used the center as an organizational base. We found housing for a women’s refuge by squatting in an empty house and told the newspapers we were open, and immediately women started coming with their children. And, you know, we felt so empowered by doing this, discovering that as women we could do something to defend each other, to help each other, not as charity but as an expression of our solidarity. But in the eyes of many we were “monsters.”

Di hands the microphone to Joan.

Joan:  First, I have to say, you know we arrived in Belgrade, was it only three days ago? In some ways, it feels like a lifetime ago. We arrived, knowing only one person, Lepa, and yet by this evening as we were walking here, we saw friends on every corner. And the group just kept growing and growing. We leave early tomorrow, but in a way, and I speak for both of us, we will never leave. Just before I address the topic, I want to say that working with your wonderful translators has become a form of poetry for me. The rhythm between our lives speaking, and your language capturing and transforming our lives into your life, is a magic of the human imagination that I have never so deeply experienced before. And it gives great hope. I’m going to speak about the difference in our histories, Di’s and mine, and how wonderful it is to share this kind of space for the first time. I know the other night I did so much talking, you must have wondered what Di’s voice sounded like.

I came out in the working class bars in Greenwich Village, in New York City in 1958, and ever since I have been creating ideas from that young lesbian’s body. When I became involved with feminism in the seventies, Di’s world of feminism but in my country, America, I had already been using my body in ‘unwomanly’ ways, for close to 15 years, and my encounters with the state all came from this illegal lesbian desire. I wanted to be in the places where I could feel a woman’s body against mine, where as a young woman, I could enact the longings of my flesh. It is something that happens with youth of all genders. But in our case, in 1950s America, we had to take on the ugliness of state. What I saw after I worked my respectable job the whole week, and then made my way to the policed lesbian bars for the weekend, was the price we had to pay for our desire. Now, I was a working class young woman, and in the bar that I went to were other working class women, women who worked as taxi drivers, telephone operators, clerks, women who had very little of the protections of our society, but every Friday and Saturday night, they opened themselves up to police violence, to violence on the streets, because as butch-femme women and couples we were clearly visible. I wondered at how women with so little could risk so much, a wonder that has been with me all the later years of my life.

I will tell you something I have written about that captures both the humiliations and the strength of those lesbian times. It is called the “The Bathroom Line”--I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with it--Ok, I will explain. Because it’s something I have never forgotten and I would wish for you never to know. Because we were considered a criminalized population, a deviant population, those “monsters” Di mentioned earlier, we could only have these bars because of the relationship between organized crime and something the state called vice squads. It was illegal for the people of the same sex to dance together or to really inhabit a public space. So the bars we had, existed under certain controls which meant policemen came in every night to get their payoffs. We would be dancing in a room, and the red light bulb in the ceiling would start flashing, our warning that the cops were on the way, our warning to separate, sit down, and pray that when the cop came into this back room, counting his money, he wouldn’t pick our butch girlfriend to antagonize, to take her outside and push her against the wall and say: ‘Oh you wanna be a man?’ and proceed to prove she wasn’t. We sat, holding on to the belts of our lovers to keep ourselves safe. Every night in that bar, that restricted territory, there was a ritual called the bathroom line. Because we were considered sexual deviants, the rule was that only one of us could go into the bathroom at the time. And it was one of our own who controlled all of this, and in her own way, tried to protect us from the forces of the state. A small solid butch woman who worked for the bar held in her hand a roll of toilet paper, and as we reached her, she would roll around her fist our allotted amount of toilet paper. This line, that we all visited several times a night, stretched from the front of the bar into that back room, and we created line acts. This was a dance of humiliation and subversion; we would flirt on that line, we would make jokes: ‘oh please let us in together, it is our first night of love’, and our butch woman would say, ‘No, no, you know better’. In the late 1950s, early 60s, in this one part of lesbian America; we were waiting for permission, as I have written, to urinate, to shit. I am using this language because it was as basic as that. Now while I was on that line I didn’t think of it as history. I did not think of it as part of what would lead a people to liberation.

