The 2025 Anita S. Goodstein Lecture: Finding Queer Love in Turbulent Times

Sewanee welcomes Dr. La Shonda Mims to campus as the 2025 Anita S. Goodstein Lecturer in Women's History. Her talk, “Finding Queer Love in Turbulent Times: Why Southern Lesbian History Matters Now,” will examine the ways that marginalized southern lesbian women made space for queer love in the past and what lessons their lives have for our present.

During World War II, the feminist 1970s, and Pride celebrations in the 1980s and 1990s, lesbians made space for love, sex, and revelry in the face of turbulent anti-queer politics and blatant oppression. Southern lesbian pasts intertwine with the industrial development of a New South, anti-woman rhetoric, and male-dominated, anti-Pride initiatives. Yet in these historical moments and often oppressive conditions, queer women built joyful lives together.

La Shonda Mims is a historian of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States and a Lecturer of History at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Concerned with the intersections of gender, race, region, and queer identity, her book, Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists, published by the University of North Carolina Press, examines queer life in the U.S. South.