Gender, Sexuality and Fictive Geography: The Political Creation of Womyn’s Music

• In Event: Gender and Place

Abstract

The creation of a community space is a key for marginalized groups organizing for collective action and the construction of these spaces can be shaped by gender and sexuality. I draw on a multi-level approach of gender that conceptualizes it as a process, system of stratification and a structure to analyze how critiques of gender oppression shape collective space, challenging traditional notions and creating new understandings and norms. While scholars have documented the importance of geographic community and the interactions within for reshaping gender and sexuality, how does “fictive geography” or “imagined community” shape gendered understandings of what it means to be a marginalized society? Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that imagined communities are the result of shared cultural artifacts and roots, particular historical forces, and individuals’ deep attachments made possible through technology. I draw on Anderson’s concept of imagined community, geographers’ use of “fictive place” (Overton and Murray 2016) and anthropologists’ ideas of “fictive kin,” and employ the concept of “fictive geography” to explore non-geographic collective space, conceived through gender critiques. Fictive geography creates a world in which members may never interact in person but through gendered structures and processes are connected in meaningful ways. I investigate the role of fictive geography in the development of the womyn’s music community in the late 1970s to early 1990s. Through the use of archival material, I show how the development of a womyn’s music community gave rise to new gendered understandings, expectations and norms. Despite geographically situated events and festivals, many women participated from a distance, connected through the distribution of music. Together these two sites, the situated and imagined, create a gendered fictive geography that politically redefined what it meant to be -- and to live as -- a lesbian, feminist, and lesbian-feminist through music and poetry.

Author

• Jo Reger, Oakland University