SpokenWeb Podcast

S2-Episode 2

Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening

This episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast is a little different than episodes you’ve heard from us before. It is a kind of “feminist memory-work” – An audio collage, a method, an approach to community building which aims to honor lesbian-feminist collective histories and renewed public attention to lesbian feminist culture.

SpokenWeb network members Felicity Tayler and Mathieu Aubin originally guided a SpokenWeb listening practice session in which they led a discussion of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds in clips from three queer films: A Working Women’s Collective (1974), Labyris Rising (1980), and Scorpio Rising (1963). After the event, participants in the Listening Practice enthusiastically desired an expanded event where we would collectively watch, listen to, and discuss these films in their entirety. This led to the organization of a second event “Lesbian Liberation Across Media” sponsored by multiple institutions of queer cultural history and community, such as Labo de données en sciences humaines/The Humanities Data Lab, SpokenWeb, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives, and the ArQuives.

Episode producers – Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin and Scott Girouard – cordially invite you into their feminist sonic memory world: A three-part audio collage of “Lesbian Liberation Across Media”. A virtual film screening and discussion held Summer 2020 in partnership with SpokenWeb, and featuring three iconic lesbian feminist films: “A Working Women’s Collective” (1974), “Labyris Rising” (1980), and “Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell”(2007). Through a weaving together of the voices of over 60 participants in attendance, along with original music scores, archival clips and more – we ask, how do we listen to Canadian lesbian liberation movements across media? Whether it’s a feature length film or a spirited virtual chat session, this audio collage episode invites you to experience a citational politics that makes audible the intergenerational relationships, conflicting concerns, nostalgic reveries, and a sense of togetherness while apart in the pandemic-related time of crisis.

Producers’ Note: This recording uses citation as a composition method, and this brings some challenges with it for the transcription process, particularly when identifying speakers. The original recording in the zoom setting also lends itself to misidentification as some participants used pseudonymous screen names, or there was more than one speaker associated with a camera. As a result, this transcript marks some speakers as “unidentified”.

