Showcase: Women Celebrating Womyn

By Daniel J. Wakin Jul. 28, 2009

It seemed a paradox.

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was started in 1976 as a private space for women, most of whom are lesbians, to set themselves apart and away from scrutinizing eyes. “For many of us, it is a relaxing, organic environment where we feel most whole and most truly ourselves,” the festival’s Web site says.

And yet there was Angela Jimenez, a photojournalist, capturing intimate moments and binding them into a book.

The result is a remarkably intimate portrait of shared ritual and camaraderie, but one that could only come about with unusual circumstances and departures from more usual journalistic practice.

To begin with, there is Ms. Jimenez, a freelance newspaper and documentary photographer. “I’m a gay person and I was interested in doing gay stories,” she said. Ms. Jimenez encountered the festival in 2003 when there on assignment for Velvetpark Magazine, a lesbian-oriented publication. She said she was inspired to return to take more photographs, and several summers later settled on her subject: the team of workers who arrive on the festival grounds in the Michigan woods and spend weeks assembling, and then dismantling, its infrastructure and buildings.

“It’s a major institution in lesbian feminist culture,” she said. “What really fascinated me about the workers is they are both literally and metaphorically building the community.”

She sent a proposal to the festival organizers. A lengthy, laborious negotiation ensued. Much of the discussion centered on protecting the privacy of the women attending the festival. “This was a really anti-establishment movement when it happened,” Ms. Jimenez explained. “It was separatist. As women, and as gay women, it was a move to create a space that valued women, and that valued being a lesbian, that mainstream society didn’t.”

Every person photographed had the right to approve publication of the pictures, and the festival was given the right to use most of the photos. In the end, few pictures were ruled out by subjects, Ms. Jimenez said.

“This whole process was very different from anything I’ve ever done, both logistically and artistically,” she said. It was a process she called incredibly stressful.

Key to gaining permission, she said, was the trust she had won by already being a “member of the community” of the festival. In 2006, Ms. Jimenez worked as a festival photographer, and joined carpentry work crews in 2007 and 2008. Sorting out her roles as participant and photographer was not always easy. “To continue to be a documentarian and equally be a person, that was hard. It’s hard to know when to put the camera down and when to pick it up, sometimes.”

Ms. Jimenez said she began documenting the festival without a clear destination for the work. Other workers suggested she make the photographs into a book, although Ms. Jimenez stressed that the festival itself had no role in funding the volume, which is self-published and will be released at this summer’s festival. It begins Aug. 4; Ms. Jimenez turns 34 the next day.

She said she looked for a commercial publisher but the material was just not marketable enough for the general public. Self-publishing gave her complete control over the contents, something she did not want to relinquish given the sense of privacy cultivated by the festival.

At the same time, new technology allowed her to do it much more cheaply. Her budget stands at around $12,000. Friends and professional acquaintances helped with production — either for fees or bartering of her photographic services. Others donated donated their time. A printer in Hong Kong, Crystal World Publishing Ltd., produced 1,000 copies. The title is “Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.”

The photographs contain few depictions of music. There are mostly images of laborers — all women — shirtless (usually depicted from the back or sides), sweaty, bandaged, playing cards, bearing timbers on their shoulders, smoking. One powerful image shows a woman named Esther, depicted from the back with a sledgehammer resting on her shoulder — an idealized evocation of hard labor reminiscent of the work of Lewis Hine.

One of the more striking pictures captures a woman named Lorie shaving Licia, who has naturally growing facial hair. “That would be a hard photo to make without really knowing them,” Ms. Jimenez said. “It’s pretty intimate.”

Toward the end of the book is the last picture Ms. Jimenez took at the festival last summer. It is a self-portrait, and one of the few fully nude shots in the book. It depicts the photographer in the woods, gazing at the camera, her lips slightly parted; looking, in her words, “really feral.” After a month camping out, she said she felt “like a woodland creature.”

Ms. Jimenez said she took the picture without premeditation. “It’s such an incomparable feeling, that feeling of being there for a month and working so hard. I felt transformed physically and spiritually and I wanted to see what I looked like in a picture.”

Basically, I saw them as less evolved and way less cool than all other letters of the LGBTQ. What I'm getting at here, actually, is the queer elitism that is so rampant right now. This is the part you may hate me for, but I think the calling out of bigotry has become quite hypocritical. The word bigot means “ having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one's own opinions and a prejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others.” Frankly, I see the young, urban, often highly educated and mostly white queers being at least as guilty of this as the lesbian separatists. The recent attack on elderly trans women who choose to keep using the word “tranny” is another good example. I can't help but notice the common factor of these two groups is their senior age and their lack of male privilege. It seems very ironic to so aggressively attack the so-called bigotry of the two most vulnerable demographics of our queer pantheon. Is not the whole point of our activism to support everyone's right to freely be who they are?

Right now, I'm sitting in my tent surrounded by oak trees and ferns. Off in the distance I hear chainsaws and hammers hitting stakes. It's my 3rd year working. When I pulled onto the land 10 days ago, I started crying, or I think balling would be the more accurate word. It caught me completely off guard. It was like this wave of relief swept over my body. For the next 4 weeks, I wouldn't be gawked at or yelled at by dudes. I wouldn't have to brace myself waiting for the light to change when 3 men in a truck pulled up next to me at night. I wouldn't be shamed for having emotions, or told I'm just “on the rag” when I dare to have an opinion. Instead, I'd be riding around in flatbed trucks filled with hay and smart, sexy babes. I'd be stacking firewood in the sunshine wearing only my gloves, boots and cut offs shorts. I'd be in the land where beards are worn with pride, fat is truly fabulous and old ladies dance naked in the afternoon, tits hanging low, and this is seen as beautiful, not disgusting or shameful.

In a world where patriarchy is still imbedded so deeply in the fabric of our collective being, it's hard to imagine a realm outside of that. You cannot comprehend the value of this place until you come breath it in, sweat it out, and walk alone with it through the woods at night. This festival has been a vital lifeline to countless women from so many walks of life. I am deeply grateful to have finally landed here, and I hold firmly that you can be an excellent trans ally and still come be with dykes in the woods. To spend our precious time arguing over whether cis women or trans folk are more deeply oppressed is a major distraction, a waste of our collective vitality, and a total drain on our political potential.

No one is served by victimization. All of us benefit when we learn to walk with heads high and hearts open. This place is not perfect, it's not a utopia, it's just a bunch of wild womyn figuring out how to love ourselves and exist together as best we are able."