Lez Liberty Lit: The Word of the Year

A graphic holding the "Lez Liberty Lit" sign written across three open books, on top of a pile of books.

Hey there and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!

Just one Word of the Year for 2020? Oxford doesn’t know her:

“Oxford Languages could not simply choose one word, nor one phrase, nor even one emoji, to sum it all up. This year, the Word of the Year is… a 16 page Language Report with sections on Covid-19, remote work, social movements, and the environment, and highlighting everything from ‘social distancing’ to ‘doomscrolling’ to ‘Blursday’ to ‘BLM.'”

Meanwhile Webster’s word of the year is… pandemic. Okay.

Here are some journalling tips.

Friend of the pod A.E. Osworth has a trans-only writing class that looks extremely relevant to your interests.

What is the project of trans poetics now?” “This Trans Poetics Anthology Imagines a World Where ‘Everything Belongs to Everyone.’

Jinghua Qian wrote about being “woman-lite” in women’s literary spaces for the Feminist Writer’s Festival.

Here’s Patricia Lockwood on the extremely online.

Stories Happen in the Space Between How We Feel and What We Say.”

How Do We Put Words to The Experience of Gender?

These teenagers are writing children’s books about racial justice.”

Pretty soon there’ll just be one big book publisher left.”

’Misery’ is a horrifying love letter to the physical act of writing.

Everything online is gay.

Who wrote America’s first sci-fi novel?

Read these 11 new books by Native American writers. Read these seven highly anticipated books to celebrate 50 years of The Feminist Press. Read these Nigerian authors who haven’t been proudly transphobic. Read these books instead of doomscrolling. Read these sex-positive books. Read these 16 nonfiction books that tried to define America.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Ryan Yates

Ryan Yates was the NSFW Editor (2013–2018) and Literary Editor for Autostraddle.com, with bylines in Nylon, Refinery29, The Toast, Bitch, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, and elsewhere. They live in Los Angeles and also on twitter and instagram.

Ryan has written 1142 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. I really enjoyed Jingua Quan’s article. It’s something I think about a lot as a nonbinary person, even when I’m accessing this website. I have identified as bi/pan/queer for ages, longer than I’ve been aware of my gender for sure. I’m very aware of how many of the spaces I occupy are grounded in a history of lesbian community, a community which I greatly respect but which I’ve never included myself in. As these communities grow and expand, I think a lot about how we choose to define them- I know that a lot of people would feel alienated if autostraddle dropped the “girl on girl” branding- at the same time, I think I might breathe a sigh of relief as a t4t queer.

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