Today I talk to Professor Jamie Harker, who is looking at the lesbian feminist movements and communities in the south in the 1970’s especially in the print world to find a lesbian aesthetic or queer utopia that may suggest a mode of resistance for the present and examines a past which can provide a historical reminder that resistance has been going on for generations. Jaime Harker is professor of English and the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches American literature, LGBTQ literature, and gender studies. . She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars and Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, and The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon among other publications.

And we will share a segment of a radio documentary Sharon Sabotta produced about local legend Bette Reid Soskin who died last month at the age of 104 . Betty Reid Soskin has been a homefront warriors worker, a singer-songwriter and a performer, co-founder of the legendary Reid’s Records in South Berkeley, a writer and legislative aid and, until she turned 100, the oldest working National Park Service ranger.

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