I began writing and researching lesbian literature in the early 1980’s. As a playwright, I was not just looking for my history, but I was searching for different paradigms and new/old archetypes from a culture that had been buried or appropriated. The so-called “classic” dramas were male narratives, obsessed with possession and overthrow, especially of father figures. The women were obstacles, rewards, or objects of exchange in the bloody transactions between men. This was not a template I could customize by the mere switching of pronouns.
 
And, of course, the so-called universal archetypes of this drama were happy housewives, glorying in their upwardly mobile marriages, or depressing martyrs and victims. The spunky women, like the mid-life, cast-off wife Medea, go mad with jealousy and murder their own children. The women excluded from male hierarchies waste their lives in futile gestures, like Antigone. The captive, raped, colonized survivor, like Cassandra, is doomed to a post-traumatic scenario of recounting her tale of atrocity to a population who will not or cannot believe her. And so on…

This was my “heritage” as a Western playwright. Obviously, I could not tell a lesbian story with these colonial archetypes or dominance paradigms. Nor did I want to write superficial lesbian sit-coms, or endless parodies or critiques of patriarchal drama for a rising elite of post-modern, faux feminists to consume. It is, of course, impossible to ignore this toxic theatre legacy, but rather than batter at the gates of this boys’ club in vain attempts to gain entry, I wanted to look back and down on it from the perspective of a fully-realized, lesbian-centered narrative.
 
Where would I turn for my narrative histories? Where was the lesbian-feminist equivalent of the Bible, or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita? Where was my Iliad, my Odyssey? Who would be my Homer?
 
And this is when I discovered the writings of Monique Wittig. I found them among the used paperbacks in a women’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon. The Lesbian Body. The Guérilières. The Opoponax. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. Wittig was generating archetypes and paradigms. She was writing about ancient matriarchal cultures that, paradoxically, were contemporaneous with ours. She was reclaiming goddesses, students of Sappho, the Vietnamese Trung sisters of 40 AD. She was not just going back in archeological time, but she was also going back in archetypal time by re-membering lesbian childhood from the eyes of the child in The Opoponax, bringing back the magical thinking of children, where the mythical beast of resistance, the opoponax, is congruent with the intense, wonder-filled discoveries of the developing mind.

"I am the opoponax. You must not provoke him all the time the way you do. If you have trouble combing your hair in the morning you mustn't be surprised. He is everywhere. He is in your hair. He is under your pillow when you go to sleep. Tonight he will make you itch all over so badly that you won't be able to go to sleep. When dawn comes behind the window tomorrow morning you will be able to see the opoponax sitting on the window sill. I am the opoponax."
 
Wittig was writing about the fluid social configurations of women not bounded by heteropatriarchal obsessions with virginity and paternity. She was writing about the volcanic fury that formerly enslaved women direct toward each other and toward themselves:
 
"Six of the women are none too many to hold her. Her mouth is open. Inarticulate words and cries are heard. She stamps the ground with her feet. She twists her arms to free them from the grip, she shakes her head in every direction. At a given moment she lets herself fall to the ground, she strikes the ground with her arms, she rolls about shrieking. Her mouth seizes the earth and spits it out. Her gums bleed. Words like death blood blood burn death war war war are heard. Then she tears her garments and bangs her head on the ground until she falls silent, done for. Four of the women carry her, singing, Behind my eyelids/ the dream has not reached my soul/ whether I sleep or wake/ there is no rest."

She was writing an eroticism that did not privilege the genitals, one that asked us to envision lesbian sexuality in radical new ways:
 
"The kaleidoscope game consists of inserting a handful of yellow blue pink mauve orange green violet flies beneath someone’s eyelids, m/ine for instance. They are really tiny flies minute insects, their peculiarity lies in the bizarre intensity of their colours. You place them between m/y eyelid and m/y eyeball despite m/y protestations and laughter."
 
She was also celebrating women’s capacity for savagery.
 
"The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning."
 
Wittig reclaimed and venerated the intricacies of the vulva in the “feminaries” that were distributed among the girls of in her tribe of women warriors:
 
"The women say the feminary amuses the little girls. For instance three kinds of labia minora are mentioned there. The dwarf labia are triangular. Side by side, they form two narrow folds. They are almost invisible because the labia majora cover them. The moderate-sized labia minora resemble the flower of a lily. They are half-moon shaped or triangular. They can be seen in their entirety taut supple seething. The large labia spread out resemble a butterfly's wings. They are tall triangular or rectangular, very prominent."

