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Unghosting Apparitional (Lesbian) History

Erasures of Black Lesbian Feminism

Michelle Moravec, Author

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11 Ehrenreich’s paper in Heresies #9

While Bristow and Johnson's conversation, shared at the Conference has never been published, the comments on the session by the socialist feminist Barbara Ehrenreich were published in Heresies #9, Organized Women Divided.  Erhrenreich's remaks, titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To Socialist Feminism" equates the situation of being "pulled in two directions" along class lines to what Johnson and Bristow spoke about in Both And.  Ehrenriech's remarks equated race with class, and did not reflect what seems most pressing in Johnson and Bristow's conversation, the feeling of being trapped outside communities rather than being torn between allegiances to two.   

When I think of myself as a member of a class, I mentally 
throw in my lot with my brother, my son, other men who
share more or less common life chances and expectations.
When I think of myself as a member of a sisterhood of
women, I mentally abstract myself from immediate family
or community ties, and focus on what I have in common
with women who may, in some cases, live in vastly different
circumstances from my own.

The point is that both ways of imaginatively situating
ourselves are true to our experience. We exist in two kinds of
"community" — as women in a class of women and men, and
as women in the sisterhood of women. Both are real. But we
do not have a feminist politics that expresses the totality of
our experience as women — "the both and the and" that
Camille Bristow and Bonnie Johnson have spoken about. We
have "partial feminisms," and I am afraid that these partial
feminisms only end up doing violence to some part of
ourselves.
 
While I am unable to find Bristow and Johnson's piece published anywhere, I found many citations to another "conversation" involving Johnson. 

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