Complicated Inheritance: Sistershow (1973–1974) and the Queering of Feminism

Abstract

In complicating feminist inheritance, this article disrupts teleological narratives of ‘second’ and ‘third wave’ feminist activism by locating ‘queer tendencies’—often rooted within contemporary frameworks of Western feminisms—within the British Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). Understanding ‘queer tendencies’ allows a reappraisal of feminist strategies that have operated outside state formations; those feminisms that use disruptive cultural politics to open up conceptions of sexuality, gender and feminist identification. Such strategies, and the groups that deploy them, have not been eagerly assimilated into dominant narratives of feminist historiography.

As such, by ‘queering the historical record’, we aim to move from generational to strategic-based understandings of feminist history. We introduce the queer feminist cultural activism of an agit-prop theatre group called ‘Sistershow’ (Bristol, 1973–1974). Whilst Sistershow was comprised of women with various and fluid sexualities, the show itself created a space for its participants to explore their desires outside heteronormative frameworks. Here, ‘queer tendencies’ form strategic interventions that call on the disruptive power of erotics rather than referring to sexual or gender orientations—be they heterosexual, queer or other. Drawing on life history materials (oral interviews and letters) and historical artefacts (photos, programmes, flyers) surrounding Sistershow, this paper aims to contribute a playful troubling of both one-dimensional understandings of ‘seventies feminism’ and contemporary ‘third wave’ feminist activist strategies, and to queer feminism's recent past.

Keywords:

• feminist memory
• generations
• queer
• third wave
• Women's Liberation Movement

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Alison Rook, Jill Robin, Angela Rodaway and Helen Taylor for sharing their Sistershow archives and memories with us during this research.

Notes

¹Eve Setch has also criticised dominant historiographies of the British Women's Liberation Movement for privileging an ‘intellectual legacy’ over the documentation and analysis of WLM grassroots actions (Setch 2002). A spate of WLM memoirs are seeking to reverse this trend (Rowbotham 2002; Segal 2007; Roberts 2008). Additionally, a number of feminist public history initiatives have been launched, including a UK-wide research network (http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/aboutthecollections/research/wlmnetwork.cfm) and oral history projects (http://heartoftherace.blogspot.com), Feminist Webs (http://www.feministwebs.com), Bolton Women's Liberation History Project (http://www.bolton-womens-liberation.org), Remembering Olive Collective (http://rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com) and Unfinished Histories theatre project (http://www.unfinishedhistories.com).

²Whilst Sistershow was comprised of women with various and fluid sexualities, the show itself created a space for participants to explore their desires outside heteronormative frames. Our use of ‘queer tendencies’ here draws on the disruptive power of erotics (Lorde 2007), rather than referring to sexual or gender orientations per se—be they heterosexual, queer or other.

³The term ‘queer’ has been used historically to denote something strange, as a term of abuse for homosexuality, and as a reclaimed name for sexualities and genders outside heteronormative frameworks (Sullivan 2003). This article looks at ‘queer tendencies’ and ‘queer’ as a set of actions, to queer the historical record.

⁴In January 1992, Rebecca Walker—daughter of novelist Alice Walker and goddaughter of Ms.Magazine stalwart Gloria Steinem—penned an article for Ms.Magazine entitled ‘Becoming the Third Wave’, which distanced Rebecca Walker's feminism from both perceived second wave and postfeminist trajectories, and coined a neologism for a new movement based on contradiction and pleasure, and women's social, political and cultural equality.

⁵In our personal correspondence, Alison Rook commented, ‘There were no women of colour in Sistershow and I think our awareness of the issue was very slight’ (Rook 2009b). Helen Taylor also commented that ‘Race wasn't much on our agenda’ (Taylor 2009).

⁶See Julianna Bethlen, Building the Future: Twenty-five Years of Women and Manual Trades, Organisational Pamphlet, 2001; the work of the See Red Poster Collective (housed at The Women's Library, London); Eileen Cadman, Gail Chester and Agnes Pivot (eds), Rolling Our Own: Women as Printers, Publishers and Distributers, London: Minority Press Group, 1981; Cinenova film archive, including films made by women in the WLM, http://www.cinenova.org.uk; for theatre and performance art, see www.unfinishedhistories.com; for music made by women in the UK, see the Women's Revolution Per Minute archive, Birmingham City Library.

⁷Pat V. T. West died from cancer in June 2008. The first ever anthology of her poetry, It Was Not & Never Would Be Enough &..., was published posthumously by Rive Gauche, the publishing imprint she established in 2010. Her life and work is documented at http://www.patvtwest.co.uk