Sexual Social Scripts and the Re-Imagings of Community Identity

Introduction I first attended the Womyn's Music Festival in 1995. By that time, the festival had a twenty year history behind it and had become, since its inception in the mid 1970s, the largest and longest running festival in North America. For a young dyke like myself, the promise of a primarily lesbian and queer body of participants was particularly alluring, and I had a sense that my journey to the festival would be a pilgrimage of sorts. Still learning to traverse the boundaries of heteronormativity, I had begun to actively seek out spaces, both discursive and material, I could cultivate and articulate my own emerging sexual and gender identities. Women's Studies classes, lesbian bars, and a cohort of lesbian and queer positive friends and mentors had already provided me spaces within which to imagine and enact identities other than those offered to me by my rural Manitoba homeland. Michigan promised one more space to live out that migratory process.(2) Migrations, Inta Gale Carpenter suggests, are made up of individuals who conclude that their problems and needs can best be met outside the native land (1990: 93). For me, there were no queers in Brandon, Manitoba's, east end, nor it seemed, were there any anywhere else in my small hometown; coming-out, I thought, would have to await larger far-off territories. That -- I grew up -- held neither authenticity nor familiarity for me; neither psycho-emotional construct comfortably intersected with my emergent lesbian subjectivity. Home, for me, was an imagined future-place, free of the heteronormative sexual scripts which marked my youth; it was a place I would eventually get to, rather then simply I came from. In the context of queer migration, then, notions of home often become not that place which is left behind, but that which beckons and is sought after. As a point for arrival rather than a point of departure, signifies a utopian possibility that imprints in the minds of queer migrants a nostalgia for that which is yet to be. By drawing from research undertaken at the Womyn's Music Festival in 1997 and 1998, I work here to elucidate some of the socio-spatial complexities inherent within the queer discourses, performances, and significations of home and homecoming that play out at the annual event. Paying particular attention to the relationship between the discursive space of the queer social imaginary -- one which seeks to resist the hegemony of heternormative sexual scripts -- and the physical space of the Womyn's Music Festival, I unpack the ways in which notions and deployments of sameness and difference, inclusion and exclusion, and community consolidation and contestation mark the annual event. Built upon a lesbian-feminist and cultural feminist politic in the mid 1970s, the creation of events like the Womyn's Music Festival reflected a desire on the part of lesbians to create spaces where a positive collective identity for lesbians is affirmed (Taylor and Whittier 1992 in Eder et al. 1995: 489). Contesting the homogeneous and heterosexist notions of oppression deployed during the early second wave of feminism -- notions which centralized the experiences of white, middle class, heterosexual women within a hierarchy of patriarchical power relations -- North American lesbians began to stake their own claims in an evolving movement through taking on central roles in the creation of emergent feminist theories, politics, and cultures. Cultural expressions of the political lesbian, drawn from both academic and activist circles, were manifested in the creation of new lesbian-feminist publications that could be accessed through a growing number of bookstores, and precipitated a new genre of women's music which challenged traditional heterosexist representations of female desire. A conscious, but often contested, creation of lesbian culture and collectivity was cultivated, in part, through a shared participation in women-only, lesbian-centered events like the Womyn's Music Festival. …

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