Multimedia Review

Radical Harmonies. Dee Mosbacher, executive producer and director; Boden Sandstrom, co-producer. 2002. Woman Vision (http://www.woman-vision.org). VHS and DVD (90 mins).

Radical Harmonies, an award-winning film directed by Dee Mosbacher, documents the "women's music" movement, a lesbian-led, cultural feminist profusion of concerts, records, and festivals launched in the United States in the 1970s. In addressing what this movement meant to some, though not all, of its diverse communities, the film stands as an improvement over earlier recuperative and nostalgic treatments that have tended to celebrate the "safe space" of "women's music" for those who found it life-affirming (even life-enabling), without exploring internal struggles among participants to define what a "safe space" would look like and sound like. These struggles to define "women's music" are significant in that they have been about how to define "woman" and how to shape an inclusive feminist cultural politics. The "women's music" movement is a fascinating instance in American music history in which music was the medium through which important questions of politics, identity, and belonging were grappled over, often contributing to and even prefiguring political and theoretical debates. Yet subsequent documentation about the movement has tended to obscure this radical dissonance in favor of harmonious celebration.