ABSTRACT
Lesbian and bisexual women’s stories of woman-to-woman mistreatment, harassment, rape, and battery continually challenge me to politicize our experiences. This politicization does not come easy. At a workshop on lesbian battering in the late 1980s given by the Network for Battered Lesbians in Boston, Massachusetts, I finally began to get it. As I listened to lesbian stories of physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse and recognized their interconnections, I felt thrown into a whirlwind of emotion and confusion, as well as clarity. The truth-telling of this session profoundly changed my work as a teacher and activist in the women’s movement against violence. The collective voices no longer allowed me to simply personalize the dynamics of power and control operating in many of our personal and social relationships. It was no longer viable for me to remain in denial about the realities of women’s use and abuse of power, to minimize the impact of womanto-woman violence in women’s lives, nor to rationalize the violence as stemming from the sexism and misogyny women experience from men. I began to recognize women’s patterns of power and control over other women, including violence, and to work with others to find ways to hold women accountable for their actions.