00:18	Hannah McGregor:	[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.
00:35	Hannah McGregor:	My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. This episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast is a little different from episodes you’ve heard from us before. What you’re about to hear is a kind of feminist memory work, an audio collage, a method, an approach to community building that aims to honor lesbian feminist collective histories and renewed public attention to lesbian feminist culture. In this episode, producers Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin, and Scott Girouard cordially invite you into their sonic memory world: a three-part audio collage of lesbian liberation across media, a virtual film screening and discussion held in summer 2020 in partnership with SpokenWeb and featuring three iconic lesbian feminist films: A Working Women’s Collective, Labyris Rising, and Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell. Through a weaving together of the voices of over 60 participants in attendance, along with original music scores, archival clips, and more we ask: how do we listen to Canadian lesbian liberation movements across media? Whether it’s a feature length film, or a spirited virtual chat session, this audio collage episode invites you to experience a citational politics that makes audible the intergenerational relationships, conflicting concerns, nostalgic reveries, and a sense of togetherness while apart in the pandemic related time of crisis. Here is Felicity, Mathieu, and Scott with Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening.
02:35	Voiceover, Emma Middleton:	On June 10th, 2020, following the extreme social isolation of the first pandemic winter, over 70 people gathered over Zoom to watch three lesbian liberation films: A Working Women’s Collective, Labyris Rising, and Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell. In this podcast, we’ve created an audio collage record of the sounds of watching these films together.
03:04	May Ning:	[Zoom Entry Chime] I’m excited to see like what it’s going to look like with a hundred people.
03:07	Unknown speaker:	I know. Yeah. [Instrumental Music] So when we were watching Bound and there was one person who hadn’t seen the movie before and she had her camera on, so everybody was like getting more, like they’re more excited about watching her reactions. I mean, they were excited about the movie too. But it was like her reactions for like the best version of the show.
03:28	Rachel E. Beattie:	And it’s so different when you’re doing an online thing, because if you’re at a talk or something, like you can see people smiling at you and like responding to stuff that you’d say. And I just feel like doing Zoom stuff is like speaking into the void. For the trivia night that I’ve been doing for the archives we had to turn off the comments and also video, like the people’s videos, because we had like, Zoom bombing and people doing offensive stuff. So, it’s like, I’m literally speaking into the void. I have no idea if people are enjoying the material that like, if they’re laughing at my jokes or like anything.
04:03	Michelle Schwartz:	What time is it?
04:06	Rachel E. Beattie:	8:26.
04:06	Michelle Schwartz:	When should I start letting people in? [Instrumental, Drums] I just let them in at 8:30 or earlier?
04:12	Felicity Tayler:	I’d let them at 8:30.
04:14	Michelle Schwartz:	Yeah.
04:15	Rachel E. Beattie:	How many people are in the waiting room?
04:17	Michelle Schwartz:	17.
04:20	Rachel E Beattie:	Cool. How’s it going May?
04:24	May Ning:	Good. I’m excited. I haven’t seen the films yet.
04:27	Rachel E Beattie:	Yeah. I saw Mathieu sent me the Press Gang one, but I haven’t seen the other two. So, I’m really looking forward to watching.
04:34	May Ning:	I know, I wanted to save them to watch it with everyone.
04:36	Rachel E Beattie:	Yeah.
04:36	Felicity Tayler:	It’s 8:30. I guess we can —
04:41	Felicity Tayler:	Yay.
04:42	Various voices.	— open the doors. (in unison)
04:44	Mathieu Aubin:	It’s funny because I imagine when you would open the door and in a real office and then 36 people coming in at once, it’d be like —.
04:52	Michelle Schwartz:	Much louder.
04:58	Unknown speaker (masc voice):	Yeah.
04:58	Felicity Tayler:	And also like more visually obvious [laughs].
05:01	Mathieu Aubin:	All the bodies.
05:05	Constance Crompton:	Oh, it is sort of wonderful watching like everyone arrive and role in —
05:08	Mathieu Aubin:	Yeah.
05:08	Constance Crompton:	— I haven’t [inaudible] a lot of Zoom meetings, so I don’t get the waiting room feature very often. It’s just a very nice.
05:15	Elspeth Brown:	Nice to see many friendly faces and the names in the list of participants, even if a lot of people don’t have their video on or their audio.
05:25	Constance Crompton:	It’s so true. Yes. Hi, to everyone who is sort of disembodied at the moment.
05:29	Various voices:	[collective laughter]
05:31	Michelle Schwartz:	Hi, to everyone who we might’ve usually seen in the summer conference season that we’ve missed.
05:37	Mathieu Aubin:	Yes.
05:37	Michelle Schwartz:	Our annual hangouts canceled.
05:42	Constance Crompton:	And now with the combination of theaters being closed and bars being closed, I think this would be the kind of event that could blend both of those things, even if everyone’s in their own living room.
05:51	Rachel E Beattie:	Yeah, totally.
05:52	Constance Crompton:	That’s great. Also, too. I think we had been expecting a much sort of smaller event and we can be like, “Oh, we can like, go around”.
06:00	Constance Crompton:	Well, shall we dive in with official programming?
06:06	Felicity Tayler:	Zoom says you’re the host so I guess you got to make the decisions.
06:09	Constance Crompton:	Yes indeed. In which case I would say, take it away Michelle.
06:17	Michelle Schwartz:	Oh no, you’re first Connie. You’re supposed to welcome everybody.
06:20	Constance Crompton:	Ah! Welcome everybody. We are definitely touched by how many people have taken up the screening and just from the last week and a half. It was put together by several organizations, the Humanities Data Lab at Ottawa U, The SpokenWeb, the University of Toronto Media Archives, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project which Michelle and I co-direct together, and the ArQuives.
06:46	Michelle Schwartz:	We as the organizers of this event are participating from Toronto. So, we have the University of Toronto and Ryerson University, from the University of Ottawa and from Concordia in Montreal. And we acknowledge that our respective institutions are located on the traditional lands of many Indigenous nations, including the Algonquian, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Just as Toronto has been a gathering place for many people for thousands of years, we are grateful to be able to provide a space for people to gather together tonight. And we ask you to think about the land that you are on and how you can show solidarity with the Indigenous caretakers of that land, by talking about what traditional people are from the land that they are on. So, if anyone wants to share their traditional land with us, we would love to know where you’re all coming in from.
07:38	Voiceover, Emma Middleton:	This screening of 1970s, lesbian liberation films was organized in response to a clamorous demand to watch these films from the audience of an earlier event. We wanted to ask an intergenerational question: are we doomed to have these same fights forever?
07:56	Mathieu Aubin:	What I would love to do is to stop — me stop talking and if anyone, like Connie’s suggesting and trying to get people to that we’ve been wanting to hear from to chat then go ahead.
08:06	Unknown speaker:	Yeah.
08:07	Rachel E. Beattie:	Hey, did you see that Ontario had a plan about like students going back to school today, but I couldn’t find anything in it about libraries. Like we’re not important. Nobody gives a shit about us. So, like the press release for the Ontario government said nothing about university libraries, like…
08:29	Felicity Tayler:	Uh, talk a little bit, just go back to the listening session that Mathieu and I led with these films about — well in April for a kind of an audience of around 30 people. So, we kind of knew more or less who was going to be there that we’re able to put on this other event that is reaching a much wider audience. So, for me, this kind of comes back to this question of gaining access to media that was seen in the first film, and that we’ll see continuing through in the, in the other films.
