#not to say male brain exists but the flowery sentence structures and vague labels used in mensplaining in some web articles are just

[dyke-bars-never-last]

Harmony Hammond

She believed that there was a quality of lesbianness that consisted of more than sexual desire for women, but influenced her entire sense of herself in the world. And she thought that this quality expressed itself materially in her art-making practice, not just the final form but the process by which she shaped her sculpture.

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[The virginal imagery]is a visual symbol of female difference from the hegemonic masculine, and a sign of solidarity among women that supported common cause among straight and lesbian feminists.

The cost of policing against misuse [of female body parts] was draining explicit sexuality from “lesbian” images and reconceptualizing the erotic apart from sexual desire. Following Audre Lorde by severing the erotic from desire so as to emphasize common bonds among women would not achieve Hammond’s ends.

Key to reading Hammond’s wrapped work is its “haptic visuality,” the relay it establishes between eye and hand.

She found the taxonomy of “shells, flowers, [and] fruits” associated with some vaginal imagery to be too limiting.

She found her solution in a fantasy novel, The Lesbian Body. Inspired by Monique Wittig, Hammond took a heteronormative language, the visual lexicon of feminist art, and reworked it until it spoke to her experience as well.

The episodic prose poem vividly describes the dismemberment of lesbian bodies and the poetic flow is arbitrarily cut and interrupted by pages on which body parts are listed in capital letters: “THE PLEXUSES THE GLANDS THE GANGLIA THE LOBES THE MUCOSAE THE TISSUES THE CALLOSITIES THE BONES THE CARTILAGE THE OSTEOID . . .” (Wittig, 1986: 40).

Wittig invented a lesbian “I” (“j/e”), a speaking subject whose splitting redoubled her authority so that it was the lesbian voice, not the masculine, that spoke universally, beyond gender.

You look at m/e, you do not stop looking at m/e

Sight was only one of the modes of sensory exploration the lesbian lovers used to connect. Touch was at least as important:

I have access to your glottis and your larynx red with blood voice stifled. I reach your trachea, I embed m/yself as far as your left lung, there m/y so delicate one I place m/y two hands on the pale pink bland mass touched it unfolds somewhat, it moves fanwise, m/y knees flex, I gather into m/y mouth your entire reserves of air.

As was smell:

The smell that escapes from m/e is noisome. You do not stop your nostrils. You do not exclaim with fright when at a given moment m/y putrescent and half-liquid body touches the length of your bare back.

Arlene Raven compared the “raw sensuousness” in Les Guérillères with Hammond’s Kudzu, whose imposing presence was enhanced by the limb-like appendages that threatened to embrace or entrap the viewer.

Lucy Lippard listed traits she observed recurring in art by women: “overall texture, often sensuously tactile and repetitive or detailed to the point of obsession; the preponderance of circular forms, central focus, inner space ... layers, strata, or veils”. Ruth Iskin described an additive process and repetitive, slow, rhythmic gestures in some work by women; according to Iskin, however, these attributes were typical of art with a lesbian sensibility.

For Hammond, wrapping layers of textured material marked time and opened a level of abstraction where sexuality could be suggested:

Instead of focusing on the figure with its fixed contour and impermeable surface of skin, abstraction opens up time and space, allowing us (other women/lesbians) to feel/respond sexually “in the body” (versus “to the figure”) to what we see.

And since the lesbian gaze is not focused on the “image of orgasm” but rather on how it feels, it can avoid the male gaze and be extended indefinitely.

Isolating the vagina fragmented the female body, it was true, and so Hammond and Wittig both worked to redirect the viewer’s or reader’s attention to include the rest of the body, its surface and interior, while contesting the notion of genitally organized sexuality. Judith Butler found [Wittig’s theory] suggests that the lesbian can exist somehow beyond gender, with the result that gender itself becomes impossible as constructed according to normative heterosexuality.

The erotic incorporated

both the identity politics of Lorde’s female solidarity and the violent, sexual aspects of Wittig’s lesbian protagonists

and is powerful to the extent that they challenged masculine culture, “modern technology,” and the “civilized world”.

Her sculptures avoided the pitfall of substituting one essence for another, lesbian for feminine sensibility, but activated both