Coming out and Staying Home: Nice Jewish Girls and Home Girls

Abstract

As multi-genre anthologies by groups of women have rapidly proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, they have become a primary site both to theorize and to put into practice communities founded upon a politics of identity. Two such anthologies, Nice Jewish Girls: A Anthology (1982) and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), form themselves around the seemingly homogeneous identities of their contributors: Home Girls is comprised of African American working class lesbian feminists; Nice Jewish Girls, of Jewish lesbian feminists. Such specificity constitutes contributors' challenge to unified definitions of woman and also to Monique Wittig's concept of a Lesbian Nation-an international community and culture shared by all lesbians-promoted by white middle class lesbians in the 1970s. The women in Nice Jewish Girls and Home Girls use identity politics to challenge their exclusions not only from lesbian communities, but also, in the case of Home Girls contributors, from their African American communities and from Black nationalist move-