08:59	Michelle Schwartz:	The screening was based on an event that Matthew and Felicity hosted. A SpokenWeb event and where, where they showed clips of Labyris Rising, which is a film that we’re going to watch tonight. And I’ve never seen a sort of 1970 lesbian, a short film that I haven’t wanted to see the entirety of. So, there was a great sort of clamor in the chat of that Zoom asking to see the whole movie instead of just the short clips. And that was sort of the birth of this, of this screening tonight where we get to watch the whole movie as well as two other movies. So, we have three short films to watch and we have a few panelists who will take turns introducing each one. And we’ll have a time for discussion and questions at the end. So, you can use the chat at any time. But at the end, we’ll hold for the questions.
09:56	Baylee Woodley:	I just have read an email from Connie from earlier. I would love to hear about Michelle’s experience visiting the installation, Killjoys Kastle, if you’re willing to talk about it and your thoughts on how it engages with this lesbian feminist history. And also, maybe it’s another way to facilitate these sort of intergenerational conversations.
10:15	Michelle Schwartz:	I just went as an attendee and it was a huge amount of fun. You, you went into this house, there was the graveyard of lesbian organizations past, which were like all these kinds of gravestones painted with all these kinds of like lesbian organizations that had sort of broken up due to in fighting or the cause getting, well, I don’t know, you know, potentially they solved the cause. They had, I believe there was like a menstrual cup reading with, you know, like, kind of a diviner of menstrual blood. And there was, smashing truck nuts — [Sound Effect: Campfire Crackling]
10:50	Rachel E. Beattie:	There was a lesbian sing along in that campfire room with all the little wood stools.
10:55	Michelle Schwartz:	— Yeah. And it was, it was, it was a really wonderful experience and it sort of did kind of provide another version of, of sort of watching these films for me as, as, someone who didn’t live through the time period of sort of having a nostalgia for something that I missed, but also, you know, like feeling, not really like fully part of it and, and just having a lot of – being able to experience the history, the history in a certain way, and also feeling very strongly the gaps between the, between the generations. So, I loved Killjoys Kastle. I don’t know if anyone else was there.
11:30	Rachel E. Beattie:	And cause I went on opening night, actually it was with Michelle and a bunch of other people —
11:34	Rachel E. Beattie:	[Inaudible] and some other people.
11:37	Rachel E. Beattie:	— yeah, some other people on this call. Like Stark [Inaudible]. But so for opening night they had all of these lesbian feminists theorists, or I don’t know how everyone identified, but and so cause it’s the last room in Killjoy’s Kastle was the processing room. So, like after you’ve gone through this whole experience, of course lesbians have to process so they had like, literally you could not leave without talking to like famous feminist theorists. It was amazing.
12:09	Felicity Tayler:	But what I do remember is that there was kind of this like double narrative of like, oh that’s just like white feminism.
12:15	Unknown speaker:	Yeah.
12:15	Felicity Tayler:	And then there was actually like an inside the Killjoy Kastle there was kind of this like trying to atone or come to terms with it or like, you know, critique, critique whiteness at the same time as like having this intergenerational kind of like smorgasbord experience. And so, I think though that that’s just, it’s part of what of what comes with this.
12:44	Rachel E. Beattie:	Yeah. I remember cause they had, it might’ve been the lesbian singalong room. There was all these quotes on the wall from various lesbian feminists. And then that there was an accusation made that they were sort of appropriating without like bringing in more diverse voices into like the making of, so it was like essentially these white feminists that are using the voices of feminists of colour, and that kind of thing.
13:11	Felicity Tayler:	And it doesn’t mean that the history that we have access to has less value. It just means that there are other histories that we can now look to as well.
13:26	Michelle Schwartz:	I wanted to say how odd it was to watch that Press Gang film, and then hear people sort of restating debates that, that we hear so much now in, in like the, in the movement. You know, like that woman who was ranting about how she doesn’t know what’s politically correct and so she doesn’t know whether I can, but what she can say because now everything she says is wrong, and so she’s not going to say anything. And it’s just so frustrating to hear the same things sort of eternally return, within sort of these kinds of communities. And it was, it was just really, you know, fascinating to hear that particular, kind of iteration of political correctness sort of from, from so far, in the path. And I just, like, I always wonder whether we’re just like doomed to have the same fights forever. Is that too dark?
14:23	Felicity Tayler:	No, but I do think it’s like worthwhile kind of embracing it, or I don’t know, like learning to live with the discomfort, like, you know, like learning to live with that affect. Right. So, like the, this question of, you know, nuancing, intergenerational conversations and like tempering your fandom for, you know, something like the, the Killjoy Kastle, right. Like, cause I was just kind of like googling quickly cause like my, so I, I always kind of had this like FOMO relationship to the Killjoy Kastle, cause it was always like not in the city that I was in.
14:55	Rachel E. Beattie:	Yeah. And I think it’s a very important point that you raise and I think that sort of come out before, is that like, all of these movements they’re never just it’s there’s never just like one thought it’s, you know, people have fights like have really big, like, you know, really serious fights about very specific points of ideology and very specific things like, where are we going? That’s – movements have always been like that, they’re always going to be like that. And so, you know, kind of like looking back that you can look at both of those things like that, there was this wonderful thing that was achieved by the movement and this like great togetherness, but then also like, you know, you argue like day and night, but then you, you know, you love the people at the end of the day, but like, “Oh my God, they made me so mad when we had the big argument” kind of thing. And I think —
15:40	Unknown speaker:	Yeah.
15:40	Rachel E. Beattie:	— that seems like a thing that sort of evergreen, like, I’ve certainly noticed that in organizing spaces now and I’m and I’ve seen, you know, as the documentaries, that you see about various different groups organizing.
15:56	Michelle Schwartz:	And we also just wanted to thank everyone that donated towards the screenings because we were able to source additional funding for the screening rates we were able to donate all that money to The519 and to support our youth in Toronto. So, thank you so much. We raised almost $400 for those organizations for queer Black and trans youth in the city. And that’s just a really great thing that we can do for our community. So, thank you all for donating.
16:23	Elspeth Brown:	I mean, it’s so nice to just watch these fabulous films without leaving my house I can’t even begin to tell you. I probably never would have gone, frankly, because I’m such a home body.
16:35	Voiceover, Emma Middleton:	The first film, A Working Women’s Collective, opened a discussion of lesbian feminist film aesthetics and printing collectives. In listening to a cacophony of lesbian liberation print sounds we wondered what these sonic resonances told us about how printing collectives lived their politics through their work and loves.
