ESC: English Studies in Canada

The Lesbian Herstory Archives and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, two radical lesbian feminist organizations that have become crucial to my intellectual life, recently celebrated fortieth anniversaries. In 1976, when I left Canada in search of radical politics and knowledge at a college in the U.S., I had no idea they existed. Although feminism was a forceful cultural and political movement, it didn’t reach my academic life until the 1980s, when a potent fusion of poststructuralist theory and feminist canon-busting produced critiques of radical feminism. Today when critique finds itself in a state of fatigue and feminisms can sometimes be taken for granted, I can nonetheless trace the latest keywords in literary studies—affect, materialism, posthumanism, environmentalism—back to feminist attention to the body. Returning to the archive of radical feminist literature, including writers such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, as well as others whose names I’m still learning, I have come to a new appreciation for this history, with its contentious relation to the present, and for what we can’t know about what will be important forty years later. [End Page 12]