As I was wrapping up the chapter on lesbian land—the first draft anyway!—I came across an interesting concept that offered an explanation for something I’d been struggling to put my finger on.
Even sympathetic observers of the landdyke world note that the community is running out of time. Heather Burmeister, who wrote a delightfully readable Master’s thesis on landdykes and their culture, said, “The founders of the southern Oregon lesbian land communities are aging, and without a new generation of women to take over the lands there may not be a lesbian land community in the future.”
There are lots of reasons for the slow fadeout. Life in rural isolation hasn’t gotten much easier since the 1970s, and while it’s now theoretically possible to do remote work from the land—though I’m not sure most landdykes would see that as escaping the patriarchy—that requires better Internet connection than most of them have. (They are, after all, low-income rural residents, with the digital and medical/dental divides that confers.)
The more divisive issue, though, is that as a matter of policy, almost all lesbian land communities still refuse access to anyone but “womyn-born womyn,” or WBW as it usually appears in country-lesbian publications. This doesn’t just exclude trans and nonbinary people, but also cis women who find the policy offensive and/or wrong.
Timing is everything, and while I might have been—heck, was!—a separatist in the ‘80s, I now know far too many trans and nonbinary people to be OK with excluding them and all the other trans and nonbinary people I don’t know. Like many other people’s, my understanding and experience of gender has expanded and transformed in the last couple of decades, and what seemed like a productive strategy 40 years ago now feels rude and wrong.
On lesbian land, though, the ideas and policies that pertained back in the days of the founders mostly still apply—and a big reason for that is that it has been a very stable community. That’s not to say that everyone who moved onto rural collectives in the 1970s and ‘80s stayed—lots of women left—but very few new arrivals took their place. Effectively, the community shrank and stagnated.
Enter into my consciousness sociologist Nancy Whittier, who has written quite extensively about feminist generations. My first exposure to her ideas came in a 1997 article examining feminist activism in Columbus, Ohio. Drawing on the work of other sociologists and political scientists, Whittier noted that in feminist groups, as in most movements, each generation of activists constructs different identities based on the dominant ideas and prevailing conditions at the time of their joining. (In this case, a “generation” is a group of people that activates at the same time, rather than people born around the same time, though those things often coincide.) What’s more, a cohort’s initial perspective tends to endure throughout their time in the movement. As new generations bring their energy and efforts, and earlier activists burn out, the cohorts that shape the ideology and focus are effectively replaced. Groups with less turnover therefore experience more ideological continuity, and vice versa.
The landdyke community is an extreme example of low turnover and high ideological continuity. There hasn’t been much generational infighting, but without newcomers bringing fresh ideas and personal connections, the movement has held on to the views that dominated in the 1970s and ‘80s. A movement that was largely shaped by exclusions has held firm to those convictions even as the world has changed.
The thing that strikes me about this is that although their long-term survival is uncertain at best, isolation has allowed lesbian land communities to hold on longer than other most other dyke institutions. In Southern Oregon alone, at least nine extant land projects have been in existence since the 1970s—and even though most have very few residents these days, they have outlasted all the Beaver State bars, bookstores, and softball teams of a similar vintage.
I have to say, though, although far fewer feminist bookstores survive from that era, they’ve aged better. Atlanta’s Charis Books and More, which celebrated its 48th birthday in November, hosts regular “Trans and Friends” and “Gender-Creative Parenting” group meetings, along with the usual readings and book-launch events, and its nonprofit arm is run by a trans guy who has worked at the store for decades. As that very guy, ER Anderson, told me last year, Charis is “a lesbian space that is also a queer space and a trans space." Meanwhile, in Madison, Wisconsin, A Room of One’s Own, founded in 1975, proudly describes itself as “queer & trans owned.”
RECOMMENDATIONS: I really liked “In the Bubble,” Molly Fischer’s New Yorker piece about NFT artist Yam Karkai, in part because it’s one of the first stories about NFTs that hasn’t made me want to open a window and yell, “Doesn’t everyone see that this is obviously BULLLSHIIIIITTT?” (Though, to be clear, that is my view.) There’s a paragraph where Karkai and her male colleagues are trying to figure out why there are only women in a fictional universe she was dreaming up. The answer seemed pretty obvious to me—those women have fled the patriarchy!—but astonishingly that doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. (Molly’s last sentence in that graf is a corker: “It was starting to feel as if George Lucas had sold the rights to Star Wars action figures before conceiving of what had happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”)
LISTEN TO ME: The holidays shook up the Working schedule, so no new interview from me, but I did talk with Karen Han about her interview with the creators of Oni: Thunder God’s Tale and with guest host Zak Rosen about his conversation with two members of the Detroit theater group The Hinterlands.
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