Sisters Together

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Michfest), an annual lesbian feminist cultural event, held its last gathering in 2015 after forty years of existence. The festival’s closure was rumored to be connected to ongoing conflicts over its infamous “womyn-born-womyn” attendance policy, which first became a subject of controversy in 1991 and effectively banned trans women from the weeklong festival. Michfest now occupies a troubled space in feminist scholarship, where it is largely cited as the definitive example of lesbian feminist transphobia. This study analyzes Michfest’s archive in order to trace the connections between the womyn-born-womyn policy and the festival’s racial politics, complicating existing narratives of the festival by foregrounding its understudied histories of trans and antiracist activism. Writing alongside other queer and trans theorists who have argued against an interpretation of lesbian feminism as the exclusive domain of white, cisgender women, I highlight the range of tactics used by women of color and trans people to challenge the festival’s policies and power structure. I argue that while the festival was shaped at the structural level by racism and transphobia, its foundation in the premise of collective ownership also made it a significant site of trans and antiracist activism and community building

Art · Inclusion (mineral) · Music festival · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Race, History, and American Society

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