CLARA T LPEZ MENNDEZ......HOMO DYKE. DYKE HOMO......

4-6
EMMA ELEONORASDOTTER...............The Lover........32-35
HANNA GUSTAVSSON..........cover: THE DYKE......front+back
JESS ARNDT........Receiving.........................18-19
JESSIKA EKLUND..................REFUGE..............24-27
JOHANNA GUSTAVSSON............................Baby, Bear,
Bi, Bull, Chapstick, in Denial, Femme, Frisco, Lipstick,
Trans, Soft. This body has many names...................3
LENA SRAPHIN................................DOUBLE......
................illustration: EMMA EKSTAM...........14-15
MALENE DAM AND ESTER FLECKNER...........Encountering Dyke
a fragment of an ongoing conversation...............20-23
PIA SANDSTRM...........the AFFIRMATION.............28-31
TIA-SIMONE GARDNER..........................Powerful and
Dangerous: Lorraine Hansberry, Geography, and The Uses
of the Demonic.......................................7-13
ULRIKA GOMM.......in my eyes/ your eyes.............16-17

THE DYKE, July 2014

Baby, Bear, Bi, Bull, Chapstick, in Denial,

Femme, Frisco, Lipstick, Trans, Soft.
This body has many names.
by Johanna Gustavsson

Women's bodies are used to embody nations but this body refuses.
This body is the site of life, where life takes place.
There is a tradition to its ways, but let me tell you how it will not
please and how it will not fit and how this body takes place and sits and
talks, as if it doesn't care, but it cares, just not for nations.
This body cares for women, whether they like it or not, and whether they
want to associate with it or show solidarity towards it or not. This body
loves women. Is geared into women.
I don't want to romanticize, or only politicize it but
This body is
untraditional
unconventional
not negotiable
This
this
many
Wind
wake

body has a specific style, an identity,

body loves, has masculine attire, a motorbike and bare arms. And
more and subversive ways of being.
in hair
up everyday, have cereal, comb through hair and puts on pants.

This body is simply

a life
spent
loving
women.
This body has Dyke sex, Dyke vibes, Dyke problems and Dykes hard.
Some Dykes would know how to make a molotov. Just ask.
(You do mean dyke as in queer, right? And not gay as in happy but more
queer as in FUCK YOU. ?)

The dyke has a leak, the river will burst through!

Half past two a summer night. Thousands of people move and exits an ocean
of fire. It is the bodies that would not be silenced. It had not yet
started to rain but thunder was in the air. It was that time of day and
it was that time of weather and it was that day and age.
A proud parade:
bodies with breasts behind shields of bandages,
bodies with wind in breasts,

All dykes to the front!! she screams from center stage. We know that she
is used to other sites and communities but there is no need for that here
and we all scream back at her:
All these bodies are dykes yo! Embrace!

HOMO DYKE. DYKE HOMO. by Clara t Lpez Menndez

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Instructions: Cut this page along the dotted line, copy and re-size (optional), re-print on t shirt transfer
paper, iron over white or coloured t shirt, & wear.


Powerful and Dangerous: Lorraine Hansberry, Geography,

and The Uses of the Demonic. by Tia-Simone Gardner

Women are powerful and dangerous, she writes...

If I were to write a genealogy of my own black feminist consciousness,
black women artist would be central. Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Carrie
Mae Weems, of course, but also, most influentially, Lorraine Hansberry.
James Baldwin writes, For Lorraine made no bones about asserting that
art has a purpose, and that its purpose was action: that it contained
the energy which could change things. Baldwins memory of his close
friends positions her as an artist activist. Hansberrys relationship
with him, another writer and transnational activist, is indicative of
her deep embeddedness as an artist located in what we might now call a
queer transnational network. I assert here that Hansberry, and a whole
cohort of BLACK FEMINIST leftists, are queer, not because this is a
term any of them would have used in their life times, nor as an index
of her sexuality alone, though she identified in her late life as a

LESBIAN, but as a means of understanding her importance to us today.

