Forms of resistance
An Oral History of the Lesbian Avengers - fascinating. Though with this: I also think the internal fucking fucked the Lesbian Avengers. When you start getting into relationships and you’re happier, you protest less because you’re less outraged.
I was rolling my eyes somewhat and thinking, sounds more like a whole lot of intra-organisation interpersonal draaaaaama to me, rather than skipping through the dew-drops singing to the fluffy bunnies.
But what do I know.
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Jackie Collins sold half a billion books, taught women to demand power, and told the truth about Hollywood, yet she’s never gotten her due.
Which is, dare we say, probably a story that can be told about a lot of lady writers of wymmynz fiction, no? Her female characters tend to be bold, smart, and resilient [perish the thort]. Lucky Santangelo, her most storied character-who Lady Boss theorizes is Collins’s alter ego-overcomes a forced marriage, mob violence, a sexist father, and a litany of abuses to become a casino boss and the head of her own movie studio. Her message for readers, Collins told the Los Angeles Times in 1988, was that “women need to be stronger … Women have always been pushed into positions in the bedroom, the kitchen, the workforce. Women can do anything.” It’s easy to satirize her style, with its rampant descriptors (“Lucky was a slender, long-limbed woman with an abundance of shoulder-length jet curls; dangerous black opal eyes; full, sensual lips; and a deep olive skin”) and husky excess. But the substance beneath it merits closer attention. Collins’s agent, Morton Janklow, argues in the film that “the great storyteller is rarer than the great writer, and Jackie was a great storyteller.”
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How Women Fought Misogyny in the Underground Press
I cannot hear those damn mermaids singing, but I have an anthology published in 1971 and presumably purchased somewhere about that date which includes Robin Morgan's Goodbye To All That piece cited therein.
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Doing meticulous research is also resistance: The Study That Debunks Most Anti-Abortion Arguments. Wow, it looks as though giving women agency over what happens to their own bodies and their reproductive capacities actually has positive outcomes, who'dathunkit?
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