Then, consistent with her commitment to anarchy, she has the feminaries destroyed:
 
"The women say that it may be that the feminaries have fulfilled their function. They say they have no means of knowing. They say that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being encumbered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations."
 
Wittig is clear that patriarchal languages is a language of ownership, and that women must resist it:
 
"The women say, the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like many-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak"
 
"The women say, I refuse henceforward to speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world."

Wittig worked with some of the classical goddesses and myths, envisioning her lover at a gathering with Artemis, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Persephone, and host of other female deities. She retold the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a female protagonist descending into hell to bring back her reluctant, self-loathing lover, who begs her at every step to abandon her to her misery. She offers a paean to Sappho, describing a violet rain that irradiates the naked body of her beloved. In Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, co-written with Sande Zeig, she not only reclaims all kinds of goddesses and mythical figures, but describes various ages (“Steam Age,” “the Concrete Age”), characterizing the present era as “the Glorious Age,” thereby attempting to perpetuate and memorialize a myth of her own making:
 
"For almost two milleniums lesbians had been represented with glories around their heads. This was mistaken for a sign of sanctity and was not yet recognized as a form of energy. When the companion lovers appeared to one another in their brilliance and were able to stand the sight, they caught and used this energy that they immediately called 'glorious.' From which comes the 'Glorious Age.'"

Wittig was, single-handedly, generating ancestral memories and cultural prototypes. She was, as she said, “Starting with zero.” And she did more than imagine a past and a future for lesbians. She realized them—that is, made them real—and then reported back to us from the center of that new reality. She was an anarchistic pioneer, smashing through men’s civilizations to reveal a primitive wildness and promise that have always existed in possibility.
 
 The obligatory and all-but-overtly sneering obituaries for Wittig in the mainstream press do not do her justice. They desiccate and desecrate her work in their attempts to get at it, but it remains inaccessible to outsiders. The succulence of Wittig’s writing is in the juice—which like the vaginal secretions she names “cyprine”– is distinctly lesbian.
 
The greatest tribute we can offer to this visionary foremother of lesbian-feminism is to take her writings to heart. And she has left us an injunction for this dazzling lesbian revolution that fluttered with such bizarre intensity behind her eyelids…

Listen:

Something didn’t feel right. Nowadays they talk about over-achieving adult children of alcoholics and the problems they have with depression… Around the age of thirty I realized that art could no longer solve my problems… I found therapy, separated from my husband, became involved with women and joined the Women’s Movement. I felt better. 2
 
At forty-four, Tee recovered memories of being sexually molested at the age of six. .
I am coming to look on my suicidal years (13-29) through the lens of this information, and find, even then, strengths to be drawn upon: the strength of the survivor; the strength of talking which chips away at the killing silence; the knowledge of the value of my own life. It’s mine. I’ve paid for it.3

Tee’s photography traced the roadmap of her personal journey. In the early 1970’s, after moving to California, Tee began working on the San Francisco Sex Information Switchboard, where she claims she learned an appreciation of sexual information. She began researching erotic art by classical artists like Rembrandt and Michelangelo. At this time, the early Second Wave feminists were arguing that heterosexuality and erotic art objectified women, but Tee’s resistance took an alternate approach: …“sensuality at its best is transformative. If I had a sense of being in touch with God, it would be at the point of orgasm.” 4  
 
She became adept at representing lesbian sexuality in ways that would elude the male gaze. In 1982, she produced a series of photographs called Yantras of Womanlove. Concerned with protecting the privacy of her models, she used techniques involving multiple prints, solarization, images printed in negative, and multiple exposures. Tee consistently and conscientiously included women of color, fat women, older women, and women with disabilities as her subjects. Sometimes printers would refuse to print her works and art galleries would refuse to show it. In 1975, she self-published the Cunt Coloring Book, which is still in print today.
 

In the early 1980’s, Tee moved to Southern Oregon, becoming part of a community of lesbians and other women who were self-consciously creating and documenting a radical, women-only culture. Many of these women were living on “women’s lands,” rural separatist collectives and communes that had been founded in the 1970’s. She became a co-facilitator of the Feminist Photography Ovulars and a co-founder of The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography (1981-83). During the next decade, much of her work would focus on her experiences of growing up in an alcoholic family and being molested as a child.
 
