Butterfly Effect - ressourcesfeministes

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9 Queen of Hearts. In a deck of cards this is the lesbian card of love. In the Tarot she
is the Queen of Cups. Jeanette Winterson goes in search of the Queen of Hearts
in The Passion (1987). Judy Grahn has written two collections of poems focusing
on the card queens, The Queen of Wands (1982) and The Queen of Swords (1987). In
the preface to The Queen of Wands she writes that The Queen of Cups (or Hearts)
and The Queen of Diamonds are to follow, p. xi.
10 thread. In the labyrinth, the house of the labrys, of the double axe, love is sought
by means of a thread. It is not clear whether love will be a monster or a tame
being; one has to enter the labyrinth to find out.
12 unicyclists. It matters little whether the cycle is a unicycle or a bicycle, a woman
riding such a contraption must be a lesbian. Divided skirts, or bloomers, were
invented so women could ride bicycles. It took some bravery to do so at the
dawn of the bicycle’s invention, and those women who did were soon equated
with feminists / lesbians.
12 fly without fear. Like the cyclists, women who join a circus, take up trapeze in
adulthood and who have overcome their fear of heights, if ever they had such
fears, are readily seen as odd, other, or as a lesbian.
13 standing one atop the other. In a performance of this poem produced by
Performing Older Women’s Circus members, four women stood one atop the
other in the balance called “tiers facing”.
14 gamelan orchestra. Helen Pausacker, a Melbourne-based writer, first gave me an
appreciation of the complexity of Balinese shadow puppets and the
accompanying gamelan music. She performed in Melbourne in the 1980s at
Salon-A-Muse, a venue established by a group of lesbians to encourage artistic
and intellectual endeavours by women.
15 webbed feet. The gondoliers of Venice are said to be born with webbed feet. See
Jeanette Winterson. 1987. The Passion.