Michigan Womyn’s Festival Will Be No More

by Bee Gray

The scene is late summer: You’re barefoot, maybe naked, surrounded by several thousand other women. An all female band (maybe Indigo Girls?) is serenading you as you frolic through a sprawling green landscape and tepid breeze. You gaze out and see encampments of makeshift  fabric tents and circles of women dancing. What alternative universe is this? Which Sofia Coppola film are we in? Is this Burning Man, Woodstock, or could this be a Bust Craftacular fair?

Well actually, you’re in Michigan. And you’re at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festivala widely beloved and recently controversial music festival made for and by women.

In 1976, festival founder and organizer Lisa Vogel created a woodsy lil’ utopia for women in rural Oceana County, Michigan. This festival was founded at a time when feminist separatism was sprouting up as a radical reaction to gender inequity. The idea behind separatism is that the best way to oppose patriarchy and oppression based on gender is to create spaces and movements that are exclusively for women and girls. MWMF was one of these spaces, and provided us with an outlet for free form, unbound, and de-regulated female experiences. And for 40 years, MWMF played a crucial role in some of our lives.

But the festival had its limitations. Since 1976, feminism has changed, identity has changed, and how we define being a woman has changed. MWMF’s founding motives have not. In recent years, controversy around the festival’s “ womyn born womyn” rule  troubled trans-advocates and erupted into a huge media debacle. