Inheriting womyn’s land 1 : ‘thinking-with’ feminist lineages in a messy archive

Abstract

In the past several years, a new generation of feminist and queer theorists has helped to cultivate renewed attention to the work of 1970s lesbian theory and activism. This renewed attention requires careful engagement with contested archives, particularly when navigating racisms and biological essentialisms of the past that continue to haunt feminisms in the present. In this article, I ask what it means to inherit and care for the contested archive of the womyn's land movement and the potentialities it preserves for future feminist theorising while remaining committed to trans inclusion and antiracist and anticolonial praxis. Drawing from the papers of womyn's land culturemakers Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, I argue for a more complex understanding of what it means to ‘inherit’ this work for feminists interested in lineages of land-based feminist thought. By more fulsomely accounting for the possibilities that emerge from non-biological and queer forms of intergenerational exchange at play on the land, I argue for the vitality of the ‘messiness’ of this archive as a source of its own feminist pedagogy, proposing a process of ‘thinking-with’ these archives as part of a web of engagements rather than a linear genealogy.