Biography as Method: Lesbian Feminism, Disability Activism, and Anti-Psychiatry in the Work of Seamoon House

Abstract

Seamoon House was an activist and writer whose political commitments spanned the lesbian feminist, anti-psychiatry, and disability rights movements in the early 1980s. Although she is not widely known, scattered bits of her correspondence and manuscripts have been preserved at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. Rather than simply recovering House from obscurity, this article centres the life of a minor movement figure as one strategy for following the transit of people and ideas between radical social movements in the late twentieth century.