Landscape Architecture Magazine: Herlands

Review of Herlands by Keridwen N. Luis

How women-only communities provide spaces for new forms of culture, sociality, gender, and sexuality

What do women's lands and lesbian lands have to tell us?" asks Keridwen N. Luis in Herlands. Luis's anthropological work, gathered from site visits, interviews, and archival research, examines the themes, philosophical foundations, and contradictions embedded in contemporary rural women's communities. She deploys the lenses of queer theory to analyze and critique the tenets and biases of these communities. Luis's text is academic, with liberal use of scare quotes and italics. Yet she adds humorous and self-deprecating anecdotes in each chapter, detailing her experiences as a guest on women's lands. This humor is echoed in the book by excerpts from comic strips such as Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel and Bitchy Butch by Roberta Gregory.    

Read the whole review in the August 2019 article.