Remediating disability activism in the lesbian feminist archive

Abstract

This article argues that U.S.-based lesbian feminist cultural work of the 1980s constitutes a generative – but underutilized – archive for scholarship on the intersection of feminist, queer and disability studies. Specifically, this article uses a May 1981 special issue of the feminist newspaper off our backs (oob) on ‘Women With Disabilities’ to historicize the emergence of a network of lesbian feminist disability activists. Tucked between the pages of this special issue of oob are, for example, Connie Panzarino’s vision for a non-monogamous community of disabled women and a reproduction of Tee Corinne’s solarized photograph of a woman in a wheelchair with her able-bodied lover. In exploring a small and largely forgotten network of lesbian disability activists, this article reads their cultural work as world making projects that model a mode of activist praxis and theory writing for the present moment.