17:00	Mathieu Aubin:	And so, I just want to quickly introduce Press Gang and Press Gang was a feminist collective with a strong lesbian constituency that were in a publishing house and printing press in Vancouver, British Columbia. So, I’m happy to say that some people here are from that area. So, it started in 1970 as a mixed collective, but in 1974, it became a woman only collective and it would go on to publish several books that were integral to the lesbian liberation movement, such as Stepping Out of Line and Still Sing, and print many, many, many documents, flyers and posters for lesbian liberation organizations in the city. So, the video we’re about to see is called, A Working Women’s Collective, and it was produced by the Media Mothers organization It is currently housed at VIVO Collection or VIVO Archives, excuse me, in Vancouver. So, what’s exciting about what you’re about to see is that it does document the origins of the collective and their values as they stood in 1974.
17:55	Mathieu Aubin:	And you get to hear from the members of the press, but what you also get to see is what the site looked like. So, what I want, I encourage you to think about is, you know, what does the relationship between sound and visual do in the film? What’s the relationship between diegetic and non-diegetic sound mean what you can see in here at the same time, and if you can actually identify the source of the sound, and if you can’t do that, I encourage you to think about that with like the rest of the videos as well. And finally, really just a general question to ask yourself, which is when you’re watching this, what can you see in the documentary and what can be heard in relation to lesbian feminist culture production? So that’s really what I’ve been thinking about and collaboratively with this wonderful collective.
18:39	Rachel E. Beattie:	First off with Press Gang – I, this is such a great, I love the, like lo-fi [Sound Effect: Film Reel] kind of, it looks like it was shot on some kind of magnetic video that is rapidly deteriorating. As a person who works on analog media I really loved that. And so, when we were, when we were talking about doing this session, there was a lot of talk about the sound of the film and so I was really listening to that. And I – the thing that I’ve been sort of obsessed with for a while, which is the way that voices sound different from the past, like there’s like a different, I, don’t not like an audio person [Audio: Background Chatter from Film] I don’t know the exact word, but there’s like a different tone to those voices. And that’s so on display when, when you’re sort of, you’re looking at the beautiful printing presses and then hearing those voices in your ear. So, Mathieu, I wonder if you had any thoughts on the sort of the prominence given to the sound of the voice.
19:35	Mathieu Aubin:	[Sound Effect: Film Reel] What’s it’s interesting about the voices – it cuts because of the editing. Like it’s a bit choppy. It’s not just the way that they’re articulating their politics and their relationship to the press, but also the way that they sounded doing so. And also, the sound of the machines. Like they don’t sound like the printing, like the printer we have at home producing these books. Like it’s like really loud and that’s part of their daily sounds. Right. So, in thinking about that, I think like we have a cacophony of sounds in the, in the video. And so, part of what I’m interested in thinking about is not just what can we see and where the sources of the audio, but how do they inform each other? So, when somebody is talking about, you know, taking over the means of production [Sound Effect: Printing Press] and then all you see is a machine just pumping, right. You’re like, Oh, okay. Like this is literally it. And then I’m thinking, Oh, step back, let’s look at this video that they produced. And like the choppiness of that. And like, as they’re explaining something like it almost cuts out and you’re like, Oh, okay, well, we might have missed the message, but so the best way to describe it at this point in terms of that video is like a cacophony of lesbian liberation print sounds. [Instrumental Music]
21:21	Audio from A Working Women’s Collective:	Why I was a printer and why all this had happened to me because women don’t have access to the media and that women have to be printers or have to be publishers to — (crackle) (new voice)— fell into it too. You know, like I was working, designing posters and things, and I came down and I thought, Oh, there’s this press. And I knew one of the men and he was doing dark room stuff. And so, I went in and so he showed me how to do all the darkroom stuff. And so, I developed the negatives of my own, like my own artwork. And then he was starting to print it and he said, do you want to do this? And I said, sure. [Laugh] And like, I was really afraid, but I thought there’s this big press. And like, I can’t drive a car and I’ve never run a machine. And I had this mental block and I thought, now’s the time. [Instrumental Music]
22:20	Felicity Tayler:	I had a kind of a follow on that is it sort of struck me like I’ve seen the film in different contexts now a couple of times, but the thing that struck me in this listening is there’s this moment where they’re talking about how it’s about the skills, like how it’s about gaining the skills and being really good at what you’re doing. And like, and, and you see them you know, working in wrenches and fixing the machines. And then they’re talking about how they’re having this conflict with somebody who’s like, who cares if you can do stuff? You just have to say things! And it’s like this big kind of like production versus content sort of false binary.
23:14	Maureen Fitzgerald:	Hi, hi. Yes, I was connected with Press Gang through feminist publishing because I was involved in The Women’s Press Collective, and I actually —.
23:29	Amy Gotlieb:	You’re here in Toronto?
23:30	Maureen Fitzgerald:	— I am in Toronto. I’m speaking from Toronto, but there was a year that I spent in Vancouver because I was lovers with Pat Smith. And it was wonderful to see that image, those images. I knew and know Sarah. The skills debate in ’81 was very interesting. The way I worked at Press Gang, I suppose I volunteered once a week and they taught me how to do layout. I’m an academic. I was on leave from U of T for the year, because that’s where my lover was. But the, the, the raging discussion was around skills. And some people thought that everybody should do everything. Like there should be no division of labor and no acknowledgement of the skills that some of the people who had been working in the presses had and were very experienced at. As Marusya just said, I mean, it was a very sophisticated operation. And by then it was also publishing books, a lot of books. So, Press Gang publishing, I think well probably didn’t outweigh the the flyer printing and printing for other organizations, but it, it became more predominant. And when I was there, it was more predominant. And I remember this discussion around skills where some people thought, well, we should all do everything in all be able to do everything. There should be no specialization.
25:12	Rachel Epstein:	It’s Rachel Epstein. And yeah, I worked at Press Gang in the early 80’s maybe just after Maureen, maybe ‘82, ‘84 or something like that. And I don’t actually remember that skills debate so much, but I started out working as the production coordinator and then I actually learned to run a press. And I remember being – that being one of the most empowering things I ever did was actually learning how to run that printing press and how to fix the printing press and all of that. And I was also lovers was Pat Smith at the same time that Maureen was lovers with Pat Smith and just [Laughs] that’s how Maureen and I met each other. So, it was, that was going on too. But also, before we, I unfortunately did not see the film. I came in late and I missed the film. I think I may have seen it a long time ago. So, I can’t really speak to that, but just not to romanticize totally what it was like there. We were also struggling with working collectively and I have some memories that were like some harsh memories of how we treated each other, how we sort of in the, in the process of trying to be fair were very unfair. So, I know lots has been written and post-feminist collectives, and that’s what we were, and it was amazing and so many ways and what we did and, and the skills that we developed, the political causes that we supported. But there was many things going on there in in that attempt to work collectively.
26:56	Voiceover, Emma Middleton:	[Instrumental Music] In the second film, Labyris Rising, we hear no dialogue, only an Eros propelled musical score, set to a collage of visuals built through mimesis and citation. We see and hear how editing is a form of care. If you want to be part of the community, you have to understand the codes.
27:19	Felicity Tayler:	So, when Mathieu and I start— first looked at these two films together, what we were listening for was, you know, the sound in the films, and how that sound worked with the visual [Instrumental, Percussion]to show us how community is created through different kinds of cultural institutions that produce a common language and a set of shared practices. It’s a video made by Margaret Moores and Almerinda Travassos who are two former members of LOOT. It was filmed in the basement of the LOOT building. [Sound Effect: Printing Press] And what you don’t see off screen is a printing press where the newsletter was published.
28:00	Felicity Tayler:	So, in Labyris Rising we hear continuous soundtrack of folk rock and R&B. And I saw a, a comment go by while we were watching, where somebody was trying to guess the track. And, I got, I got to say, that’s kind of my, my experience of the film as well, trying to, trying to situate the sound while I’m watching the images. [Instrumental, Trumpet] And so the musical landscape kind of helps the flow of the non-linear narrative structure throughout the film and the collage, but as you saw between the two clips, the collage aesthetic of the video, and also the sonnet composition are borrowed from the iconic film of gay cultures, Scorpio Rising. So, there’s a lot that’s borrowed from the film, but there’s also a lot that’s kind of worked at — redefined in relationship to that film.
28:51	jake moore:	We all know the soundtrack from Scorpio Rising and that’s even many years after the fact because the – Kenneth Anger was able to draw from very known, popular culture to find the representation of this so-called outlaw. That outlaw is fully coded as what we accept as a masculine identity. And the idea that the, the sort of travel that was going to happen, this, this, the gathering that would become what was going to be a Hell’s Angels gathering, whereas in the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, you have, people riding bicycles and all of the coded things that you’re describing, but in the soundtrack, most of us are not as familiar. And well Joan Armatrading. And, until we see Janice Joplin, it really doesn’t enter into a contemporary imaginary. And, I think it’s really the outlaw status is still much stronger for the lesbian woman. It still doesn’t enter into the same kind of accepted social practice.
29:52	Felicity Tayler:	So, but another parallel between them is that both opening clips also point to fashion as a signifier of community belonging. And for the woman fixing her bicycle we can look at the embroidered patch that’s, that you see on her hip of her jeans so what you see there is the line “woman identified woman.” So, this kind of echos a pop —in the context of fixing the bicycle it echoes a kind of a popular saying that people would wear on t-shirts and protests at the time, it says, “a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle.” But it also has an organizing function. And so, historian Becki Ross had, when speaking about LOOT talks about this term as a political category. So, she says “a true feminist is a lesbian by definition in the political sense.” And this further explained by a Vancouver journalist, Judy Moreton, that “all women fully committed to the cause of freeing themselves and all other women from oppression are lesbians.”
30:54	Marusya Bociurkiw:	So, I was interested in the sort of like warning at the beginning around sort of different ideas of gender in second wave feminism. And you know, that there were no non —I mean the word non-binary didn’t exist. And transgender existed, but was identified, I think, in different ways. Certainly, there was gender bending. And we see that in the the, out— the clothing and the, the embodiment of female masculinity.
31:32	Felicity Tayler:	So, this of course is an articulation of an ideal that’s easier said than done, because there tensions. There’s always tensions in social movements, and so there’ll be tensions in this time period between gay and straight feminists, and also between feminist organizing and male-identified gay liberation organizing, for example. And this tension between — this tension within the gay liberation movement is alluded to in Moores’ appropriation of Scorpio Rising. So, when I also looked at this film, I looked at it as kind of a semantic structure. So, the different scenes are being put together as if the, the visuals themselves and the kind of soundtrack are a narrative structure that’s built through mimesis or citation. So, it’s, it’s repeating motifs that come from somewhere else. And it is not —so there’s no spoken dialogue. So, it’s not as it’s kind of a direct or explicit as the last film that we saw. You have to kind of like imagine yourself into the scene and imagine your knowledge of what you know about the scenes that are being portrayed, at the kind of community that’s being shared with us, the music that’s being played to kind of imagine yourself into it, depending on what your existing experiences are. So, this ambiguity of origin contributes to the sense that to be part of the community, you have to know it’s references or codes, which include specific genres of music as a cultural institution. And in Labyris Rising you’ll see that those genres of music kind of lead to this, like, you know, [sound of concert cheering] heady dream of the outdoor music festival.
33:08	jake moore:	The Michigan Womyn’s Festival was this iconic, though clearly specific, gathering site. And I think it’s telling that it was known as the land where people gathered and my exposure to it as a musician was as a punk rock musician that they invited there. But we were very much interlopers in the warm, fuzzy, like the, in the kind of breakdown of feminist status. And what was outlier? What, what was allowable outlying? Uh, I think you get into really interesting territory thinking about when a rebellious figure can be fully embraced by a larger dominant culture, like the masculine and biker that is still embraced today. Like we still see this in, in contemporary film and television. It gets a lot of play. It’s a very common association of, of, a powerful and often militarized understanding of how to achieve power.
34:10	Felicity Tayler:	So, you learn a lot about the world of LOOT from the movement of the camera around the scene in Labyris Rising and I’m going to read an excerpt that describes the scene from historian Becki Ross’s book. “An inventory of 1970s, lesbian feminist lifestyle is richly detailed in the 1980 film Labyris Rising. A deliberate feisty send-up of the urban gay male style captured by Kenneth Anger and Scorpio Rising. This lesbian cult classic was shot on location at 342 Jarvis Street and the Fly By Night Lounge by former LOOT members, Margaret Moores, and Almarinda Travassos. The half-hour super eight film is full of clues. The double-headed axe, the Labyris or cunt beads on a chain. The famous maxim woman identified woman embroidered on the back of blue jeans, pinky rings, interlocking women’s symbols, pink triangles, and suspenders. While reading the Washington DC based feminist journal, off our backs, the protagonist drags deeply on her marijuana joint and drifts off to remember scenes from the Michigan festival to the music of Be Be K’Roche, Heather Bishop, Joan Armatrading, and Janis Joplin. If you think about Labyris Rising, then taking the vocabulary from that film, what’s interesting is note— noting what they keep. Right? So, the, the scene that we all love with the cat and somebody named Mark, like on the bed, like there are some comments going by, like maybe people knew the name of this person in the bed.
35:50	Mathieu Aubin:	Oh, we have a comment from Amy Gottlieb that says the person on the bed is Marcia Cannon known as Mars.
35:59	Felicity Tayler:	But you know, so in Labyris Rising you have somebody on the bed, they’re smoking a joint, they’ve got all the music festival kind of paraphernalia all around them, they’ve got a cat and that scene is constructed almost exact — and they’re reading off our backs right? So, it’s like —
36:13	Raegan Swanson:	They’re reading on our backs! And all I could think about was like, I were about to like, watch the movie about Chris and how much work that she did around censorship. And, it, that was one moment where I was just like, it all, I know it felt very tied together.
