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Feminist Studies

Revising ‘Re-vision’: Documenting 1970s Feminisms and the Queer Potentiality of Digital Feminist Archives

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In 1972, Adrienne Rich wrote an essay that would both profoundly shape feminist approaches to women’s history in the decades to come and go on to inform feminists’ own self-archiving practices. ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ paints a provocative portrait of contemporary women as ‘sleepwalkers’ awakening together to reject the history and tradition of male thinkers and name themselves as authors in their own right (Rich, 1972: 18). The essay initially reads as an attempt to encourage female writers of fiction and poetry; however, its call to ‘re-vision’ women’s histories provoked responses from myriad feminists across scholarly and artistic spectrums. They pursued this project of self-knowledge with the sincere belief that in reimagining women’s pasts, they could better know themselves in the present, and guarantee the survival of women and the continuation of women’s creative and intellectual work in the future. Like Rich, they considered their victimization and anger to be birthing pains and thought of themselves as “bearing [them]selves” through their creations (Rich, 1972: 25). In 1979, the visual artist Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party, a giant triangular dining table installation with thirty-nine vulva-like place settings, so that women from across time—from ‘the primordial goddess’ to Sappho to Georgia O’Keefe—might sit together in conversation. Those who viewed the work, including early audiences and those to visit it since its permanent instillation at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007, would become participants in this cross-temporal feminist communion. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist historians also set about to uncover the secret lives of women, famous and forgotten, across the centuries. Their histories generally served as celebrations of these women’s pasts and drew connections between their lives and those of women in the present. In Surpassing the Love of Men, Lillian Faderman, for example, ultimately claimed various ‘romantic friendships’ from across the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries to be early iterations of lesbian feminism (Faderman, 1981: 20). Feminist film theorists, meanwhile, contended that they had to ‘re-vision’ much of film history—including not only its objects and approaches but its structures of vision as well—before an authentic women’s cinema could emerge (Doane, Mellencamp, Williams, 1984: 2, 14-15). Though the particular stakes of each of their disciplines and media varied, these assorted feminist projects from the 1970s and 1980s agreed with Rich that knowledge of women’s history as their own history was imperative for women, as self-actualized creatures, to survive.

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: Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.,
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English
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Feminists
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Feminist Archives
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