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Abstract
Few events evoke a divisive response amongst lesbians like the mentioning of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Autoethnographies, interviews, podcasts, and books – just to name a few – continue to be crafted even after the forty-year festival’s end. Unlike previous publications, this article approaches the festival using archival materials housed at Michigan State University donated by producer, Lisa Vogel, to unpack the signaling rhetoric of womyn-born-womyn (WBW). I center the experience Nancy Burkholder, a transsexual woman expelled from the festival, to navigate, as Nancy tried to navigate, the WBW “policy.” I then take readers on a journey into the archive and articulate my research through calculated steps of tracing language through years of the festival. This article demonstrates how documents, created by festival producers, incited confusion for Nancy Burkholder during the festival and how these same documents now sustain an archival ambiguity.
Disclosure statement
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
Notes
1 The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is also referred to as Michigan or MWMF or MichFest. MichFest is the term attendees use most often. Therefore, as a former festival goer, I will use MichFest throughout this article.
2 Other notable writings have been The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival: An Amazon Matrix of Meaning (2008) by Laurie J. Kendall, Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (2009) by Angela Jimenez, and “Woods of Their Own: Feminism, Community, Music and Politics at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival” (2011) by Amy Clarissa Barber.
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Sarah Cooper
Sarah Cooper is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Clemson University.