Julia Penelope

I just discovered the other day that radical dyke theorist Julia Penelope died in January. Author Victoria Brownworth has this remembrance. Here's a small sample:

Julia Penelope was from another era, an era that is truly bygone. Unlike those other theorists, her work was so controversial, so revolutionary, so for lesbians only that what she said often created outrage, even among other lesbians and feminists. Julia Penelope was never an assimilationist, she never approved of assimilation and she built her whole world–a world into which she tried to draw as many other women as possible–around lesbocentrism. She was a lesbian separatist–something anathema in our mainstreaming, assimilationist LGBT world where straight acceptance is often more important than queer freedom.

The entire post is well worth reading.

You can find more of Victoria Brownworth's excellent prose here and here.