Queer

is for me a tool that defines the countours of an anti-

normative way of being, a particular leftist collectivity who have and

continue to theorize and put into practice a critique of hegemonic
white middle-class, colonizing, heteropatriarchal, nationalisms.
Queerness is also an useful way of knowing in that Omiseke Natasha
Tinsley has written that blackness and queerness inseparable because
as Black folks crossed the Atlantic, because the very nature of
slavery was to determine whiteness by negating blackness, to deny
normal identity categories such as man, woman, child, to this
particular group of people, calling them, instead, slaves.
Now, I

also begin with James Baldwin to illustrate a point. That

is, Baldwin, an openly gay male voice of the Black Left remains a
prominent subject in Black, queer, and literary studies while
Hansberry, who like Baldwin, subscribed to Leftist queer politics in
theory and practice, remains alienated from similar consideration. Let
us pause in this moment to remember, or reintroduce, the importance of
Lorraine Hansberrys work, now nearly fifty years since her death, by
looking at the multiple ways in which she engages a queer politics of
space-making, a cartography of struggle, as Chandra Mohanty and
Katherine McKittrick would call it, as a BLACK Left FEMINIST cultural
worker, US Cold WARRIOR, thinking
also about the power and
danger that have yet to
be understood in her
words. I explore here
that POWER AND DANGER in
relation to the demonic.
THE DEMONIC

In Demonic
Ground: Black Women and
the Cartographies of
Struggle (2006),
Katherine McKittrick writes, the demonic is a dark and unknowable
conceptual terrain that has been denied within Eurocentric ways of

mapping the world and charting epistemology. In this paradigm, the

demonic is acknowledges the limitations of what may be known or
understood, it allows room for tread into a space that is perhaps
perceptible but unknowable, a space that institutions and gate keepers
of knowledge cannot comprehend. This idea of the demon or the demonic
became a stand in identification for the cultures of those to be
colonized, the systems of thought that ran counter to or against the
knowledge products of the Enlightenment, equating blackness/darkness
with all that is evil, ugly, and exploitable. But. It is perhaps a
paradigm worth stealing. The fear and anxiety produced in response to
the idea of the (dark) demonic opens the possibility for a small
breach in power, the fear used to oppress becomes a border the
oppressor is afraid to cross. Going beyond what we understand socially
or spatially to be the common grounds of our political desires, be it
space, rights, or belonging, demonic grounds is a wholly
political terrain.

alternate

Zenzele Isoke writes that this conception of black

womens cartographies insists that the realm of politics, as a

central component of human life, necessarily unfolds in and across
time, space, and place (Isoke 6). The forging of demonic grounds
means a chance to reorient, remap, re-place where, how, and through
whom change may take place. Cultural workers visual, performing, or
literary have maintained long relationships to the political and
ideological struggles being fought in, over, and between spaces, but
McKittrick is also accounting for an under-theorized aspect of black
womens political praxis, that is scale.

Thinking about scale is

certainly instructive for examining Hansberrys work. In this context,

the queer politics of Hansberrys last plays such as Les Blancs and

What Use Are Flowers,

might be read as both creating and exploding

crevices of power, a term McKittrick borrows from Jenny Sharpe. That

is, the imaginative openings that her radical engagement with space
and non-linear time create cracks in the limitations we may be tempted
to place on cultural work, broadly recasting our understanding of the
black left and radical feminism. In Hansberrys work, demonic grounds
would provide a swampy spatial antagonism in which white supremacy
could drown itself.

Lorraine Hansberrys work as an activist and dramatist can be

thought of through the lens of demonic ground. Thinking in these
terms, I assert that the theater is a dense micro-political space in
which the experiences of black life, queer life, might be articulated.
Hansberry understood well the importance of cultural work and the
informal meeting spaces it allowed in the generating of formal
political networks.

She understood that the shared experience that

art and artists created could be an important component of social

justice work. These experiences had to be shared, had to be
collectively produced, and drama with all of its seemingly infinite
performability, allowed for an interactional space to access critiques
of colonization, paternalism, heteropatriarchy, and power.
Katherine McKittrick writes produced alongside and through
practices of domination, black womens expressive acts spatialize the
imperative of a perspective of struggle (xxiv).

In other words,

black womens expressive acts, their cultural work, the ways in which
they are able to counter their oppression through performing
resistance, often in intensely subtle ways, cannot be thought of
outside of the spaces in which these acts of resistance take place.
The street, the classroom, the bus, the bathroom. The embodied
struggle that shapes black womens experiences give these spaces of
resistance meaning, black womens embodied knowledges and histories,
make them mean. In Hansberrys life work, this embodied knowledge took
various forms. Les Blancs, one of her last staged plays, staged in
fact after her death, is one such example.
The drama Les Blancs (1970), began in 1960 on the heels of her
great success with A Raisin in the Sun. Partially as a critique of the
French playwright Jean Genets Les Negres, or The Blacks, Hansberry
continued writing and edited this new drama, completing the character
developments and dialogues, until her death. Genets play was to
Hansberry a very narrow, racist, caricature of black radicalism,
written by a dramatist who, along with Norman Mailer, comprised what
she termed the new paternalist.
In

1961, Lorraine Hansberry penned the essay Genet, Mailer, and

the New Paternalism, partially a response to the U.S. opening of Les

10

Negres, partially a theorization of white liberalism amongst cultural

workers. The new paternalists were a privilidged group of white male
writers who presumed to write about the lives and experiences of black
folk, as insiders would, patriarchal in their romanticization of
black subjugation, what Hansberry terms romantic racism (10). Black
subjects are given relevance if they provide a cathartic, validating
mirror to white male subjectivity.

The new paternalism was to

Hansberry a conversation between white men about themselves (The New

Paternalism 10, her emphasis).

Les Blancs, however, is not a reactionary work.

It was to be for

Hansberry a way to reconnect with places and ideologues she initiated

in Raisin, specifically the character Joseph Asagai, the young
Nigerian intellectual studying abroad in the U.S., and, quite
possibly, Beneatha Younger, the young, book smart, budding BLACK
FEMINIST. The play also allowed her to further develop a critique of
white liberalism, which she began undertaking in essays, speeches, and
creative work.
In a town hall meeting in New York in June of 1964, Hansberry
stated explicitly, We have to find some way with these dialogues to
show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and
become an American radical (Say it Loud 21).

Her frustrations lie

with whites who verbally supported the freedom and full citizenship of
black people, but through though their actions disregarded corporeal
and intellectual tactics of anti-racist organizations, believing them
to be hasty and impatient. This is a part of the complex

perspective

she brought to the writing of Les Blancs. Les Blancs provides a sharp
study of the Hansberrys interests and understanding of transatlantic
cartographies. Previously she wrote, I cannot allow the devious
purposes of white supremacy to lead me to any conclusion other than
what may be the most robust and important one of our time: that the
ultimate destiny and aspirations of the African peoples and twenty
million American Negroes are inextricably and magnificently bound up
together forever (Lorraine Hansberry quoted in Hansberry and Nemiroff,

The Collected Last Plays 1993, 31). Hansberry scholar Margaret

Wilkerson and Hansberrys former husband Robert Nemiroff have both

11

noted that the playwright was the first African American dramatist to
focus on African liberation struggles and American racism. A student
of sociologist and pan-africanist, W.E.B. DuBois, it is not at all
peculiar that Hansberry would take such a position.

What is

interesting is the ways in which she ties opposition to white

supremacy across transatlantic boundaries. The spatial make up of her
argument is in part symbolic of, what I am arguing is, her practice of
black queer critique.

She exposes colonization and racism as a white

supremacy heteropatriarchal, paternalistic devices and does not

shy away from addressing questions of violence. In the the play Les

Blancs, through careful character constructions the present-absent

BLACK WOMAN WARRIOR catalyst, the queer mixed-race insurgent,

the

reluctant radical-intellectual, the liberal well studied white

American journalist Hansberry writes a dynamically new
characterization of black radical militancy and white liberalism.
As it is my hope that you, dear reader, will go out and read this
amazing play and take from it what you will, I will not go into a
description or analysis of the text here. But rather end where I
began, locating myself in black feminist genealogy from Hansberry to
now. Lorraine Hansberrys work has taught me to rethink my own
assumptions and values that I placed on different kinds of activism,
often dismissing the intellectual and spiritual contributions of
myself and others as useless. Writing in 1964, only a few months
before the cancer invading her body would take her life, Hansberry
said I rather looked forward to going to jail once. Now I can hardly
imagine surviving at all. Comfort. Apparently I have sold my soul for
it. I think when I get my health back I shall go into the south to
find out what kind of revolutionary I am. We can read these words
many ways.
I choose to read them not as the words of a fearful reluctant radical,
but as the conscience of a revolutionary intellectual whose body
betrayed the will of her spirit. While I would not dare compare my
small life to the overwhelming bigness of Lorraine Hansberys life
(and death), her words remind me that even in those for whom we have
found to be sources of power, there has been this tendency to value

12

particular kinds of action over others, i.e. going to jail, over

writing at a table, speaking out loudest and boldest, to thinking in a
corner. When we validate such hierarchies in our daily encounters with
one another we miss the necessity of valuing BOTH of these ways of
being. Our bodies bare varying histories of violence, abilities,
fatigue, and, in my case, social anxieties, that may allow or prohibit
the social part of our social justice desires. Lorraine Hansberry,
and all, artists I hope, makes visible the ways in which corporeality,
while certainly important aspect of the political work at hand, is
only one way in which feminist action may be carried forward. It is
Art, she stated, not charismatic personalities, that holds the power
to change things.

13

in my eyes/ your eyes

by Ulrika Gomm

Ada Nilsson Adrienne Rich Alberta Hunter

Alice B. Toklas Alice Walker Angela Y. Davis
Anna Rling Audre Lorde Barbara Hammer
Bettina Kster Catalina de Erauso
Chantal Akerman
Christina of Sweden Clara Lpez Menndez Claude Cahun
Del Martin
Edmonia Lewis Elsa Gidlow Erika Mann
Gertrude Stein Gladys Bentley Gloria Anzalda
Hanna Gustavsson Harriet Hosmer Jack Halberstam
Jackie Moms Mabley Jodie Foster
Karin Boye
Kathy Fire Kris Kovick Linda Perry Lozen
Luca Snchez Saornil Marie Equi
Mercedes De Acosta
Michele Aboro Michelle Cliff Monique Wittig
Muriel Rukeyser Pat Parker Pia Sundhage
Radclyffe Hall Ruth Charlotte Ellis Savoy Howe
Selma Lagerlf
Soeur Sourire Sonja Sekula
Sophia Parnok Storm DeLarverie Qiu Jin

16

blood hot gallows humor solid charm

warm light deep well burning
flirty laughter aware tenderness
heavy pale patience veined sorrow clear opened
loving joy sparkling knowledge
determined strengths know tireless fighting
raged presence sturdy stubborn endurance
strong-minded smile warring-for justice
alert twinkling energy forward forward
absorbing squint sexy resting
will strong high-hearted sadness
gentle ice open wide pearl magnetized
dark lingering desire remote longing
rare radiating free forms
hard-mouthed fragmented many many birdlike shiftings
humorous stories heated now-and-always combat
strong wildfire early running
wordless splendid morning deep forested touch
adventurous tongue intimate navigating
challenging activity re-arranging speaking movement
naughty riotously flirty various trumpeting crossings
proud spiritual identities working conscious change
calm solid love waiting edges darker
adventurous floodlights restless desire
far from escape see right through
laughing hunger edgy brave
still glimpse piercing sad serious
many-sided gem glory solemn message
painful defiant rising rage flowing world-wide
head-on bending mind speaking gorgeous
wild heart painful force
sky-ward path vision warrior
hawk autonomous tearing down wrong-headed notion
stormy hard-and-fast constant brilliant connecting
shadowed obsession elegant lust
power power fighter undefeated beautiful
fire speaking soul turning silence-to-scream
self-governed violent glorious action
stories told heavy astonishing daring escapades
unleashing loud word word strong caller
smile burning gold generous
hanker lonely light inward
dancing drive dignified spirit
captivating pounding seducing weight
self-collected strong passionate will
few-spots-of-joy melody sad
diverse rendering wall-less frustrating
vibrant warmth raying inhaling life
fierce brave fighting-illusion-construct thank-you
uprising spirit wakening war-drums

17

18

Receiving
by Jess Arndt

We were hooking up.

Put that there and this here.
Body surface as site of attachment.
Then I wanted to be the bigger person.
Im being the bigger person, I said.
I put on a deep-sea diving suit. It was huge.
It came phallus-equipped, something like a pacific gooey
duck neck whanging out from the crotch pad.
In Nisqually gooey duck means: dig deep or genitals.
At home on the beach theyd always looked like hollow
uncut dicks to me, the siphons crawling around trying to
escape their shells.
How Lygia Clark says: the I and the you as if we could
be them both equally?
Occasionally a hot feeling comes across my lobes not unlike what I imagine a sudden seizure or erasure instills,
or wet brain from alcohol, the pieces swelling up, wood
splitting when an uncured ship meets too much water, the
cortex becoming thick and hard.
In other words: it wont go back in, the surgeon said.
Its stuck like that.
If I attach to you, then I have no room left to attach to
you.
But weve barely talked about how the surface hose meets
the mouth (now prostrate on seafloor) and the air pumps
and feeding gadgets.
How I am not yet good at receiving.
Other fantasies?
Truck hitch and hooded coupler.
Ice cream glob lowers on a half-broken cone.
Bathtub plug lips protruding down into drain.
Banana slug waiting for salt.

Image: Lygia Clarke the You and the I (cropped and distorted)

19

Encountering Dyke
a fragment of an ongoing conversation
by Malene Dam and Ester Fleckner

20

21

22

23

REFUGE/ 60 50 17 N 16 28 3 E
by Jessika Eklund

24

25

I have a place where I can afford to be indifferent to the world.

Untangle myself from it.
Leave all that it makes us carry outside.

Here I own all time and space surrounding me.

I own the choice to define and undefine myself endlessly.

Hate men. Love women.

Without any need for grey.

And I can build a monument of me, being loved.

Feel it inseparable running through my veins, enabling my hands to
make a change.

Its a ship shaped like a house.

Where winter sometimes keeps everything dormant and silent until
May.
But then summer brings the neverending light.

We can leave the grass, spruce, pine and birch uncut on top of
each other. On top of red sand, and black soil.
Put seeds in there.
And listen to the dogs eternal barking.
When we wait for stars.

I know Im lucky.
So come. Meet me.
Be brave.
You are gonna be alright.
We can do extraordinary things.

26

27

28

29

30

the AFFIRMATION
by Pia Sandstrm
31

The Lover
by Emma Eleonorasdotter

In a low voice, just below your breath, you are talking to me.
Your eyes black of desire. Your words complicating my breathing.
I feel your breath against my forehead. Wet heat against my hands
and a wave of hunger for reaching into you drowns me, leaves me
drenched and dedicated.

You weave me into your being, your past and universe of thoughts.
My feelings all mixed up with memories and heartbreaks of my own.
I switch between my messed up bed in Malm, surrounded by toys
and books, to your neatly cleaned apartments in New York, to beds
that I have known, cardboard on the ground, soft thick mattresses:
Places where the power of the erotic has been nurtured. On an emotional level I cannot tell the difference, and you become my past
and take part among my lived through, and unfinished,
love stories.

