A multitude of dates are offered up when delving into artist Monica Majoli’s exhibition Countervision. The years delineate and cross over, framed largely within the socio-political movement of second-wave feminism, which for the purpose of this reading list, started in the United States roughly around 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and concluded by the release of Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women in 1991—the same year when Anita Hill testified before the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when he was chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Countervision brings together two significant, yet under-historicized, feminist spaces: Sisterhood Bookstore in Los Angeles, California (1972-1999) and the Feminist Photography Ovulars at the lesbian commune Rootworks near Wolf Creek, Oregon (1979-1983). The exhibition itself is embedded amongst the vast collections of The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, CA. Founded in 1981, the Mazer is the largest archive on the West Coast dedicated to preserving lesbian history.
The show includes new drawings by Majoli; books, magazines, and photographs from Majoli’s research of the Ovulars; and a concise selection of materials from the Simone Wallace Sisterhood Bookstore Collection held at the Mazer.
Majoli estimates that she began visiting Sisterhood in 1975 when she was 12 or 13 years old, at the behest of her encouraging music teacher. It was in the store, which also served as a vital gathering space for the local feminist community, that Majoli witnessed lesbians in relationship with each other, both in-person and in photographs. Over the years she spent at Sisterhood, coming into her own sexuality and political consciousness, Majoli became particularly absorbed in the images created by artists who participated in the Ovulars, a series of photography workshops driven by feminist theory and a commitment to elevating lesbian visibility.
A central figure for both Majoli and Countervision is artist Tee A. Corinne (1943-2006), who co-facilitated the Ovulars from 1979 to 1981. Photographs and contact sheets from Corinne’s archive, held at the University of Oregon, serve as the source materials for Majoli’s fifteen new drawings on view in the exhibition. Majoli renders nude women in pairs and groups in sculptural configurations that move between acrobatic, ritualistic, and desirous. Alongside these artworks, Corinne’s images, handwriting, authored books, and other ephemera are embedded throughout the archives. A pioneering lesbian photographer, Corinne’s practice forefronted the erotic during a time when second-wave feminism was entrenched in polarizing debates around varying issues of sexuality, known as the feminist sex wars.
Taking place from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, the feminist sex wars included acrimonious divides around subjects like sex work, sadomasochism, sexual fantasy, and a cacophony of other issues existing at the intersection of pleasure and violence. Taking up the most oxygen and headlines was pornography, which moved from a social debate to one of policy through the legislative efforts of self-identified radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon, writers who began drafting ordinances in 1983 that provided women harmed by pornography the ability to seek damages through a civil rights violation claim.
One of many responses to escalating feminist critiques of pornography came in 1984, when Debi Sundahl and Myrna Elana began publishing On Our Backs, the first erotic magazine in the United States to reflect, cater to, and celebrate lesbian sexuality. Photographs by numerous women who particulated in Ovulars appeared over the years in On Our Backs, and Majoli has made those issues available as part of her exhibition.
As pornography became a central focus of mainstream feminist discourse, a movement that was once defined by the discussions of conscious-raising groups and academically rigorous criticality started to feel binary, categorizing people into two camps: pro-sex and anti-porn. Over time, extremes on both ends began to alienate the majority and exhaust the political momentum of the movement; the feminist sex wars took the steam out of the collective engine, marking the consequential end of second-wave feminism.
Below are excerpts from a selection of texts published between 1973 and 1989, encompassing the years of the feminist sex wars and reflecting the rhetoric of the time. This handful of readings is what I went to when processing my thinking around Countervision. For a show born out of the significance of a bookstore, it felt apropos to turn towards writers such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Steinem, who all participated in events at Sisterhood.
While the exhibition is steeped in the loss of lesbian-feminist spaces that no longer exist, nostalgia is only one side of the story. These publications, ranging from essays to poetry, and even a coloring book, do more than shed light on the historical context of the materials on view. For me, revisiting the past, through its language, has offered insight into the present need motivating Majoli to embark on this new body of work that she will continue excavating for years beyond this single exhibition.
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or destroy those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.
– Audre Lorde
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1981
The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality. …Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity. Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.
The realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequalities, and modes of oppression. As with other aspects of human behavior, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given time and place are products of human activity. They are imbued with conflicts of interest in political maneuver, both deliberate and incidental. In that sense, sex is always political.
