Sinister Wisdom 106: The Lesbian Body

From the provocative to the mundane, the specific to the metaphorical, the relative to the cliché, this issue of Sinister Wisdom celebrates lesbians and our relationships with and to our bodies, no matter how painful, radically indulgent, seemingly benign, and powerfully personal.Personal narratives tell and explore the very particular lives of lesbians, how they weave, overlap, include and sometimes exclude. Work featured in this special issue is rooted in the body but also simply begins and come back to the body as the writer explores any number of topics. Encompassing as large a range of art and writing as possible, rooted in the very ground metaphor of how we experience the world—through the body—“The Lesbian Body” penetrates deep truths about the lesbian self directly from the source. How might we better explore and accept an expansive, full-range of lesbian identity from the very messy particulars of everyday consumption, digestion, expulsion, and excretion? Where might we enrich and intersect our understanding of sexuality and identity by breaking down a host of barriers and include what we do with our bodies as perhaps even more enlightening than mere rhetoric and discourse? Can the jeans we choose to wear tell a better story of our complex humanity? Can something be a cliché and still be achingly true between the sheets?