But in my country other things were happening as well--the civil rights movement, the anti war movements, the anti nuclear movement--and I found myself involved in all of them as I took that allotted amount of toilet paper. It took me a while to believe I wasn’t the freak of my country’s imagination, but that I was as worthy of a civic place of respect as all the other peoples I was involved with in moving towards a different kind of state. Then came the Women’s Liberation movement  and I marched with them in the streets and then the Gay Liberation movement in the early 70s and all the social journeys started coming together. But always within me was the young working class woman who had stood in that bathroom line with so many others, whom I seldom saw in the new Women’s Liberation movement. Many of my old comrades did not survive to the new land of feminism. Now this is a long way to get to where I think I was going in answering the questions put to us by Adriana, but it all seems important to me. When I became involved in lesbian feminism for a while I ‘passed.’ To pass, I pretended I had another history, because there was a new rule, there was a new--how can I say--a new version of how to be a lesbian woman in the world and some of my desires did not fit into this new vision. I was willing to be a 50s fem in secret, in privacy, because it was so good to be this new kind of woman, until I realized that new walls were being erected in the name of the desire for a more perfect world. It was in 1981, after I had been a lesbian feminist for over ten years, that I decided to write an essay called “Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s” to explore these desires and histories in a new time and then, I ran against that new wall, new exiles. I was told by women active in the anti-pornography movement that I was not allowed to talk about such things, that I was a traitor to the cause because I has I had a “prick in my head.” This is partly why I desire complexity. In all liberation movements, we tend to a monolithic comradeship, but I learned there are certain desires that put you beyond the pale, that make new monsters. And in the desire to protect women’s bodies in the political dedication to give an anatomy of our victimization, which we needed, something else was happening. It became almost impossible to talk about sexual joy, to talk about more complex forms of sexual desire. I didn’t think this made for healthy politics. The heresy in those days, you’ll laugh at this, was that I was a lesbian who liked to be fucked. I enjoyed penetration, and that was treason for some. Is this interesting to you? But there is something deeper here, not just what I like to do in bed. It is the body, that we really struggle for, it’s the freedom of the body to live in its full being, the black body, the white body, all the ways, nations, states define body, the naked body, and let’s say the woman’s body, the queer body, the trans body, how do we keep the integrity and the right of that body in the face of what I call the armed state. Think of tanks so set on maintaining national order, and the naked body, the naked deviant body--how do we ensure its dignity and its fullness of difference? From that bathroom line, I’m seventy now, from that bathroom line so many years ago and the women who stood on either side of me, came all my life’s work and brought me here.

Adriana: Our guests are already asking if there is anyone who would like to ask a question or comment, It would be great. If you are shy tonight as usual Lepa and I can encourage you.

 

Lepa:  What I wanted to say is that I was lucky enough to visit the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York, which now has its own building in Brooklyn, and which started many years ago, in 1973, in Joan and her then partner Deborah Edel’s apartment. It is a completely fantastic history of that lesbian archives that till this day exists as a collective and only the woman who helps to clean the place is paid, all the others are working as activists. What’s fascinating is how Joan and other lesbians began to make this  archives and why it is important that we all remember our lesbian history. One of the sentences that can be read on Lesbian Herstory Archives website is, “Send us something in the language you make love in.”

Adriana: I would like to ask something about lesbian archives. In fact the question is for both of you in different ways. In a video clip which can be seen on the website of the Archives, Deborah and Joan are speaking and, at the very end, Joan talks about a situation they had, about one woman who worked for the FBI, and she was lesbian, how her documents were in the Archives, and about the problems and questions that came out of that situation. I will let Joan say the same thing that has already been said at the end of the video clip, but the question for both of you has something to do with what Lepa said that the Lesbian Herstory Archives is for everyone. I would like to ask now, what is your opinion about the phrase that we in fact attribute to bell hooks--that feminism is for everyone.