My grandmother Mabel died when I was forty, leaving me a suitcase full of five generations of photographs… 5  Somewhere in the process of enlarging and coloring in the old photo images, I began to bring the past and present together, visually and psychically.6
 

During this period, Tee edited several anthologies of lesbian erotic fiction. As an editor, Tee was scrupulously respectful of class difference as it is reflected in writing, again modeling an authentic, not tokenized, diversity. She looked for “stories about how sexuality could work with the bodies we have, within our disparate personal histories.”7
 
In 2004, Tee’s partner of fourteen years, writer and social activist Beverly Anne Brown, was diagnosed with metastasized colon cancer and given a terminal diagnosis. Wanting to use something more immediate than darkroom techniques, Tee learned to use a digital camera and Adobe Photoshop in order to “push the polite boundaries of portraiture.”8 The result is the series “Cancer in Our Lives.”
 
After the death of her partner, Tee was diagnosed with a rare form of bile duct cancer. On August 27, 2006, she died quietly in her home. She was surrounded by a network of loving and supportive members of her community, who thoughtfully maintained a weblog in order to keep Tee’s wider, international community informed about her health.

In the monograph about her exhibit titled “Family,” Tee wrote:
 
If I look inside me, talk to the child within who, after all, is the one who originally wanted to be an artist, I find that she almost always knows how she wants my work to look: “Beautiful, in a big and powerful way.”9
 
Those words could stand as her epitaph. Tee, you will be missed.
 

And she studied and collected rocks. She loved to go “rockhounding.” Where others would see just an uninteresting pile of rocks, she would find her treasures. She knew the history of rocks: which ones had evolved their distinct characteristics under centuries of compression, which were the result of cooling magma, which were aggregates of minerals bonded together over time. She knew which rocks were precious and semi-precious, which would be enhanced by polishing, and which were likely to prove geodes with secret, crystalline fairy structures hidden under their crude exteriors.
 
Lesbians, words, and rocks. She leaves a solid, living, individual legacy. Thank you for your dedication and your integrity.

How is it that clarity can result in misunderstanding? How is it that being fierce can result in vulnerability?
 
Andrea made no concessions to political expediency, societal prejudices, academic protocols, or social hierarchies.  She spoke the truth as she saw it, with what certainly appeared to me to be complete disregard for the consequences to herself. Few of us can do that. Few of us would want to. We like to be accepted. We like to feel that what we are saying will be acceptable. We are concerned about alienating our audiences, offending our hosts, embarrassing our friends, jeopardizing our careers, sabotaging our networks, compromising our alliances. We censor and edit ourselves in order to be effective. We are understood, at least in part, because we are willing to tailor our message to our audience's capacity to hear it. We stay away from our bottom line as long as we can in order to keep everyone at the table as long as possible.

Andrea's clarity came from the fact she spoke directly from her bottom line. It's visible in nearly everything she said or wrote. It was always crystal clear where she stood on an issue, and she stood with those whose voices were the most silenced: the women and children who were victims of sexual abuse. Andrea's bottom line made clear to most that she did not have a lot of support from powerful mainstream allies. She was not supported by academia, by corporate interests, by left-wing liberals, by governmental agencies, or even by the women's movement that she helped establish. Her clarity made it clear that she was fair game to anyone wanting to disparage, discredit, misquote, vilify, scapegoat, ridicule, malign, or libel her. Reputations could be enhanced and careers promoted by attacking Andrea. Misunderstanding Andrea Dworkin became a national pastime, an industry, and an academic discipline.
 
And what about her fierceness? Being fierce strikes me as a protective response. Something about which one cares deeply has become endangered. This is not the dictionary definition, but it's what I think of whenever the word is applied to women. Andrea's fierceness invariably drew attention to whatever or whomever was under attack, and also to how deeply, how passionately, how utterly she cared. In a world of cool political machinations and sado-masochistic academic equivocating, Andrea stood out Wildly. There was something feral about her fierceness.

Andrea has died, but her words live on - weapons and shields both. Who can be fierce and clear enough to pick these up and engage with an enemy that never sleeps, an enemy that grows stronger and more global every day, and who never seems to tire of inventing new tortures and humiliations for women?
 

Xaviera Hollander’s memoir is similarly illuminating.
 
In 1972, The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander burst onto the scene, becoming an international bestseller and launching its author into instant celebrity. The book seemed to offer proof positive that the so-called “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s had indeed succeeded. The publisher crowed, “Far from the conventional image of the prostitute, Xaviera is well-read, articulate, fluent in half-a-dozen languages, and bursting with charm and joie de vivre.”
 
