"The Times of Wimmin": Queer Futurity in WomanSpirit Magazine, 1974-1984

Abstract

The southern Oregon women’s community began during the 1970s and developed into a loose network of intentional lesbian collectives concentrated in the rural southwest part of the state. As internal divisions fractured the feminist movement, some lesbians found themselves dissatisfied with living in the patriarchal, heteronormative cities, desiring spaces made by and for lesbians. Lesbian feminists and other women formed collectives on rural land in order to get closer to nature and create a new women’s culture. This culture was made and spread through numerous publications, like WomanSpirit magazine, which ran from 1974 to 1984 and both fostered and documented the burgeoning lesbian feminist spiritual culture of the time. WomanSpirit was futurity bound––from beginning to end, its contributors imagined what it might be like to create a better future for themselves and their sisters out of the constrictive, patriarchal present. This thesis uses queer futurity, coined by José Esteban Muñoz in 2009, to analyze WomanSpirit and its visions of the future, ranging from sincere beliefs in utopian idealism to anxiety and the fear of an imminent nuclear crisis.