Joan: Let me say a little about why we started the archives, my role in it. First it was to honor the women from the bars whom I didn’t see in lesbian feminism, in their full complexity, as sex workers, as passing women, women who appeared as men, so they could work. When we started the archives in 1973, there was no other such thing in the world. Criminals don’t have archives and we were a criminalized community. Early on we had discussions about what should we collect, and again there was all this pressure to correct all these negative stereotypes about lesbians. In the late 1970s, a famous American lesbian said in a very public interview, “you know, we are not all truck drivers.” And I thought, but some of us are. Again, at the first women’s studies conference at the University of Kansas, I think it was 1979, a very happy lesbian was giving a slide show poking fun at all those stereotypes and how they were all gone. I was laughing along with everybody in the darkness, and I’m feeling, you know, oh I’m really part of this new world, and then came the slide of a butch woman and a femme woman, and the voice saying: ‘we no longer need these kind of images, these kind of women, it was only out of desperation’. The joy went out of it. The sense was, it is so easy to create new exiles, when you are almost drunk, when you are drunk on the possibilities of new liberated communities. So my dedication to the archives was that it would be as inclusive as possible. That  sex workers, lesbian sex workers’ history, would be next to women against pornography history. That the pasties … (What’s a pasty?) … Ok, strippers, you know women who strip, wore pasties to cover their nipples because it was illegal to expose your nipples. Ok I have to tell you the story.  I was doing a slide show, our inclusive slideshow, in the eighties in Los Angeles and one of the images was of a hardhat, a construction worker’s hard hat that a lesbian butch lesbian had worn in the steel mills of Buffalo, New York, with its Lambda gay liberation symbol on it alongside her hard boots that she wore in the factory. I said to the audience, we have this as a memorial to all the lesbians who work and have worked at hard, factory jobs and we don’t know their names.  At the end of the slideshow, the lights came up, and a woman who, to me was quite beautiful, stood in front of me and said, “Joan, I was very moved by the hardhat, but I want to know, if you would accept my pasties. I am a lesbian woman who worked as a striper to get an education.” And of course, I said yes. So in our archives, the pasties sit next to the hardhat, sit next to the T-shirt that announces, “The Lavender Menace,” an early slogan of lesbian feminism. We decided to let the future and visitors decide what the conversation is between these expressions of lesbian life and lesbianism. I say this because our Archives became controversial in the seventies and eighties because we included lesbian sex workers, we included lesbian SM organizations, and the feeling was, in some parts of the community, that the Archives should only have what is called ‘role model’ images. We’d only tell the future how wonderful we were. There’s no way I could give a life’s work to that. I saw it as an insult to the complexity of the future and what might be needed. Inclusivity became a very real issue in many different ways. One time, in a general discussion in the late seventies, a lesbian woman who was thinking of starting a lesbian archives on the West Coast said, “But if there was a lesbian Nazi organization, you wouldn’t want their papers, would you?” And I said: “of course we would. How would we understand?” Now, that seemed like a rhetorical conversation until one afternoon in the 2000s, two women appeared with boxes of a friend of their’s who had just died. As we sat down to talk about the life in these boxes, one of her friends said: “we didn’t know if you would accept this”. This woman who had run a very famous lesbian guesthouse in Provincetown, a popular gay resort town on in Massachusetts, had earlier in her life in the forties and fifties been an FBI agent. She had been awarded a national medal for helping to sentence trade union leaders to prison. She was celebrated as a good citizen for turning in Communists. She wrote a very popular book about it, that the archives has, which was translated into many languages. The cover is a heavy red curtain with a hammer and sickle on it being pried open by this small very butch woman. The issue here being, did we want this collection that said we could be as fascist as anyone else, and I thought: this might be one of the most important collections we could have. This doesn’t mean that it didn’t break my heart, but my heart wasn’t the point of this.

Di, I am not sure what you wanted to say here--J

Dianne: I think there also a difference between an Archives and a liberation movement. An Archive has a particular role to play, it informs a liberation movement but it isn’t a movement itself. An Archive opens possibilities for a movement, helps us to ask ourselves hard questions. So maybe this gets back in a way to the institutionalization problem. In a women’s studies course, especially the parts that are linked to a formal university, you have to asses people as I said earlier. So the research that masters students do, for example, has to fit certain rules which can be counter-feminist. You can close down thinking or limit thinking because of what’s acceptable in academia. And part of the idea of Women’s Studies is to challenge those limits on thinking so, like the Archive, Women’s Studies is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle of our movement, but it’s not the movement itself. There’s an important link between the Archives and Women’s Studies--they absolutely need each other--and hopefully, women’s studies students are using archives to produce histories that we would otherwise not have, and archives are collecting those histories. Together they help to create a space where we can talk across our different histories, and so confront questions like whether we would accept the FBI agent’s papers in our archives.

Joan: I will say, the Archives accepts those papers, that life, that complication of a woman’s decision, that she made but the movement doesn’t have to. I want to separate out those papers from the body,  and how to embrace it, how do you keep it alive and complicated and full of passion in the face of national terrorism. It is something that doesn’t fit into our ideological conversations as we’ve been having them and that’s why I wrote erotic stories, why I tell stories of the body, really, to comfort and to make real that we are carrying this, this so brave and fragile thing—lesbian desire.

Dianne: I just want to also link feminism with the body. I want to resuscitate sex-positive feminism in this conversation. Because for me, feminism was about sexual liberation. Before I came to feminist ideas I didn’t understand really that women had sexuality, I didn’t know women had orgasms, I thought only men had orgasms. It was only because of feminism that I discovered, you know, women have as much to enjoy from sex, as men. I see this discussion in feminism about sex, and its pleasures and its dangers, as part of dynamism that keeps feminism alive, and it’s challenges like this which give us life. How to address sexual violence, and in a way it doesn’t exclude sexual violence which is experienced by men and transgender people and others, and at the same time recognize the complexity of our sexuality and the pleasure and deep humanity that it expresses?

Lepa: Are there any questions? Any associations or anything you can say? [addressed to the audience]

Dianne: Come on everyone! Just a comment!

Adriana: Ok. I had one more question that is in a way linked to all we have talked about tonight. It’s in fact about one sentence that is important for many women and men that are here in this room this evening because it’s about connecting groups that are here tonight. I’m talking about connecting the Women in Black from Belgrade with the Women in Black from Melbourne. I would very much like in this context in which we spoke so far, in that space for differences, sometimes conflicting differences, especially in the context of our general discussion, to ask you how would you both talk about the sentence “WE WILL NOT BE ENEMIES”, which is on a sign held by the Melbourne Women in Black in their vigils.

