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A Restricted Country

1988; SAGE Publishing; Issue: 30 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1395059

1466-4380

Elizabeth Wilson, Joan Nestle,

Canadian Identity and History

In recent years more and more feminists have turned to autobiographical writing, making of reminiscence a kind of do-it-yourself oral history, in some cases seeking the history of oppressed peoples as part of the search for personal roots, in others creating history out of a well of silence, a past that is or was invisible. The past of lesbianism comes into the second category, and Joan Nestle's book comes in part out of her work for the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The' author is well known to feminists on this side of the Atlantic as the writer of articles on butch and femme relationships, and as an opponent of the feminist antipornography movement. In A Restricted Country she brings this writing together in the context of a number of autobiographical pieces, but there is no division here a division which can be a pitfall in biographies of the selfbetween the sharp, idiosyncratic memories of childhood and the more partisan, polemical experiences of adulthood. For even in writings in which the purpose is to trace the origins in childhood of adult political commitment, the child's vision and the uniqueness of every experience tends towards the recreation of an enchanted lost world. This is true even of works such as Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which includes many painful and one quite horrific experience. Joan Nestle somehow surmounts this hurdle, her politicization through events in her childhood anchored closely to her politics today by her sexuality and also her mother's sexuality. In women's autobiography the narrator's relationship with the mother is often painful and fraught; there is also a tradition, in the works of Colette, for example, of the autobiographical celebration of motherdaughter love. Seldom, however have I encountered such clarity combined with such love and loyalty as in Joan Nestle's defence of heterosexual female desire as in the section 'My Mother loved to Fuck'. 'Celebratory' writing often verges on the sentimental or fudges painful issues. But not here. Joan Nestle does not gloss over the times her mother got