Where is a woman at home? In her body, her household, her country, her family, her marriage, her job? And what rights and responsibilities, what subjectivities and sensibilities, what protections and dangers come with being at home, between homes, homeless? The articles in this volume explore the physical, emotional, economic, ideological, aesthetic, and political dimensions of affiliation and alienation, desire and fear that accompany women's experiences of home in its multiple and competing dimensions.

The first two articles focus on bodies as sites of comfort, conflict, and commerce. In "Come Out, Come Out Whatever You've Got! or, Still Crazy after All These Years," Susan K. Cahn offers a powerful meditation on the ways that sexual desire and physical illness confound our sense of being at home with ourselves. Embracing a lesbian identity in 1975, at age seventeen, she was transformed from "a lonely gender misfit" to "a loud proud lesbian who had made the pilgrimage to the lesbian-feminist Mecca of Berkeley, California." Finding an emotional and physical refuge in this new-found world, Cahn was swept up in the tide of gay rights, feminism, and queer studies for twenty years, until she floundered on the alien shoals of a chronic illness. That illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, challenged the physical, psychic, emotional, and financial resources she had garnered over the previous two decades. In this eloquent and witty essay, she struggles with the meaning of her illness, with the ways that it echoes earlier debates over sexual orientation, and with its significance for rethinking issues of self and tolerance.

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Susan K. Cahn
Come Out, Come Out Whatever You've Got! or,
Still Crazy after All These Years

Carole Anne Taylor
an ex-charmer  gone in the chest (Poetry)

Pei-Chia Lan
Working in a Neon Cage: Bodily Labor of
Cosmetics Saleswomen in Taiwan

Dawn McDuffie
Dollar Store; What I Found at the Corner of Willis and Third (Poetry)

S. Li
My Sister and I: Whose Voice Are We Making? (Fiction)

Sarah Avery
Sweater, Daughter (Poetry)

Brianne Russell
Photo (Poetry)

Jamil Khader
Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: Community and Transnational Mobility in Caribbean Postcolonial Feminist Writings

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee
Freedom (Poetry)

Dawn McDuffie
Dad Skins Muskrats When I Turn Six (Poetry)

Annelise Orleck
Gender, Race, and Citizenship Rights: New Views of an Ambivalent History

Nancy King
Evolution (Poetry)

Elaine S. Abelson
"Women Who Have No Men to Work for Them": Gender and Homelessness in the Great Depression, 1930-1934

Jack Hirschman
Elly Simmons: An Appreciation (Art Essay)

Rachel Norton
Poetry

Lisa Levenstein
Hard Choices at 1801 Vine: Poor Women's Legal Actions against Men in Post-World War II Philadelphia

Eileen Moeller
Poetry

Dawn McDuffie
Poetry

Paisley Rekdal
Six Girls without Pants

Christina Simmons
Women's Power in Sex Radical Challenges
to Marriage in the Early-Twentieth-Century United States

Jennifer Firestone
How to Treat a Woman (Poetry)

News and Views

Cover Art

Elly Simmons. Street Abandon, 1986.
Pastel on Rag Paper.
55 1/2” x 41 1/2.” Private Collection.
© Elly Simmons