Dianne: I'll start. The way I see that, it speaks of a long history of women’s peace activism. At least for a century women have been organizing internationally for peace. And even before, as we know from the Greek play Lysistrata in which the wives organize to withhold sex from their soldier husbands until the war is ended. WE WILL NOT BE ENEMIES captures something that I think we’ve associated with women peace activism, which is that women can, (I know this is very idealistic), that women can network across the divisions of the war. Now we have some very positive examples of that happening, including in your recent wars in the Balkans, but I think it’s also important to not just claim the ability to do that as an essentially women’s thing because, really in the end, we have to break down the gender understanding of war and peace, that dichotomy that associates war with men and peace with women, and we have to find ways to associate peace with men, as well as with women. I want to see that WE WILL NOT BE ENEMIES speaks more inclusively than just to women.

Joan: How I want to talk to this, is by reading something with your permission. I should say first, that the sign, WE WILL NOT BE ENEMIES,  grows out of our Women in Black demonstrations in Melbourne that we--many of us are Jewish women, Jewish lesbian women who are standing against the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli state. We are refusing to be enemies with the Palestinians. On one level, that’s why we hold the sign, to show we refuse dicated hatreds, but I want to read something and hopefully, that’s when you’ll see the connection for all this conversation. At the Lesbian Lives conference in Brighton, at the beginning of our European trip, I was talking to a large group of young people, summing up what I had learned from my many lesbian years of desired lesbian touch, what these often nationally policed bodies have taught me:

To question orthodoxies, nationally and sometimes within our own communities. To refuse the allotted places, to move into unknown waters, to take on  huge states of NO, with comrades on either side, to collectively say YES to previously un-thought  of  equities, to take pleasure in new decipherings of old conversations, to compose homes in exile, to listen to the songs of the exiled who perhaps need another kind of body, to look always for the national absences.

Also, from a journal I wrote on our visit to Israel and Palestine several years ago now:

Our friends in Haifa had made us see with their eyes, and so we saw through the landscapes to deeper histories. When we first traveled the roads between Tel Aviv and Haifa our eyes fell off the scrub hills but Hanna asked us to look again. “See those prickly pear cactuses” and she slowed the car down so we could focus our gaze. “Every time you see a cluster of them, you are looking at the ruins of a Palestinian home. The farmers used the plants to form natural corrals for their grazing animals, and also ate the fruit born on the tip of the rounded leaf”. We started to look deeper, longer, and soon we could see the traces of other people, a recently displaced people. Stone foundations started to appear, buried in the living scrub. May you all have friends who make you see again.

This empathetic vision into other histories, this is what I mean by WE SHALL NOT BE ENEMIES. It may not lead to easy answers, but we will not insult the dignity of each other.

Lepa: Are there any more questions? Would someone like to say something? I just wanted to give an image to all this, because we also had these dilemmas in our context. We, lesbians and gay men, had an organization during the wartime, Arkadia, and at that time we didn’t have political nor emotional conditions to open our organization for lesbians and gays who are nationalists. There was no chance, because the environment was full of hatred for the Others.  When in 1992, Dejan Nebrigic and I discussed whether our organization can include racist gays and lesbians we had to decide that it is not possible. This complicates the story that WE WILL NOT BE ENEMIES, in which I  believe, but I think it is important to say that it depends on the context, because one is the Archives and the other thing is our bodies.  My body in that time couldn’t stand the fact that there is someone, that there are other bodies close to mine, in our first lesbian and gay organization, that are spitting on human dignity and that wanted some groups of people to be dead.  We needed a safe space at least in our small group.  That’s one thing, and there was another dilemma.  For example, there was one lesbian who worked for Arkan, and of course we knew that he kills people in our name in war in Croatia, that he is a war murderer.  This lesbian comes to our party, and she has knives in her boots, or a leather whip that she kept under her leather jacket to feel stronger. So lesbians like that were coming to the same places we do, some of us were afraid, and what do we do with that?  Years ago I wrote one text called “Lesbians During Wartime,” knowing that I made my choice to be one of the co-founders of the organization in which there will not be nationalists, and that on the other hand there are other lesbians, whom I cared about, who went to war and who went to other “Arkans.” It was an open question for me, how they stay alone over there, isolated with their lesbian desires. I’m glad that now I can talk about this, and I’m also glad that I met one lesbian who decided to write her doctoral thesis on this subject, to find lesbians who joined the soldiers during the wars from 1991 to 95. I think her work is very significant for us to see, and hear what were the life stories of lesbians who were on the other side.

Adrijana: Ok, thank you. Above all, I would like to express many thanks to our guests.

Joan:  It's very hard to say goodbye. We have seen some of your faces now for 74 hours. It’s going to be very hard to separate. But thank you for the generosity of your attention, and your care.

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