Butterfly Effect - ressourcesfeministes

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21 cities in our minds. The art of memory, an art required by those interested in pursuing
lesbian history and culture, involves creating a mental space, a place through which the
mind can saunter at will, noticing elements of the place and its people. So long as these
elements and people are tagged as memory joggers, the city in the mind can provide
the possibility of speaking at length without notes, other than those places through
which one is walking. See Frances Yates. 2001. The Art of Memory.
22 women can hold to. Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies and her Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honour both outline the ways in which a woman can live profitably
in a city. It takes women’s experience as central, and builds codes of conduct and laws
upon this experience. She does not pretend that life will be easy, instead she prepares
women for the inevitable adversity with which they will be confronted. In 1905 Bengal,
Rokeya Hossian pondered these same questions and explored them in her story
“Sultana’s Dream”. See Rokeya Sakhawat Hossian. 1988. Sultana’s Dream and Selections
from The Secluded Ones.
23 our bodies giving shape to brick and stone. The above works of imagination can be set
against the archaeological records as described by Giti Thadani in her travels around
India to discover ancient lesbian archaeologies. Giti Thadani. 2004. Moebius Trip. Two
fine ancient examples of buildings which reflect the shapes of women’s bodies are the
Temple of Tarxien on the island of Malta and Skara Brae in Scotland. The shapes of
these and other tombs and dwellings are shown in Cristina Biaggi. 1994. Habitations of
the Great Goddess. p. 127. For a lesbian story centred on Skara Brae see Cathie Dunsford
2001. Song of the Selkies.
24 rooms burrowed into the earth. The Hypogeum of the Temple of Hal Saflieni in Malta, is
the largest of all underground buildings, encompassing 600 square metres and
extending more than 10 metres into the earth. The Hypogeum consists of one or more
egg shaped chambers situated underground. Cristina Biaggi. 1994. Habitations of the
Great Goddess. p. 29. A fictional rendering of such underground dwellings appears in
Sally Gearheart’s utopian novel, The Wanderground. She creates the Remembering
Rooms which are fashioned to resemble the cochlea of the inner ear (they are called the
Kochlias). Sally Gearheart. 1979. The Wanderground. This novel was very influential for
many lesbians in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Remembering is an act of resistance for
lesbians, for without active remembering we can forget or not recognise even the lovers
we have had. See Andrea Dworkin’s short story “The simple story of a lesbian
girlhood” in The New Woman’s Broken Heart (1980).
25 rent by strife. Monique Wittig’s San Francisco, as depicted in Across the Acheron, is deeply
divided, and the divisions include the fights and arguments of lesbians who hold to
different politics. Similarly, the zappers in Building Babel show the divisions in the city
of Babel. They possess shiny steel claws of varying voltage; the higher the voltage, the
higher the social position or closeness to Queen Alice. Suniti Namjoshi. 1996. Building
Babel, pp. 129-131.
26 unscrupulous women. Queen Alice in Building Babel is one such character. She has
determined to be a dictator and insists on total loyalty from her followers. Reminiscent
of the Red Queen, she is quick to order, “Off with their heads.” Suniti Namjoshi. 1996.
Building Babel, pp. 104-140.
27 not even lesbians. An ironic statement to say the least. Lesbians, of course, are as frail as
any other group of people. Our dispossessed status sometimes confers an advantage of
insight, for some it simply continues the violence of our lives. One can celebrate a
culture, such as lesbian culture, without holding to the proposition that all its members
are wonderful individuals. Gillian Hanscombe explores the idea of evil in lesbian
feminists in her novel. Gillian Hanscombe. 1995. Figments of a Murder.