WINNER, "BEST QUEER NARRATIVE," BEYOND THE CURVE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Sisterhood is complicated.

Sisterhood is complicated.Sisterhood is complicated.Sisterhood is complicated.
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  • Making
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    • Home
    • Making
    • Press
    • Credits

Sisterhood is complicated.

Sisterhood is complicated.Sisterhood is complicated.Sisterhood is complicated.
  • Home
  • Making
  • Press
  • Credits

MAKING THE PROJECT

Jackie Rhodes sits at a table covered; in the fore in papers and books. In the foreground is a blue

It was supposed to be a book.

After my first book (Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency), I wanted to write a book about the Furies and their newspaper. I had read the Furies newspaper in 1984, when I first came out. It was formative for me, and I wanted to do the research and write a monograph.


I ended up writing several other books instead, and had a sort of writer's block about the Furies project. Then it occurred to me: they're out there, still. I could talk with them. And so I did.

Jackie Rhodes smiles broadly while holding a copy of THE FURIES newspaper up to the camera.

Archival research

During that long writer's block, I read a lot. I traveled to  Duke University to explore the holdings of the Sallie Bingham special collections. There's a complete run of the Furies newspaper there, annotated by readers 50 years ago. The collection lives online here. I also went to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn to look at its collection. I presented on the Furies at a number of conferences. I just couldn't do the big project until the idea of documentary storytelling hit me.

A composite of nine pictures of individual Furies during their interviews.

Interviews

I started my interviews in 2017, with a trip to Manhattan to talk with Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron. Over the next three years, I traveled to Columbus, Cupertino, Oakland, Santa Fe, Studio City, Afton, and Washington, D.C. with my recording gear and sometimes an assistant.

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