In the book, Hollander recounted in titillating prose her experiences as a prostitute and then as a madam in New York City. It didn’t hurt sales that her appearance corresponded with the stereotype of the “blonde bombshell,” and the fact that she was from the Netherlands lent her an air of European sophistication. Hollander was lauded as a completely liberated woman whose apparently insatiable sexual appetite was nothing more than the natural expression of a healthy libido. The one episode in the book where she was beat up and very nearly murdered by a john is treated as an unfortunate and fluke event, in what was otherwise consistently characterized as an empowering and fulfilling profession.
 
The Happy Hooker sold fifteen million copies, and was made into a movie starring Lynn Redgrave. Hollander went on to write a sex advice column for Playboy, and several more books about her sexy escapades. Then, in 2002, she published a memoir that was very different from her other books. Titled Child No More, this book did not make any best-seller lists or attract any movie deals. It was, in fact, a Holocaust memoir.

Meanwhile, Hollander’s father, whom she barely met, was interned in a different camp. Also caught smuggling food, he was beaten, tortured on a bamboo rack, and subjected to electrical shock administered to his genitals.
 
The war ended and the camps were liberated, but before Hollander and her mother were reunited with her father, she suffered another traumatic experience. Climbing a dead tree, she took a fall that resulted in her groin being impaled with a dead tree branch. Taken to the hospital, she remembers there were two doctors, who playfully told her to choose which one would treat her.  Unknowingly, she chose her own father. He also failed to recognize her. 
 
He apparently performed surgery on her torn vulva, and Hollander’s memories of this episode are bizarre. She remembers his “hypnotic power,” as “magic seemed to flow from his hands as they brushed my most private region.” Whether he was sexually inappropriate or she was overlaying previous trauma memories, she would write, “… there was that peculiar attraction at first sight. And in the years that followed, the precocious eroticism his loving, skillful hands had aroused in me would develop into a powerful emotion, little short of obsession.” (Hollander, p. 71)

Such were the formative years of the “Happy Hooker:” imprisonment in a concentration camp where all the males were enemies,foreigners, and sadists, constant witnessing of torture and murder of utterly subordinated women, separation from her mother, starvation, and then an episode of genital trauma associated with incestuous affect.
 
How much of her eagerness to please men sexually could be attributed to a post-traumatic, generalized Stockholm Syndrome? Was the peculiar form of mouth torture that she noted a result of women not smiling enough at their degradation, of not appearing “happy” enough at their sexual violation?  Hollander noted that, in the camps, it was clear that some women were not starving and were visibly better off than others. Later, she would understand that these were the women who were prostituting themselves.  How deep an impression did that information make? Could her celebrated hypersexuality have been a response to inappropriate sexualization as a toddler—either in the camp or at the hands of a father whose lack of sexual boundaries was a constant source of conflict in his marriage?
 
In Hollander’s own words, “A child’s character is like clay, and my confinement in that hell behind the bamboo wall certainly molded my character.”

In the last issue of Rain and Thunder, Barbara Louise's plea for donations to provide permanent housing for “The Dinner Party” was published. “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago, a symbolic commemoration of women in history, is probably the most famous work of Second Wave feminist art in the world. From 1974 to 1979, Chicago researched the biographies of women that were just coming to light in the newly-created departments of Women's Studies. She designed a triangular table for the thirty-nine “guests,” each represented by a place setting complete with an individually designed place mat and plate.  Inside the table, was the “Heritage Floor,” where tiles bearing the names of nine hundred and ninety-nine more women honored those not chosen for seating at the table.
 
“The Dinner Party” was a massive work, engaging the minds, hearts, and hands of dozens of women. It marked a reclaiming not only of aspects of women's history, but also of women's traditional arts, which had been considered “crafts” by a male dominant art world.
 
“The Dinner Party,” as with all works of art, represents the vision of its maker—a vision specific to an individual, to a place, and to a time. That time was the beginning of the Second Wave, when the movement was dominated by the interests of white and predominantly middle-class women. That place was the US, a country still struggling to catch up to the upheavals caused by the social revolutions of the 1960's. And that woman was Judy Chicago, a white woman eagerly embracing the discoveries, values, and comeraderie of that early Second Wave and courageously using her feminism to challenge the male hegemony of the commercial and academic art world. It was a time when sisterhood was powerful, but multi-culturalism was not.

Since 1979, the women's movement has undergone changes, including a radical critique of the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of its earlier agenda and constituency. As African American studies became more feminist-friendly and women's studies became more multi-cultural, consciousness about the marginalization of women of color in so-called “women's history” was raised. Curricula that may have appeared to be racially inclusive in the 1970's is now, in light of two decades of scholarship and publication by and about women of color, seen as painfully tokenizing.
 
