Butterfly Effect - ressourcesfeministes

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22 lemon. In Australia lesbians are referred to as lemons. In 2001 Auberon Waugh
derisively called the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Lemon Award. Sunday Age,
Agenda, 8 July 2001. p. 10. Elizabeth Ashburn’s book Lesbian Art: An encounter
with power (1996) has on its cover an image of twelve lemons. The cover is a
detail from a work by Koori artist, Rea. Lemons 1. C-type photograph.
40 x 100 cm, 1994.
23 cabbages. Lesbians, it is said, “are born today from ear to ear” for as Monique
Wittig and Sande Zeig point out, “the atrocious mutilations once suffered by the
newborn when their cabbages were accidentally cut are thus avoided.” Lesbian
Peoples (1979), p. 49.
24 potatoes. “Potatoes are a lot like lesbians. They’re all the same and they’re all
different.” Bode Noonan, 1986. Red Beans and Rice. Cited in Rosemary Silva. (Ed.)
1993. Lesbian Quotations, p. 19.
25 Med. Mad Med is a character in Suniti Namjoshi’s Building Babel (1996). Many
lesbians have been labelled mad; many have suffered incarceration and illtreatment
as a result.
26 black sheep. Lesbians and other rebellious women have often been labelled as
black sheep of the family, the oddity, the marked one. This, of course, assumes a
white norm.
27 spin. Spinsters and lesbians are often one and the same. They spin thread or tales,
just as the Norns and the Fates of legend did. The -ster ending on many
surnames indicates a profession of women, a good proportion of these women
pursuing independent means were single or were lesbians. Among the
professions suggested by this suffix are: spinsters (spinners), websters (weavers),
baxters (bakers), sisters (nuns, nurses). More unusual words, kempster (a female
wool comber), huckster (a seller of smallgoods) and dempster (a judge, or
deemer) can be found. There are some puzzling words such as: monster
(although Robin Morgan’s poem suggests this might not be surprising;
youngster (but it is a person without power); more puzzling perhaps is gangster,
but a gangster is a person without a gang, without the power of numbers. In
Sigrid Undset’s novel, Kristin Lavransdatter (1951) the word moster, mother’s
sister, is used.
28 wool. Wool was the foundation of wealth for the Listers of Shibden Hall. Anne
Lister, the best-documented lesbian of the nineteenth century, was a beneficiary
of this wealth. See Jill Liddington. 1998. Female Fortune, p. 15.