Wednesday, March 3, 2010

New Issue of Trivia Voices Out!


TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism #10—“*Are Lesbians Going Extinct?*”—edited by IMA Faculty Lise Weil (Individualized MA faculty) and Vancouver poet Betsy Warland and dedicated to Mary Daly, is now online. Our longest and possibly most thought-provoking issue yet, TRIVIA 10 features writers from the U.S., Canada, England, and Australia, including the daughter of another member of the IMA faculty!

In an essay written in 1983, Nicole Brossard wrote: “Une lesbienne qui ne reinvente pas le monde est une lesbienne en voie de disparition.” (A lesbian who does not reinvent the world is a lesbian going extinct.) At that time, the phrase made very good sense. As writers, thinkers, activists, and in our day-to-day lives, we felt (many of us) compelled to reinvent a world in which we were for the most part invisible if not unthinkable, a world whose values we largely rejected. Today, over 20 years later, we are accepted, even embraced, by mainstream culture—as co-workers, wives, mothers, as TV talk show hosts and anchorwomen!—in ways we could not have imagined then. But how have we gained this inclusion? Have we gone quiet as lesbians (not denying our lesbianism but seldom foregrounding it)? Are we still reinventing the world? As writers, are we inventing new forms? Is there still a radical edge to the word “lesbian”? Or are we now, by Brossard’s definition, a disappearing species?

TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism is an online relaunch of TRIVIA: A Journal of Ideas, an award-winning international feminist literary magazine published from 1982 to 1995, edited by Lise Weil. TRIVIA publishes feminist writing in the form of literary essays, experimental prose, poetry, translations, and reviews. The journal encourages women writers to take risks with language and form so as to give their ideas the most original and vital expression possible. TRIVIA's larger purpose is to foster a body of rigorous, creative and independent feminist thought. read it at our website. Photo: feminist scholar and writer Mary Daly, to whom this issue is dedicated.

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