Butterfly Effect - ressourcesfeministes

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11 casting off. See Lara Fergus. 2005. “Lifeboat”.
12 the seven sisters. Also known as the Pleiades. There is much mythology centred on
this star cluster. Many peoples have used the Pleiades as a calendar or as a guide in
navigation. Sappho wrote of the Pleiades in one of her Fragments “The moon and
the Pleiades have set / the night is half gone / hours pass / still I sleep alone.”
Translation Susan Hawthorne. 1984. For more on the Pleiades, see Munya Andrews.
2004. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: Stories from around the World.
13 pirates. Famous among historical pirates are Mary Read (b. 1690) and Anne Bonney
(fl. 1718), both of whom cross-dressed as men and are said to have fallen for one
another. As happens in the lives of some lesbians, they are said to have later married
and been condemned to hang. Mary Read died of a fever, and Anne Bonney
disappeared from the history books.
14 lighthouse. A reference to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1990), whose main
character, artist Lily Briscoe, herself became the central focus of the autobiography of
artist, Mary Meigs. 1981. Lily Briscoe: A Self Portrait. Jeanette Winterson’s
Lighhousekeeping (2005) is also a nod in the direction of Virginia Woolf. The
suggestion is that whoever set out to the lighthouse is now installed there. Artist,
Suzanne Bellamy’s Lily Briscoe Series, 1999 was reproduced in The Australian’s
Review of Books, pp. 3-5, and 30.
15 curve of a breast. “The curve of your breast is like the curve / of a wave: look, held,
caught, each instant / caught, the wave tipping over and we in our bower, / the two
of us sheltered, my hands on your thighs, / your body, your back, my mouth on
your mouth / in the hollows of your jaws and your head / nuzzling my breasts.
And the wave above us is / folding over now, folding and laughing. Will you / take
to the sea, my darling” From “Well, then let slip the masks.” Suniti Namjoshi and
Gillian Hanscombe. 1986. Flesh and Paper, p. 19.
16 none of us can walk straight. Lesbian writers have reflected on the impossibility of
straight lines, straight thinking. “The waves are curved lines on a sphere (earth)
which moves in a spiral around a central point (the sun) which whirls through
another spiral (the galaxy) which is part of an infinite boundless universal spiral. So
to talk about the shortest distance between two points as a straight line is ludicrous.
Nothing from the smallest particle to the galactic arms moves in a straight line.”
Susan Hawthorne. 1992. The Falling Woman. p. 200. Also see Monique Wittig, 1992.
The Straight Mind and Other Essays.
17 the waves break on the shore. The last sentence of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves is:
“The waves broke on the shore.” Virginia Woolf. 1969. The Waves, p. 256.
18 wreck. Lesbian lives are real, and the reality often bears little resemblance to the
mythology surrounding lesbian existence. It is, as Adrienne Rich writes: “the wreck
and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth”, “Diving into the
Wreck”, 1973. Diving into the Wreck, p. 23.