Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"No foggy remnant of a dying era, lesbian (and women’s) lands continue to provide meaning and solace to many women who are dissatisfied with and alienated from the dominant U.S. culture and its heterosexism. Herlands documents a particular moment in history in which a radical movement of primarily white women imagined and crafted a different world. There are few instances cross-culturally in which women have taken such dramatic steps to remake the world in their own image, which is why this story, an empathetic view of a group of women continuing to define themselves and live independently, is a must read."—Evelyn Blackwood, Purdue University
"Herlands is an accessible and sympathetic ethnography of the lesbian back-to-the-land movement. Going well beyond caricatures of landdykes, Keridwen N. Luis shows the promise of feminist intentional communities—their enactment of utopic ideals of collectivity, feminist embodiment, and ecofeminism—without sidelining how the animating logic of women’s nature/nature-as-woman also reproduces transphobia, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. What emerges is a complex reading of gender, race, and nature in a rural lesbian culture."—Margot Weiss, author of Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality
"The book is an ethnography rooted in the methods and language of Anthropology. It’s refreshing to see women's lands positioned as the saving remnants that we always hoped they might become!"—Duluth News Tribune
"For urban, landscape, and community planners, a careful read of Herlands can shake loose the biases and banalities that inform our current assumptions about who is included in our sanitized visions of future communities. Landscape architecture and planning practices are grappling with intersecting threads of systemic racism and segregation, income inequality, and new perspectives on gender and identity, all within the context of climate change. Women’s communities have been facing these issues head-on, grappling with them in all the conflict and messiness required in utopian work, and they offer clues for alternative practices. "—Landscape Architecture Magazine
"Luis describes the unique freedom she feels in an exclusively woman space. She is able to interact with others less carefully, and to experience a sense of self-possession and awareness."—Full Stop
"Herlands makes important points about the cultural dynamics of social movements, the politicization of everyday life, current debates within feminism, and the persistence of inequality within social movements."—Mobilization
"The book is deeply enmeshed in cutting-edge contemporary academic arguments about identity politics."—American Journal of Sociology
"The relevance of the collectives, in addition to their reach into mainstream and left-of-mainstream culture, is their creation of a space to debate and examine and critique. In some of the most refreshing sections of the book, Luis describes the unique freedom she feels in an exclusively woman space."—Full Stop Reviews Supplement
"Luis’s depiction of real women necessarily provides a much more nuanced narrative of complex lives, identities, and motives."—H-Net
"This book beautifully illustrates the possibilities that can become realities when people collectively re-imagine ways of building community, creating homes, and living outside of traditional societal structures."—Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Welcome to Women’s Land, Here Is Your Umbrella
1. The Political Is Personal: From the Peace Camp and Women’s Music Festivals to Women’s Land
2. Are the Amazons White? Race and Space on Women’s Land
3. “Now My Neighbors and Friends Are the Same People”: Community, Language, and Identity
4. The Giving Tree: Gift Economies Planted in Capitalist Soil
5. The Mountain Is She: Gender as Landscape, Landscape as Gender
6. Primally Female: Agency and the Meaning of the Body on Women’s Land
7. We Have Met the Enemy and She Is Us: Scapegoating Trans Bodies
8. The Hermit and the Family: Aging and Dis/Ability in Community
Afterword: Women’s Lands, Women’s Lives
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
