Not Yet and Elsewhere: Locating Lesbian Identity in Performance Archives, as Performance Archives

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Notes

1. Anjali Arondekar, Ann Cvetkovich, Christina B. Hanhardt, Regina Kunzel, Tavia Nyong’o, Juana Maria Rodriguez, and Susan Stryker, ‘Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion’, Radical History Review 122 (May, 2015): 212–31 (217).

2. Jill Johnston, Mother Bound. Autobiography in Search of a Father (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 91.

3. Stacy Wolf, ‘Desire in Evidence’, Text and Performance Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1997): 343–51 (345).

4. Arondekar et al., ‘Queering Archives’, 211–31 (217).

5. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 1, 12.

6. Ibid.,16.

7. Annamarie Jagose, Lesbian Utopics (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1–2.

8. Ibid., 5, emphasis by the author.

9. Jill Johnston, ‘Going Down with Peggy and Lois’, The Village Voice, July 5, 1973, 23.

10. Vivian Gornick, ‘Lesbians and Women’s Lib’, The Village Voice, March 18, 1971, 5, 8.

11. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds. Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011),13–4.

12. Louis Horst, ‘Review: American Dance Festival’, Dance Observer 22–23, August-September 1955: 97.

13. Johnston, Mother Bound, 91.

14. Jill Johnston, ‘Thoughts on the Present and Future Directions of Modern Dance’, Dance Observer 22 (August-September, 1955): 102.

15. Ibid.

16. Jill Johnston, ‘The Modern Dance: Direction and Criticisms’, Dance Observer 24 (April, 1956): 56.

17. Johnston, Mother Bound, 91.

18. There were certainly female dance critics writing before Johnston, notably Margaret Lloyd of the Christian Science Monitor and Doris Herring of Dance Magazine, though neither enjoyed the broader circulation and public intellectual status of their male colleagues. Most of the dance critics at Leftist, Jewish, and Black newspapers were women, but those newspapers had smaller circulations and did not offer their writers the kind of public platform that other publications did, although Edna Ocko had broader reach than is often recognized. Thank you to Hannah Kosstrin for helping me think about this. For more on Ocko, see Lynn Garafola, ‘Writing on the Left: The Remarkable Career of Edna Ocko’, Dance Research Journal 34, no. 1 (Summer, 2002): 53–61.

19. Johnston, Mother Bound, 91.

20. Johnston, ‘Thoughts on the Present and Future Directions of Modern Dance’, 102.

21. Jill Johnston, ‘Dance Journal: Robert Whitman’, The Village Voice, September 8, 1966, 10.

22. Gregory Battcock, ‘Introduction’, in Marmalade Me, ed. Jill Johnston (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971), 9–13 (12).

23. ‘Waring-Rainer’, The Village Voice, May 6, 1966, 15, 26.

24. Letter from Diane Fisher to Jill Johnston, Undated. Box 6, Jill Johnston Literary Archive, New York, NY.

25. Ad, The New York Times, November 16, 1969, BR61.

26. Jill Johnston, ‘Come Seven’, The Village Voice, May 15, 1969, 26, 30.

27. See note 25 above.

28. Letter from J. Berger to Jill Johnston, March 15, 1971, Box 7, Jill Johnston Literary Archive. New York, NY.

29. Letter from G. Degeushine to Jill Johnston, June 18, 1969, Box 7, Jill Johnston Literary Archive. New York, NY.

30. Jill Johnston, ‘Lois Lane is a Lesbian’, March 4, 1971, Village Voice: 9.

31. Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 275.

32. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 49.

33. Town Bloody Hall: a Dialogue On Women’s Liberation, Dir: Chris Hegedus & D.A. Pennebaker (New York, NY: PBS, 1979).

34. Clare Croft, ‘Lesbian Echoes: Jill Johnston’s Political Embodiments’, in Futures of Dance Studies, ed. Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) 117–34.

35. Cindy García. ‘“Don’t leave me, Celia!” Salsera homosociality and pan-Latina corporealities’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist theory 18, no. 3 (2008): 199–213 (204).

36. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York, NY: Da Capo Press),132–47.

37. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press: 1993), 202.

38. Castle’s argument shares much with dance theorist Susan Foster’s assessment with how modern dance functioned via a similarly structured closet – a structure that was essential for the ascendancy of gay men in mid-century US American modern dance: the generation with whom Johnston studied (Limón) and whom she lauded in her writing (Cunningham). See Susan Leigh Foster, ‘Closets Full of Dances: Modern Dance’s Performance of Masculinity and Sexuality’, in Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) 147–208.

39. Jill Johnston, ‘Lois Lane is a Lesbian’, The Village Voice. March 11, 1971, 28.

40. Jill Johnston, ‘Stein: Affectionately Obscene Poetry’, The Village Voice. May 4, 1972, 25, 28; and Jill Johnston, ‘Avocados and Rainstorms’, The Village Voice, May 11, 1972, 52, 54, 56.

41. For a discussion of transphobia and the role of trans women in lesbian 1970s lesbian feminism, see Emma Heaney, ‘Women-Identified Women’, Trans Studies Quarterly 3, no 1–2 (May, 2016): 137–45. For more on the exclusion of Black lesbians from lesbian feminism (even for a figure as well-known as Audre Lorde), see Amber Musser, ‘Re-membering Audre: Adding Lesbian Feminist Mother Poet to Black’, in No Tea, No Shade: New Writing in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 346–61.

42. Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 211.

43. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 242.

44. Jill Johnston Folder, Lesbian Herstory Archives, New York, NY.

45. Jill Johnston Folder, Lesbian Herstory Archives, New York, NY.

46. Ibid.

47. Sharon Thompson, ‘Urgent: The Lesbian Home Movie Project’, The Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 1 (2015), 114–6 (115).

48. For more on the ways Johnston used humor toward political ends, see Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).