– Gayle S. Rubin
“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” from Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole S. Vance, 1984.
Sexuality, then, is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed, embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality.
Catherine A. MacKinnon
Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, 1989
[Lesbians] cannot survive as a formless, faceless people who fear discovery so much that we are not visible--even to each other. Without a visual identity we exist in isolation; without community, without support, without a movement. Making ourselves visible is a political act. Making ourselves visible is a continual process.
JEB (Joan E.Biren)
“Lesbian Photography: Seeing Through our own Eyes,” from The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography, No. 1, 1981.
In the beginning we come from the cunt, not from some man’s side; and we are washed in the water and blood of birth, not the spear-pierced side of some dying god. In the beginning women made pots and jars shaped like wombs and breasts, and decorated them with triangles, which were symbols of the cunt. So the first art was Cunt Art. The bones of the dead were laid in jars – perhaps to speed the soul to its next womb? Did the ancient women sing, how delicate, sensitive, delicious, how strong the ring of muscle between one life and the next?
– Martha Shelley
From the forward to Tee Corinne’s Cunt Coloring Book, 1975
“Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. …[A]nd lesbian existence has been lived (unlike say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning. The destruction of records and memorability and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.”
– Adrienne Rich
Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,1980
She sits with one hand poised against her head, the
other turning an old ring to the light
for hours our talk has beaten like rain against the screens
a sense of August and heat-lightening
I get up, go to make tea, come back
we look at each other
then she says (and this is what I live through overand over)–she says: I do not know if sex is an
Illusion
I do not know
who I was when I did those things
or who I said I was
or whether I willed to feel
what I had read about
or who in fact was there with me
or whether I knew, even then
that there was doubt about these things
– Adrienne Rich
“Dialogue,” from Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972, 1973
Erotica may be the word that can differentiate sex from violence, and rescue sexual pleasure. It comes from the Greek root eros (sexual desire or passionate love, named for Eros, the son of Aphrodite), and so contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person. Unlike pornography’s reference to a harlot or prostitute, erotica leaves entirely open the question of gender. …The problem is that there is so little erotica. Women have rarely been free enough to pursue erotic pleasure in our own lives, much less to create it in the worlds of film, magazines, art, books, television, and popular culture–all the areas of communication we rarely control.
– Gloria Steinem
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983
It has been a simple task for women to describe and criticize negative aspects of sexuality as it has been socially constructed in a sexist society, to expose male objectifications and dehumanization of women, to denounce rape, pornography, sexualized vioelce, incest, etc. It has been a far more difficult task for women to envision new sexual paradigms, to change the norms of sexuality. The inspiration for such work can only emerge in an environment when sexual well-being is valued. Ironically, some feminists have tended to dismiss issues of sexual pleasure, well-being, and contentedness as irrelevant. Contemporary emphasis on sexual revolution or anything-goes-sexual-expression has led many women and men to assume that sexual freedom already exists and is even over-valued in our society. However, this is not a culture that affirms real sexual freedom.
– bell hooks
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984
Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resource of the unconscious spring forth. Our naphtha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars–black or gold–nonassessed values that will change the rules of the old game.
– Hélène Cixous
The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975
And I would be the moon
spoken over your beckoning flesh
breaking against reservations
beaching thoughts
my hands at your high tide
over and under inside you
and the passing of hungers
attended, forgotten.
Darkly risen
the moon speaks
my eyes
judging your roundess
delightful.
– Audre Lorde
Excerpt from “On a Night of the Full Moon,” from Coal, 1976
Christopher Mangum-James is LAND’s deputy director and the curator of Monica Majoli: Countervision, an exhibition on view September 19 - November 21, 2026 at The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, CA.
Image Credits
Featured image: Monica Majoli, Ovular 9, 2026. Colored pencil on colored paper.
1: Monica Majoli, Ovular 5, 2026. Colored pencil on colored paper.
3 & 4: Installation views of Monica Majoli: Countervision, September 19–December 21, 2026 at The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. Photo by Gina Clyne.
5, 6 & 8: Installation views of Monica Majoli: Countervision, September 19–December 21, 2026 at The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. Photo by Evan Bedford.