Incomplete Messengers: Notes on Heavy Equipment

Tee Corinne, “Lesbian Photography on the U.S. West Coast: 1972–1997,” Purdue, 1998 →.

Alix Dobkin and Sally Tatnall, “The Erasure of Lesbians,” Gender Identity Watch: Watching Legal Developments that Erase Female Reality, January 28, 2015 →.

Liza Cowan frequently posts hostile transphobic comments to Facebook, the Lesbian Herstory Archives and h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y instagram feeds. Cowan’s 1975 photo of Alix Dobkin’s “The Future is Female” T-shirt went viral when it was shared on h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y and it in turn inspired the Otherwild store to create a wildly popular contemporary version of the t-shirt with the same slogan, which did not adhere a tag with a critical lens to the slogan’s ideologies. For other current examples of TERFs in action see Erin Flegg, who covers resistance to anti-sex worker rhetoric and transmisogyny in Vancouver, “New Space, Old Politics,” in Maisonneuve Quarterly (October 2017). For a source deconstructing the logic of TERFs see Sara Ahmed, “An Affinity of Hammers,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility Edited by Johanna Burton, Reina Gossett, Eric Stanley, (MIT Press, 2017), 26.

Kai M. Green, “Troubling the Waters: Mobilizing a Trans* Analytic,” No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson, (Duke University Press, 2016), 67.

Green, 66.

Beverly Smith, in an interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free—Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, (Haymarket Books, 2017), 108.

Combahee River Collective published the pamphlet originally titled, “Six Black Women: Why Did they Die?” in 1979 outlining the conditions leading to the murders, resources such as community meetings, and guidelines to help women protect themselves. Tia Cross Papers 1963-2007, MC 801, Box 9, Folder 18, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Terrion L. Williamson’s essay “Why Did They Die? On Combahee and the Serialization of Black Death,” Souls, A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 19, 2017 - Issue 3: Combahee at 40: New Conversations and Debates in Black Feminism, 328–341.

Karen A. Hagberg’s article “Rash of Murders Stirs Feminist Outrage,” ran on the cover of the New Women’s Times, vol. 5, no. 13 (June–July), under a photograph of Tia Cross, captioned, “April 29, demonstration organized by a coalition of Boston feminist groups in response to the growing number of murders in Roxbury/Dorchester neighborhoods.”

Letter, Barbara Smith to New Women’s Times May 26, 1979, Tia Cross Papers 1963–2007, MC 801, Box 9, Folder 18, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Other photographers in the Boston area attempting to extend the longevity of these protests who have photographed this sign included Cheryl DeVall, Ellen Shub, and Marcia Stano.

Tia Cross, Freada Klein, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, “Unlearning Racism: Face-Face, Day-to-Day Racism CR,” (Heresies 15: Racism is the Issue, 1982), 66 →.

Tia Cross, →.

Diana Davies Oral History, conducted by Laura Finkel and Aimee Brown in 2001, (Diana Davies Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass), 16.

Decolonize this Place asked “Can photography be decolonized?” at Photography Expanded: Counter-Histories, May 1, 2018, Magnum Foundation at The New School, New York.

Davies Oral History, 8.

Davies Oral History, 16.

Kady Oral History conducted by Aimee Brown in 2001, (Kady Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass), 13.

Kady Oral History, 13.

JEB, phone interview with author, October 10, 2017.

Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box, dir. Michelle Parkerson, 1987 →.

Parkerson

Morgan M. Page, One from the Vaults, episode 18, “Stormé Weather,” 2017 →.

Elyssa Goodman, “Drag Herstory: A Drag King’s Journey From Cabaret Legend to Iconic Activist,” Them, March 29, 2018, →.

Wendy Syfret, “how instagram can be a weapon against the erasure of lesbian culture,” i-D, June 6, 2016 →.

Tabs Benjamin in “Masculinity” Kicking the Kyriarchy podcast, episode 24, August 7, 2018.

Saskia Scheffer, interview with author, July 7, 2018. LHA digital collections: →.

A line of t-shirts, tote bags, hats, buttons, designed by h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y and sold at Otherwild donates 10 percent of profits to the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Examples abound of images arriving online via community-based and academic archives, and then circulating without requests to recirculate from whoever holds the copyright. The question of how to treat published material that in particular contains lesbian content is explored in Elizabeth Groeneveld’s essay “Remediating Pornography: the On Our Back Digitization Debate,” Continuum, 32:1, 73-83, 20 Nov 2017

The Blatant Image: a Magazine of Feminist Photography was co-edited by Ruth Mountaingrove, Tee A. Corinne and Caroline Overman.

Joan E. Biren, “Lesbian Photography—Seeing through Our Own Eyes,” The Blatant Image: A magazine of Feminist Photography, no. 1 (1981): 52.

Here I am thinking of photographs of Sharon Farmer and JEB that publicized Tia Cross’s “Lesbian Photographers” slideshow and talk, where both are wearing two cameras, one falling over their chests, the other down by their waists, perhaps one black and white, and one color, or one for backup if technology problems ensued. Further advancing the camera as prosthesis theory is in an interview by author and Lana Dee Povitz, Silver Spring, MD, August 12, 2017.

Clarity Haynes, “I’m a Queer Feminist Artist. Why Are My Paintings Censored on Social Media?,” Hyperallergic, March 21, 2018 →.

I’ve noticed Ian Lewandowski and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, both queer identified portrait studio photographers, who often take pictures of people when they are not wearing clothes, have at least twice had posting of their work taken down from Instagram. Also see Hito Steyerl, “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise,” e-flux Journal 60, (December 2014) →.

Maximilíano Durón, “Laura Aguilar, Compassionate Photographer of Marginalized Groups, Dies at 58,”ArtNews, April 25, 2018 →.