“The Dinner Party” is an accurate reflection of the racial imbalance that characterized women's studies two decades ago, and critiques of the work that charge it with racism are valid. In a photograph commemorating the dozens of artists who contributed their work to the project, there is not one face that appears to be African American. Ironically, the book in which this photograph is published is titled The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage.
 
The only African American woman invited to sit at the table is Sojourner Truth. Not just a token at “The Dinner Party,” Truth was also used as a token by the predominantly-white Suffrage Movement. The cause for which she labored stood to benefit white women more immediately than women of color, and perhaps it is for this reason that she was the first woman of color to come to mind when Chicago was drawing up her seating arrangements. Perhaps the work of women like Fannie Lou Hamer or Harriet Tubman was seen as too specific to African Americans to warrant the one place at the table with so many white women.

In addition to calling attention to her token presence, African American critics of “The Dinner Party” have raised objections to the plate design for Sojourner Truth. The other dinner guests have plates whose designs represent fanciful abstractions on the theme of the vulva, but Truth's plate is distinctly “other” and “exotic,” in that it has stylized human faces, not vulvas, on it. Critics have noted a “mammy-esque” treatment of the African American woman's face on this plate, which was overtly designed to represent an African mask and the agony of enslavement.  This refusal to ascribe a vulva design to Sojourner Truth has been read as a racist denial of, or discomfort with, the African American woman's sexuality, a flip-side—or perhaps overreaction—to the traditional stereotype of Black women as oversexed.
 
Chicago does include the names of other Black women among the 999 names on the floor tiles, but this roster is still dominated by white women of European background.
 
The only First Nations woman at the table is Sacajawea, again a collaborator with white—and, this time, colonial—interests. Although the goddesses represented at the table are multi-cultural, the actual historical guests do not include any Latinas or Asian women.  
 
Where do we go from here? Should we abandon “The Dinner Party” to the warehouse where it has been ignominiously stowed all these years—a response not to its lack of racial inclusiveness, but to its aggressive feminist content. Do we, for the good of some supposedly overriding cause, gloss the racism inherent in the token presence of women of color at the table?

Is it possible for a work of art to be considered great, when, at the same time, it reflects and perpetuates racist values?
 
To answer this question, it might be instructive to turn to the words of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, whose work as an English professor at an Ivy League university has compelled her to grapple with a canon of “great works” by almost exclusively white authors. In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, she shares with us her discoveries about what she calls “African Americanism,” or “the ways in which a nonwhite or Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the US:”
 
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which to wrest an identity of national virtue while continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury… For the settlers and for American writers generally, this Africanist other became the means of thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasions for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression; permitted opportunities for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power.

In other words, Morrison contends that racist depictions are not just oversights or unfortunate lapses on the part of the white artist to be circumvented like potholes in a road, but rather that these distorted characterizations inform the entire canon of values embodied in the work, being the very key to understanding the construction of the white artist's identity!
 
What does this mean for 1990's feminists approaching “The Dinner Table” today? It means that we should not flinch from confronting the treatment of women of color in the work. Far from shying away from these embarrassing seating arrangements, we should make them the centerpieces of our critical understanding of the work and of the movement it represented. The absence of women of color at the table is more than an unintentional oversight. It is a necessity for a feminist identity that informed and defined the entire guest list. Sojourner Truth's position at that table, according to Morrison's theory, provides the key to understanding the myths, the terrors, the denials, the strengths, the failures of that early feminist movement. The artist's unwillingness to grant, or inability to conceive, a symbolic vulva for a Black woman may be central to an entire definition of Western sexuality, of white women's sexual identity.  Adopting Morrison's perspective and approach, one could argue that the Black and the First Nation's women's place at the table, and the exclusion of the Latina and Asian woman, could be the most historically significant aspects of “The Dinner Party.”
 
White radical feminists have vacillated between stonewalling and scapegoating when confronted with racist artifacts of the early Second Wave. Neither is a constructive strategy, and I suggest that we take Morrison's teaching to heart and begin to find ways to talk about our history that neither glosses over or trashes this very mixed heritage. A step in this direction would be to incorporate an acknowledgment and historical contextualizing of the racist treatment of women of color in any description of “The Dinner Party,” and especially in any press release designed to raise money for housing the project. As Morrison reminds us, “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist."