Colonialist Intimacies: Loving and Leaving on Lesbian Land

Using archive material from the women’s land, or lesbian land movement of the 1970s and 80s in the U.S., this paper considers colonialism as a framework for examining the intimacy of sexual and personal relationships. Lesbian lands were a site of lived feminist politics – the incarnation of “the personal is political” – that incorporated lesbian-feminism, identity politics, anti-capitalism, nascent forms of environmentalism, and a back-to-the-land DIY ethos. White lesbian women in the land movement uniquely positioned themselves relative to white (male) settler ideologies, particularly in the emphasis on a move to the country as a path to liberation. I argue that the operation of colonialist patterns in these communities appeared most vividly on the scale of the intimate and personal, and, therefore, left Native-identified and non-Native women of color without access to the same freedoms.