“I was returning to see if the ghosts were still astirring”: Southern lesbian reflexivity as social movement in Feminary (1979–1982)

This article examines an instructive moment in the archive of Feminary, a periodical that began in 1969 as a local feminist newsletter for the Triangle region of North Carolina. In 1979, the editorial collective announced a shift in focus toward "a feminist journal for the South emphasizing the lesbian vision." I argue that through this turn, the Feminary Collective experiments with lesbian and southern as discursive laboratories for shaping what I refer to as backward-onward community-formation-a praxis that requires confronting and acknowledging historical specificity and experiential limits while also imagining new possibilities for social movement. Instead of framing southernness and lesbianism as fixed identities, the Collective treats them as multivalent, slippery markers that resist closure, produce ambivalence, and contain vast relational and political potential. Moreover, this article discusses the Collective's configuration of the U.S. South as a spatial and temporal avenue for confronting the experiential and institutionalized afterlives of slavery and for critiquing the white-washed classism of literary conventions. The article's methodology includes close readings of material from the Collective's nationally-circulated journal, as well as discussions of excerpts from the oral histories of two former members of the Collective, one of which was conducted for the purposes of this project.