Featured photo of Susan Hawthorne taken by Susan Kelly.

Thistle sat down with Susan Hawthorne last month to discuss her new book, Lesbian: politics, culture, existence. In a lively conversation, the two grappled with lesbian economics, lesbian and women’s embodiment, and several other compelling and sometimes urgent topics in her book.

Ms. Hawthorne has been active in the Women’s Liberation Movement since 1973, joined the Collective of Melbourne’s Rape Crisis Centre in 1974 and co-founded independent feminist publishers Spinifex Press in 1991 with partner Renate Klein. Susan has been an aerialist with Women’s Circuses, organised writers’ festivals and feminist conferences. In Uganda in 2002, a woman said to her, “Be careful, in Uganda lesbians are tortured.” From 2003 onwards Susan has written numerous research papers and spoken on the subject of the torture of lesbians. At the FiLiA conference in 2019, she gave talks entitled “Bibliodiversity at the heart of radical feminist publishing” and “Unnoticed, unrecorded, unremembered: inscribing the torture of lesbians.”

You can purchase Lesbian: Politics, Culture, Existence from the good women at Spinifex Press here: https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop…

The above bio is courtesy of FiLia’s website here: https://www.filia.org.uk/latest-news/…