Lorraine Bethel is an

African-American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...

lesbian A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexu ...

feminist poet This is a list of feminist poets. Historically, literature has been a male-dominated sphere, and any poetry written by a woman could be seen as feminist. Often, feminist poetry refers to that which was composed after the 1960s and the second wave ...

and

author In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...

Professional experience

Bethel is a graduate of

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

. She has taught and lectured on black women's literature and black female culture at various institutions. She currently works as a

freelance ''Freelance'' (sometimes spelled ''free-lance'' or ''free lance''), ''freelancer'', or ''freelance worker'', are terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long-term. Freelance w ...

journalist A journalist is a person who gathers information in the form of text, audio or pictures, processes it into a newsworthy form and disseminates it to the public. This is called journalism. Roles Journalists can work in broadcast, print, advertis ...

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

Involvement with the Combahee River Collective

Bethel participated in the

Combahee River Collective The Combahee River Collective (CRC) ( ) was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1974 to 1980. Marable, Manning; Leith Mullings (eds), ''Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, an ...

, an organization that was part of the

Women's Liberation Movement The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism. It emerged in the late 1960s and continued till the 1980s, primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which resulted in g ...

in the 1960s and 1970s. The collective was a black feminist group founded in

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

in 1974. It fought against racial, sexual, heterosexual, racial stereotypes and class oppression.

Feminist writing

In an issue of ''

off our backs ''Off Our Backs'' (stylized in all lowercase; ''oob'') was an American radical feminist periodical that ran from 1970 to 2008, making it the longest-running feminist periodical in the United States. Marilyn Salzman-Webb and Marlene Wicks we ...

'', a feminist news journal, a participant recounts her experience in the 3rd World Lesbian Writers Conference on February 24, 1979 at New York City's Women's Center, in which Lorraine Bethel and

Barbara Smith Barbara Smith (born November 16, 1946) is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, ...

moderated one of the five workshops available. In their workshop, called "Third World Feminist Criticism", Bethel and Smith discussed various topics such as the definition of "criticism", criticism as a "creative" art, white feminism versus black feminism, intersectional feminism, and the unification of black lesbians. Later that year, in November 1979, Bethel and Smith guest-edited "The Black Women's Issue" of '' Conditions: Five'', a literary magazine primarily for black lesbian women. In the introduction, it is stated that the issue "disproves the 'non-existence' of Black feminist and Black lesbian writers and challenges forever our invisibility, particularly in the feminist press." Bethel wrote the poem "What Chou Mean We, White Girl? Or, The Cullud Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence", which was published in this issue. Bethel's essay, ""The Infinity of Conscious Pain": Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition", appeared in the seminal book ''All of the Women Are White, All of the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies''. Identifying in this essay as a Black feminist critic, she wrote, "...I believe there is a separate and identifiable tradition of Black women writers, simultaneously existing within and independent of the America, Afro-American, and American female literary traditions."

List of publications

*Bethel, Lorraine &

(eds.) ''

Conditions (magazine) ''Conditions'' (full title: ''Conditions: a feminist magazine of writing by women with a particular emphasis on writing by lesbians'') was a lesbian feminist literary magazine that came out biannually from 1976 to 1980 and annually from 1980 unti ...

: Five'' 2, no. 2: ''The Black Women's Issue'' (Autumn 1979) *"What Chou Mean 'We', White Girl? Or, the Cullud Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence (Dedicated to the Proposition that All Women Are Not Equal, i.e., Identical/ly Oppressed)", poem published in Bethel & Smith (eds, 1979), pp. 86–92. *"'This infinity of conscious pain':

Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo ...

and the Black Female Literary Tradition". In Hull, Gloria T., Smith, Barbara and Scott, Patricia Bell (eds.), ''But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women's Studies''. Feminist Press, 1986.

Additional reading

*ISIS. "Herstory in the Making."

Off Our Backs ''Off Our Backs'' (stylized in all lowercase; ''oob'') was an American radical feminist periodical that ran from 1970 to 2008, making it the longest-running feminist periodical in the United States. Marilyn Salzman-Webb and Marlene Wicks we ...

Apr 30 1979: 20. ProQuest. Web. 22 May 2016. *McDowell, Deborah E. Black American Literature Forum 16.2 (1982): 77–79. Web. *Philyaw, Deesha. "Conditions: Five." Bitch Media, 5 May 2009. Web. 21 May 2016.
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bethel, Lorraine Year of birth missing (living people) African-American feminists Feminist studies scholars African-American LGBTQ people Lesbian feminists Lesbian journalists American lesbian writers American LGBTQ journalists Living people Yale University alumni 20th-century American women writers 20th-century American non-fiction writers American women non-fiction writers Members of the Combahee River Collective 20th-century African-American women writers 20th-century African-American writers 21st-century African-American writers 21st-century African-American women writers 21st-century American women writers American feminist writers