Tag: Feminist Bookstores

The Women’s Bookstop, the first and only feminist bookstore in Hamilton, Ontario, opened in 1985 on 333 Main Street West. In the midst of the AIDS epidemic and in the beginning of resistant Queer Nation politics, The Women’s Bookstop offered a new space – outside of mainstream commercialization – for women and queer folks to gather, theorize, and celebrate. Renee Albrecht, the founder of The Women’s Bookstop, defines the early stages of the bookstore as an “explosion of learning” once the shelves and sections began to reflect some of their queer clientele, specifically lesbians and lesbians of colour. Lesbian and queer bookstores, specifically, offered “real and fictional” voices “whose words” could “provide comfort, encouragement, and guidance.”¹ These bookstores were a relative safe haven for queer folks to explore, validate, and justify their identities by reading others’ experiences with gender and sexuality.

If unnoticed walking through the doors, a bookstore can be the perfect place to understand your queerness without “outing” yourself to a wider, perhaps heteronormative, community. Albrecht remembers one queer woman who almost “tiptoed” into the store but eventually gained courage as she saw the entire section dedicated to queer women authors. The Women’s Bookstop was also a social, intimate space, as past employee Cole Gately defines, where “people would come in, they would buy books but really they wouldn’t be buying books. They’d be coming in to try and meet other lesbians.” While books could be the focal point, The Women’s Bookstop was ultimately a place for folks “to feel at home,”² to build communal relations and kinships, and to resist the heteronormative mainstreaming of culture by supporting a small, queer business.

Continue reading “The Women’s Bookstop and Sites of Queer Relational Resistance”