36:35	Mathieu Aubin:	The sound of the music and the voices as they are connecting, which are mostly non-diegetic then become diegetic think at a certain point with the poster, if I’m not mistaken, like there’s a poster referenced, like that’s where you’re like, okay, here’s where, like there’s a whole community. They’re not just trying to like, leave the music production. It’s like, it’s, there. Here it is. Right?
36:55	Marusya Bociurkiw:	I was published by Press Gang, but I was, I worked more in a feminist video collectives, Emma Productions and Women’s Media Alliance, which Nancy Nicol was part of. And I remember when I first joined Women’s Media Alliance, there were no, there were no roles. There was no camera person. There was no sound person. We just, we, we just rotated those roles, which, was part of that, that notion that there —of collaboration and of circularity. And I think that it, it created a kind of aesthetic actually, which at the time, you know, which, which results in those, those kinds of interesting audio choices or editing choices. We, I remember the video we worked on, Our Choice, about teenage mothers and we edited that entire thing by committee. It took —
37:59	Rachel E. Beattie:	Wow.
37:59	Marusya Bociurkiw:	— So, so what resulted was also long swaths of talking that weren’t edited and that kind of editing was a form of care. And it was, a way of caring for our interview subjects and working against the grain of, of television and mainstream cinema.
38:26	Voiceover, Emma Middleton:	The third film, Proud Lives, featured a significant force in Toronto’s local communities and Canadian lesbian and gay liberation at large. We heard how a singular figure could be part of a generative field of queer cultural production and galvanize a movement to shift the terms of the world, our bodies, and our relationships.
38:52	Raegan Swanson:	Hi everyone, so the next film we’re going to be watching is Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell, which was directed and produced by Nancy Nicol. It was a commemoration video that was shown at Chris’s memorial in 2007 after she passed. For those who aren’t aware, Chris is well Nancy describes her as a towering figure in the history of gay liberation in Canada. And I think that’s a fair assessment. She began writing for The Body Politic in 1975. And she’s kind of, when you look at the pictures of like the body politic, she’s the woman. And everybody else is just like, those are the guys. She was, one of the founders of LOOT. She worked for the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay —CLGO — the coalition for lesbian gay rights of Ontario. She was a part of GATE [Gay Alliance Toward Equality] in Toronto, but she also did organizing in Edmonton when she was a teenager. When The Body Politic was charged, Chris was right along there and so there’s this really great picture of them celebrating after they’ve won the court case. But when a lot of people think of Chris, they think of Chris yelling, “no more shit” [Audio clip: People chanting “no more shit”] as part of the bathhouse raids. And I think that’s a picture of her and sums her up in an interesting way. She’s definitely one of those people that I really wish I could have met in person, especially reading about her and seeing all of her work. If you look at the material that we have at the archives, she’s got her fingers in all the pies, you see her stuff in the [inaudible] you see this stuff Body Politic you see it everywhere. And we have a small collection of her material, of one of her folios at the archive as well. And she’s a part of our national portrait collection. And I really love the portrait that we have of her. She’s done a whole bunch of stuff that I know some of it’s going to be in the film, but you should definitely look up more about her. And if, especially if this video piques your interest.
41:38	Felicity Tayler:	For me the thing that like, I mean, there’s so many things that I love about that film. and I’m like in the work that I do, I’ve been really interested in the work that Pink Triangle, no, that Pink Type that Chris did with Pink Type as the typesetter for, so many different magazines, you know, so sort of like an arm of Body Politic, but it’s also type setting Fireweed its type setting, like all these other magazines. And so, it becomes kind of this really important sub layer to all of this different – the kinds of cultural production that were coming out of all, all the different edges of this kind of lesbian gay feminist, like press movement in Toronto. So that’s kind of like where my personal desire comes from, in relationship to this field, this film, but there’s, there’s so many other aspects of it that I, that I do kind of pull on those emotional threads. And but, but one of the things that I like the biggest, I guess the biggest takeaway, I don’t know, the thing that I, that I think about from that film in relationship to Labyris Rising and the questions about how do you see or hear like these institutions that, that lesbian and gay liberation like produce for themselves is when she’s talking about how the gay rights movement or the lesbian gay rights movement is not just committed to rights in an end of itself, but that like the, the political kind of protests and boots on the ground, trying to like change legislation is just like one way of generating like community and cultural institutions that are the actual movement, like, or like the bigger kind of like part of the movement is you have this multiple multi-layered push towards shifting the terms that your body interacts with the world and that you, in your identity interact with world and you interact with others. And, and both are important, but there is like this much larger kind of like force that’s taking place alongside this kind of challenge to the law.
43:50	Constance Crompton:	Not to put anybody on the spot, but I do see in the chat that Amy Gottlieb amazing has a comment about working at Pink Type. Amy, did you want to talk about it? [Instrumental, Piano]
44:06	Amy Gottlieb:	Sure. I worked at Pink Type. We typeset, I mean, I sort of, I remember type setting The Body Politic type setting Fireweed. At that time, we were on Duncan Street sort of queen and university area. And Gabe Bell worked there as well with me. I remember all sorts of people in the office and I remember our wonderful, beautiful typesetting machine, which we took great care of and felt quite privileged to be using to typeset all these incredible magazines and, you know all sorts of different kinds of publications. And people came in and there were, there was a space for people to do the layout. And so, you got to hang out with people and sort of learn about, you know, what the, these different publications were all about. And, yeah, lots of discussions about the content of The Body Politic about the personnel that the, the, the personal ads in the back. And, that was another, you know, interesting, and a difficult time sometimes in terms of the kind of tension that I think, I certainly felt and I think that Gabe might have felt as well. Yeah, it was, it was a time.
45:51	Felicity Tayler:	Were you ever like tempted to, to change what the type was going to say?
45:57	Amy Gottlieb:	In terms of the ads? [Laughs].
46:00	Felicity Tayler:	[Laughs] Or, you know, editorial copy, like who knows.
46:08	Amy Gottlieb:	I don’t think so. So, it’s like, it was, it was, I mean, I think we would have, you know, you’re working at such a fast pace when you’re type setting [Sound Effect: Printing Press] and that it’s like, it’s just, you know, how any of us trying to get it out there and so that it can be proofed and pasted up and, you know, it’s, it was, you know, there was some crazy hours as well. And so no, but we, and, you know, yeah, he didn’t organize in that, in that way. Good idea though. [Laughs].
47:15	Mathieu Aubin:	Thank you for listening to Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening. Welcome to the epilogue. My name is Mathieu Aubin and I am here with Felicity Tayler, and we wanted to take a moment to reflect upon the process of making this episode. [Instrumental Music]
