dykeotomy-butchandfemme

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

When someone says these days sexism and misogyny don’t exist anymore show them this.

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

I'd very much like to punch a feminist.

I’d never, ever hurt a lady but I’d be happy to punch a feminist. It’d bring me great joy.

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‘March 8th - International Women’s Day’, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, place unknown, [1970s].

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

Just for fun...

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

1982

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

Call to Action

When I think about why a call to action must be made, I think about our youth. It is hard enough growing up in a world you don’t feel like you belong in but being queer just adds to the stress of not being widely accepted. Statistics done by the Human Rights Campaign depict just how many difficulties our LGBTQIA youth face.

This is important when electing officials who can make laws that oppress LGBT youth.

We need to come together within our communities and educate one another on the importance of acceptance.

Bullying is unacceptable. As educators and peers we must not tolerate any form of bullying physical, sexual, mental, or verbal.

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

Ellen DeGeneres is one of the most influential lesbians of our time. She opened up the doors for the LGBT community to be able to speak up about their own identities. She has become one of the leading faces of the community and continues to help people every day because she is a humble, funny, relatable woman. Although her whiteness is privileging to her own identity, she does carry the voices of those who cannot be heard. This video of her brings attention to the amount of suicides that are done by LGBT people due to bullying. 

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Just one of many aesthetics lesbians adopt as their own.

Butch lesbians are redefining masculinity and indefinitely challenging hegemonic masculinity because as the norm that is unquestioned and taken for granted, the assumption is that a specific type of person fits into this category. When we deconstruct our understandings of these concepts and realize it is something we are taught, we can break down these heteronormative idealized forms of masculinity and barriers all lesbians face.

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HOW CAN YOU HELP?

What is most important for you to take away from this page is that you are now at least a little more educated on lesbian activism than you were before. Becoming an ally of the community is your first step in helping be a part of the change and becoming an advocate for the LGBTQIA community. 

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It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

Audre Lorde

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This is Cherrie Moraga. She wrote ‘La Guera’ where she discussed the disconnect between her mother’s experiences growing up and her own. She struggles with her own oppressions as a fair skinned Chicana whose mother was Chicana and father was Anglo. She was never taught much Spanish and recognizes her own privilege when looking at her mother’s poor, uneducated, Chicana narrative, however she struggles with the lack of emotional support she received identifying as a lesbian. It is important to note that no one has the same narrative, no matter how similar the attributes and identities may be. 

"In this country," she writes, "lesbianinsm is a poverty- as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor...The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of oppression" (Moraga 29).

Moraga, Cherrie. “La Guera.” This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color, 1983, pp. 27-34.

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

Can Trans Women Be Lesbians?

Susan Stryker, a trans lesbian feminist, argues that there is more than one kind of feminism. Her goal was to end gender based oppression by eliminating the idea that trans women brought a “male presence” into a feminine space (Stryker 378). As the queer movement began however, she finally felt like she had a space where she could identify. Today the term ‘lesbian’ has almost come and gone, as the times are shifting away from the word lesbian and onto the community of being ‘queer’.

Similarly Julia Serano, another trans lesbian feminist, participated in an oppositional protest of Michigan’s Womyn’s Music Festival by attending Camp Trans in 2003. Camp Trans is a protest against the festival due to its exclusion of trans women. 

Stryker, Susan. “Lesbian Generations: Transsexual, Lesbian, Feminist.” Feminist Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2013, pp. 375-383.

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

Art is especially wonderful for women to express themselves. Have a listen.

[dykeotomy-butchandfemme]

The Lavender Menace

The Lavender Menace was an informal group of lesbian radical feminists formed to protest the exclusion of lesbians and lesbian issues from the feminist movement. This group formed at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970