32

You say we must let ourselves be enforced by the erotic. I want

nothing else. Revolution. This time sensuous. My skin reacts to
your touch your eyes into mine, your mouth, our shared
experience of moments. I want to cry by the arousement. And I know
that you are right, that this deeply human, border crossing
capacity of meeting between women is a dangerous power to those
who wants hierarchies to stay intact.

There is a reason why female sexuality is enclosed in all those

taboos, feelings of shame and guilt. It is frightening to think of
as a free source of power if you dont want women to be strong. We
share this knowledge you and me, and I feel you there beside me,
your hands, telling me to use that power.

Yet, the DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US MUST BE ACKNOWLEDGED. You tell me

what I already know, but in new ways, clearer and decidedly, making
efforts of glossing them over impracticable. And I am not talking
about you being dead Audre, and me being alive. (Because you are
so alive to me. Your death is a confusing fact that I am trying to

33

ignore.) I am neither talking about your talent in writing poems

that I dont know of, nor your strength throughout your hardships
that I dont believe myself to be capable of going through with
such dignity and heart.

I think of the question of race. This colour based separation of

people on a global and personal level, that work its way into the
human mind when we are young, and stay there as a raster in our
visions, inseparable from how we think of ourselves and
others. Your experiences differ from mine. When you were told off,
I was welcome, and even if I many times experienced unwelcomeness
I cannot know what person I would have been if I couldnt float
silently inside the accepted whiteness of everyday life in Europe,
choosing my occasions to show anti racist ambitions.

Someone might say, your stories and experiences arent for me to

cherish as my own because of this reason. But I dont think you
would agree. I think you would say that one must be aware of the
differences to see the similarities, and the other way around. And

34

you want us to unite, all women, in other, loving ways than

patriarchy has ever intended to.

We lay close to each other. Her smell. Her heat. The skin. But
most of all: The calm in my body. I am still inside.
No gravitation. No intestines. Space on the inside of my skin.

35

hi!
this is an invitation to participate in
DISRUPTIVE LAUGHTER.
disruptive laughter is a publication of 5 issues. each issue will be available both online, as a pdf
for downloading, and in a small edition printed version. there will be some sort of release event in
the end when all the issues are done. so each issue will be more like chapters in the whole, and the
release is an event of gathering those five chapters.
to loose a little bit of the hierarchical curatorial role my idea is to invite three women to participate in disruptive laughter, and those three women will invite two women each to the project.
all together we will be ten voices. this is also a way to hear and listen to voices that you have
not met before. for every issue it will be the same ten women dealing with those different voices
given for each issue. so over time and for each new issue we listen and speak and in the end there
will be a multitude of voices heard.
disruptive laughter:
#1 THE VISIONARY
#2 THE MOTHER
#3 THE DYKE
#4 THE POET
#5 THE WARRIOR
my idea is that the project will be going on for about a year, with start sometime during late summer 2013. every second or third month there will be a new issue published. the idea to give you the
titles for every issue from the beginning, is so each and everyone of the participants can dispose
their individual ideas and contributions to fit their own creative process. and for every issue all
these 10 voices will meet, a multitude of identities, thoughts, lived experiences, dreams, standpoints, complexities and voices.
each participant will have about 5 pages for each issue (more or less if needed). the format will be
A4, standing, b/w. the material can be images; photos, stills, drawings and/or text; essays, concrete poetry, articles, speeches and so on.. the layout will be very simple. all the body text will
have the same font, if there is not a specific layout idea for a specific text.
it is important, if you decide to be part of this project, that you will be part of it through all
the five issues. this project is formulated with inspiration from Audre Lordes life and work.
looking forward to hear from you! please dont hesitate to contact me if there is any questions or
thoughts!
all the best
/Ulrika Gomm
April 3 2013

DISRUPTIVE LAUGHTER
is supported by Lngmanska kulturfonden.
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PT MONO
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