47:34	Felicity Tayler:	In designing this audio collage, we have proposed a reflexive remix, an aesthetic that Eduardo Navas describes as a sonic collage that blurs the origin of the sounds that we appropriate while relying on your allegorical recognition of the many sonic codes embedded within the soundscape, their larger meaning, and how they are received by members of LGBTQ2+ plus communities. We’ve remixed the sound space of the SpokenWeb: Lesbian Liberation Across Media listening practice held in April 2020. And the watch party of the same name held later in June. We think this produces a new sonic space as a continuation of what Judith Butler calls a citation politics, and that we honor the sounds of feminist press and lesbian liberation films shown during these events. And as we consensually site and remix the sounds of people’s voices, co-producing these events.
48:38	Mathieu Aubin:	This episode cites and further circulates a queer language that acknowledges rich and complex lesbian histories. It makes room for intergenerational discussion and listening. And the virtual space of the watch party attendees from different generations can together to watch lesbian liberation films, and listen to each other’s responses to them. The event highlighted the importance of earlier community building, while challenging romanticized notions of what that community meant. It also enabled members of more recent generations to reflect critically upon that time period, and to identify shared, lived experiences across generations. All this to say, the event built a virtual space that created rich intergenerational dialogue.
49:32	Mathieu Aubin:	So, with that being said, I want to take this opportunity to reflect upon the whole process of making this episode with you Felicity. And you and I have been working on this project for months now, time flies by even during a pandemic. And I was thinking about this, but like, remember when you originally asked me to co-lead the listing process with you beginning of the pandemic, it’s kind of surprising that we’re now here with a podcast episode capturing all the Lesbian Liberation Across Media events. So, my question is kind of broader and it’s, it’s this what surprised you the most about the process of producing this episode, given where we started and where we are now?
50:15	Felicity Tayler:	I think what surprised me the most was how easy it was. Like how smoothly it went, but I feel like it’s because we’ve been establishing kind of a set of like an, an underlying trust for so many years. And you know, the work, the work around the feminist presses and this sense that those communities produce their own, like the communities around these presses use that as the upward apparatus to produce their own kind of alternate world, is something that brought us together in the beginning. So, it’s sort of like we’re starting to, we’re starting from a space of queer affinity in order to be able to continue to speak about these things and draw a wider narrative around it. And now we’re thinking through it in relationship to sound.
51:11	Mathieu Aubin:	Yeah. I still remember when we first met at that Concept of Vancouver conference and you were like, you, you do queer things. I’m going to come and talk to you. And that was what, 2016, I think? So, four years this month. Wow. Time flies by.
51:31	Felicity Tayler:	Yeah. So, I guess I can kind of, I can follow up on that with my question. And this is a question that other people have asked me while I’m working on this material and as I continue to work on this material. And so, the question that I get asked is whether or not this is about identity and if it, so, yeah. So, is this about identity and if so, what does that mean to you?
51:58	Mathieu Aubin:	That’s a tough and good question. I think that for me, it’s, it’s strange because I’ve come to these materials through obviously, well, just say, I identify as a man and I’m interested in queer materials in general and the sounds of that period. So, for me, it’s not just an idea of identity, but also community building and solidarity, and thinking about what that type of solidarity work looks like. So, one of the things that was really powerful for me was being invited by you to not only participate in that listening practice with our past relationship and amount of work that we’ve done together, but also being invited for that launch party and being asked to contextualize some of those materials and to give some of my reflections. So, the word that I think that comes to my mind is privileged to be able to be in those spaces with the identity that I have, and also knowing when to perhaps limit the amount of space that I occupy when I’m invited to be in those spaces.
53:04	Mathieu Aubin:	So being invited to be there means that I have to be responsible and be respectful. So, I guess going back to your point about the easiness of all of this work, me feeling not only an enormous sense of respect for you, but also feeling that this respect is mutual. And I think that is grounded in our shared queer affinities. I, that’s probably the best way to put that. It’s just at the end of the day, I think that it has something to do with community building and identity, at least at the level of producing and collaborating together, you and I. So yeah, I have —in short, yes, it has to do with identity.
53:44	Felicity Tayler:	[Laughs]. Yeah, that’s what I always say. And I mean, of course it has to do with identity, even if it doesn’t pivot on it. But it is always about creating a sense of self in relationship to the, to the idea of communities and what does produce that idea of community. And in this sense, it’s has a temporal dimension, as it often does in, in queer spaces, because we’re always looking for a past that isn’t always necessarily available to us.
54:13	Mathieu Aubin:	Yeah. Exactly.
54:14	Felicity Tayler:	But I do like the, you know, what we were talking about earlier today about this clip that we wanted to revisit, and the editing kind of really illustrates where these questions are going. I think where, you know, in an earlier edit, there was a mistake and there was your voice like overlaid on top of one of the other participants voices and so you, you kind of produce this like typical stereotype of the, you know, the mansplaining, like, not, not making, not making space. And so, the ease with which we were able to address that and to smooth it out, in the final product, I think is a really great kind of example, of, of how working together has worked.
54:58	Mathieu Aubin:	Even though it’s a tiny glitch in our process over logic. I was just thinking, you know, I was listening to that I was thinking, this is egregious if we let this be, because this is just bad.
55:10	Felicity Tayler:	But also funny that there was like an ambiguity as to whether it had actually happened in real life or not. When we were working in the collage space, which it didn’t, it did not happen in real life.
55:24	Mathieu Aubin:	This is great. I’m super thankful that I’ve had this opportunity to collaborate with you on this project and for all the other collaborators as well.
55:33	Felicity Tayler:	Yeah. Well I thank you for your thoughtful ways. And with that in mind, here are some other thank yous for all the voices that you hear in this podcast. And also for the institutions that we were able to wrangle to make this series of events possible. So, we’d like to thank Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGregor, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Scott Girouard, Constance Crompton, Michelle Schwartz, Rachel E Beattie, Raegan Swanson, May Ning, jake moore, Becki Ross, Amy Gotlieb…
56:09	Mathieu Aubin:	…Rachel Epstein, Maureen FitzGerald, Emma Middleton, Marusya Bociurkiw, Baylee Woodley, Elspeth Brown, Stark, Humanities Data Lab at U Ottawa, SpokenWeb, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives, ArQuives, VTape, and VIVO Archives. All the proceeds from the event were donated to supporting our youth of Toronto and their Black queer youth and Trans crew and The519 trans people of colour project.
56:47	Felicity Tayler:	We couldn’t have made this podcast without you.
57:03	Hannah McGregor:	[Instrumental Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Mathieu Aubin of Concordia University and Felicity Tayler of the University of Ottawa with guest collaborators, Scott Girouard.
57:26	Voiceover, Emma Middleton:	And additional voiceover by Emma Middleton.
57:29	Hannah McGregor:	Our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland and a warm welcome to new podcast research assistant Judy Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribed to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. [Theme Music] You can rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada from all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds.

Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin & Scott Girouard

Felicity Tayler, MLIS, PhD is the Research Data Management Librarian at the University of Ottawa, and currently the Interim Head, Research Services Arts & Special Collections uOttawa. She is an occasional visual artist and curator, and has published scholarly writing related to literary archives in anthologies, and in venues such as the Journal of Canadian Art History,Canadian Literature, and Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture.

Mathieu Aubin is a scholar on print and performance cultures in Canada. He completed his PhD at UBC and is now an Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University where he holds a leadership position within the “Oral Literary History” research component of the SpokenWeb project. As part of this project, he is working towards recuperating queer people’s contributions to Canadian literary culture. His work on queerness, literary communities, and Vancouver has been published in the journal Canadian Literature.

Scott Girouard is a Front-End Developer based in Toronto, Canada with a lifelong background in music and creative practice.

Acknowledgements:

Episode Voiceover by Emma Middleton

Music/Score by Scott Girouard and Mathieu Aubin

Thanks to Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGreggor, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Constance Crompton, Michelle Schwartz, Rachel E Beattie, Raegan Swanson, May Ning, Jake Moore, Becki Ross, Amy Gotlieb, Rachel Epstein, Maureen FitzGerald, Marusya Bociurkiw, Baylee Woodley, Elspeth Brown, Stark (pseudonym) .

Humanities Data Lab at U Ottawa, SpokenWeb, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives, ArQuives , VTape, VIVO Archives

References:

Anger, Kenneth, director. Scorpio Rising. Ruban VHS, 1964.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Routledge, 1993.

Godard, Baraba. Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec Women’s Writing. ECW P, 1987.

Media Mothers, directors. A Working Women’s Collective. 1974.

Moores, Margaret, director. Labyris Rising. V Tape, 1980.

Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. Ambra Verlag, 2014.

Nicol, Nancy, director. Proud Lives: Chris Bearchell. V Tape, 2007.

Ross, Becki. The House that Jill Built. U of Toronto P, 1995.

SpokenWeb Podcast

S2-Episode 2

Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening

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SpokenWeb Podcast

S2-Episode 2

Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening

November 2, 2020

Produced byFelicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin & Scott Girouard

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Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin & Scott Girouard

Produced by
Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin & Scott Girouard