Ann Cvetkovich

Mixed feelings : feminism, mass culture, and Victorian sensationalism

Arguing that affect has a history, Ann Cvetkovich challenges both nineteenth- and twentieth-century claims that the expression of feeling is naturally or intrinsically liberating or reactionary. The central focus of Mixed Feelings is the Victorian sensation novel, the fad genre of the 1860s, whose controversial popularity marks an important moment in the history of mass culture. Drawing on Marxist, feminist, and Foucauldian cultural theory, Cvetkovich investigates the sensation novels power to produce emotional responses, its representation of social problems as affective ones, and the difficulties involved in assessing the genre as either reactionary or subversive. She is particularly concerned with the relation of gender and affect since many of the sensation novels were written by and for women, and women. By examining the powerful conjunction of ideologies of affect, gender, and mass culture, Cvetkovich reveals the powerful political effects of affective expression and sensational representations.

Don't Stop the Music: Roundtable Discussion with Workers from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

This roundtable discussion offers a glimpse of one of U.S. lesbian culture’s most important institutions, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2000. The festival emerged from 1970s lesbian feminism, which established women-only spaces and genres to nurture women’s creativity and community. Its longevity and continuity are testaments to the dedication of Lisa Vogel, one of the festival’s founders and its current producer, and of the thousands of women who have made the journey to “the land.” The festival carries enormous symbolic significance, even for those who have never been there; it often represents 1970s lesbian feminism, and all the opinions it generates, despite the fact that the festival itself has evolved and grown over the last quarter century. As roundtable participants, we present an inside view of Michigan because we are all festival workers, part of the workforce of five to six hundred women who set up the festival every year for the five to six thousand festivalgoers. As members of this intentional community for a period of ten days to a month, workers play, fight, perform for each other, work extremely hard, and debate the state of the lesbian nation. The discussion here is not intended to be representative of the festival; in fact, it questions whether such representation is possible. Instead it is merely one of thousands of conversations among friends that Michigan inspires. One reason for publicizing the festival through this roundtable is the controversy that arose at the 1999 festival over transgender inclusion and the festival’s “womyn-born womyn” admission policy. In 1999 a group of transgender people and their allies set up Son of Camp Trans (the return of 1994’s Camp Trans) outside the Michigan festival gates to draw attention to these issues. Members of Son

A Girl's Journey into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge

The GLQ Gallery features Allyson Mitchell’s 2010 installation for the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, A Girl’s Journey into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge. In a plus-sized version of a sculpture gallery, two large ladies, in luminescent gold and silver, face two walls of books, attached to each other and to a giant crochet brain overhead by a crochet rope that links their crotches to the brain. Mitchell recreated a version of the Lesbian Herstory Archives reading room in Brooklyn by covering the walls of the gallery with trompe l’oeil wallpaper made from drawings of the books on the shelves. In addition to photographs of the installation, the GLQ Gallery features examples of Mitchell’s original drawings. In a brief commentary on the installation, Ann Cvetkovich discusses how Mitchell brings lesbian feminist history and culture to a larger public and creates an “archive of feelings” through the affective labor of redrawing the Lesbian Herstory Archives shelves. The Gallery also features Mitchell’s Deep Lez I statement, a manifesto that calls for a return to lesbian feminist culture as a resource for contemporary queer cultures.