Wanting Pictures After Feminism: Re-reading On Our Backs

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between photography and feminism that emerges through the pages of the lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs (1984–2006). The San Francisco-based magazine represents an exceptional archive of images made in the context of lesbian community. Returning to the photographs that were published in early issues of the magazine, the article argues that On Our Backs, whilst explicitly addressed to a paucity of available images of lesbian culture, reflects a complex engagement with the meaning of the photographic image in dialogue with contemporaneous feminist debates. Through the work of Tee Corinne, Morgan Gwenwald and Honey Lee Cottrell, a desire for pictures renders the image a site of fantasy in which different ways of inhabiting lesbian identity form in dialogue with a community of readers.

Keywords:

• lesbian
• feminism
• photography
• periodicals
• desire

Notes

1 In the early 1990s, Mandy Merck, Lisa Duggan, Nan Hunter and others wrote extensively on this period of feminist debate within the emergent field of queer studies. See, for example, Merck (1993), and Duggan and Hunter (2006).

2 Sue Ellen-Case, who wrote a play about Maud’s, describes her first visit to the bar in an essay on butch identity and lesbian style in the 1960s and 1970s (Ellen-Case 1998).

3 Jill Johnston, the journalist, and author of Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, describes how, prior to the Stonewall riot in 1969, lesbian identity did not exist as a broadly unifiable category. Thus she argues that only after the advent of the modern Gay Liberation Movement were many able to identify as lesbians (Johnson 1998).

4 In her essay ‘A “Labor From the Heart”’, Jan Whitt discusses a number of lesbian feminist periodicals published throughout the twentieth century including The Ladder, Focus: A Journal for Lesbians and Sinister Wisdom. She quotes Lisa Ben, who edited Vice Versa, an early dyke magazine, ‘I gave it to my friends, because I felt that it was a labor from the heart, and I shouldn’t get any money for it’ (Whitt 2001: 235).

5 ‘Countervision’ was the title for a 1982 feminist photography project that included contributions from Cathy Cade, Joan E. Biren and Barbara Hammer among others. Related material can be viewed at the Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University, where the archives of Susie Bright, Honey Lee Cottrell and On Our Backs are also held.

6 Both Corinne and JEB were involved with both the Rootworks project and The Blatant Image. For a detailed account of ‘Lesbian Images in Photography, 1850–present’ see Hackett, 2015.

7 The group that published On Our Backs were not solely interested in publishing and also utilised video, producing pornographic shorts and features. Whilst working on the magazine, Sundahl and her partner Nan Kinney established Fatale Video. They utilised new home video technologies to become one of the largest distributors of lesbian porn, producing titles such as Shadows (1985), Clips (1988), Suburban Dykes and the ludicrous, cathartic Bathroom Sluts (both 1991). Cherry Smyth reviewed the lesbian pornography that was burgeoning at this time, taking in what she described as its banal S/M scenes, the thrill of the mock penis and, finally, the promise of a ‘filmic practice that explores the gap between identity and fantasy’. See Smyth 1990: 159.

8 This prohibition was enacted through censorship, though not always. Handwritten notes adhered to the copies of On Our Backs that are held in the Lesbian Archive at Glasgow Women’s Library simply state ‘for research purposes only’. Whilst permitting readers access to the magazine, the note nonetheless intervenes in the manner in which the magazine is read, urging research in opposition to pleasure.

9 In 1985, the San Diego Gayzette, invited reader responses to the magazine with one employee of a bookstore saying that ‘obviously, the people who are complaining about the price are not the ones buying it’ (San Diego Gayzette 1985: 12)

10 This placed material constraints on image production too and the magazine was nearly always printed in black and white. When the publishers did find a colour printer that they could afford, restrictions surrounding content forced them to return to a sympathetic printer and monochrome format.

11 Deborah Bright edited an edition of the photography magazine exposure in 1994 titled ‘Sex Wars’. The collection gathered together the work of various artists engaged in making sex-radical images.