Wars and thinking.

 
   "What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed 
   to the point of explosion."--Radicalesbians, "The Woman-Identified 
   Woman," 1970 
 
   "The realm of human sex, gender and procreation has been subjected 
   to, and changed by, relentless social activity for millennia. 
   Sex as we know it--gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, 
   concepts of childhood--is itself a social product."--Gayle 
   Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on a Political Economy of 
   Sex," 1975 
 
   "Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give 
   us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather 
   than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary 
   drama."--Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic," 1978 
 
   "Thus the lesbian has to be something else--a not woman, a not 
   man, a product of society, not a product of nature for there is 
   no nature in society."--Monique Wittig, "One is Not Bore a 
   Woman," 1980 
 
   "I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range--through 
   each woman's life and throughout history--of woman-identified 
   experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously 
   explored genital sexual experience with another woman."--Adrienne 
   Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and 
   Lesbian Existence," 1980 
 
   "What is the relationship between sexuality and gender? What 
   is our stake in maintaining a still relatively rigid gender 
   dichotomy in sexual temperament and behavior? What is the 
   relationship between sexual fantasy and sexual acts? What is our 
   rational control over fantasy and do we think there should be a 
   sexual ethics that extends to fantasy? ... How malleable is sexual 
   taste? In other words, how set are our individual scripts for sexual 
   arousal?"--Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson, 
   Introduction to Powers of Desire: the Politics of Sexuality, 
   1983 
 
   "Heterosexuality, I now think, is invented in discourse as that 
   which is outside discourse. It's manufactured in a particular 
   discourse as that which is universal. It's constructed in a 
   historically specific discourse as that which is outside of time. It 
   was constructed quite recently as that which is old: heterosexuality 
   is an invented tradition."--Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention 
   of Heterosexuality, 1995 
 
   "From the beginning of wars in this region from '91 on, I felt that 
   I have to invent Ten Thousand ways to let my lesbian desire 
   breathe. At some moments during the last 8 years, it was not 
   easy for me to put in words how do I feel when making love 
   with a woman and in the back there is a radio with the news of 
   war. Killed or expelled or other fascist acts. In my room, I would 
   not be able to stand up from the bed, leave the desired bodies 
   and switch off the news, because I thought respect to the killed I 
   will show by not switching off the radio ... reading Adrienne 
   Rich, "Litany for Survival," by Audre Lorde and essays of Joan 
   Nestle kept the light of my soul in wartime alive."--Lepa 
   Mladjenovic, in a private correspondence, Belgrade, 1999 

American bombs are falling on Baghdad; seven Iraqi women and children are killed by young frightened American soldiers; Rumsfield grins his death-mask smile, "I wish I was the author of this war plan, it is going so well." I sit in my new home in Melbourne, Australia, driven here by breast cancer, landlord greed, and my love for a Melbourne woman. Several months ago when the Journal of Women's History extended me the invitation to join this project of rereading, …