sous-sol

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At the same time [as men were being imprisoned for homosexuality], women were increasingly caught up in the psychiatric system, and women who desired other women were diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia which was the same thing the authorities would use for political dissidents. So in a way, women who desired other women became sexual dissidents, and they were committed to psychiatric institutions and given all sorts of cures. For instance, electroshock therapy or sometimes even putting them into a diabetic coma with the hope that when they came out they would stop desiring other women.

Interestingly enough, if they couldn’t cure a woman of her desire for other women they would actually just change the gender assignment on her papers, so they would allow her, allow him to now have a transgender identity, and you would change your documents from female to male, which allowed you to do all sorts of things. It allowed you to go get a job and get a man’s pay scale, you could wear men’s uniforms to work, you could marry your girlfriend, you could also go to a couple of hospitals later on in the regime from the 1970s and 1980s forward, there were a few hospitals that would even perform certain surgical procedures to help your body look more like a man’s.

So while men were caught up in the law, women were caught up in a psychiatric cure that also served a chilling and terrorising effect on those populations because of course you never knew when that could happen to you, if your relatives would commit you, if the police would use that to blackmail you. And it was used in a very similar way, although it was a very different idea, of men having sex with men as a crime, and that to be punished, and women having sex with women as a form of psychiatric illness that had to be cured.

Laurie Essig, on Russia’s treatment of same-sex attracted women in the mid-20th century. From

Rear Vision, 1 December 2013

(via fyxan)

“We don’t, especially in the US, want to look at poetry as something every student is capable of, because that would be dangerous to those who control the school systems. All students, regardless of their backgrounds, would realise that they are capable of speaking very well; that there are not certain individuals who control what constitutes good language. They would realise that language is not just this agreed upon set of constructed ideas, that it’s not an MLA citation or a five-paragraph essay, that everyone can create new and beautiful language. So it is very frustrating to me when people say, ‘I don’t like poetry,’ or, ‘I don’t understand it,’ because all of that seems the fault of a system that doesn’t want to give poetry its power, and that doesn’t want to give people their power either.”

Dorothea Lasky, interviewed by Rebecca Tamás for Prac Crit (via bostonpoetryslam)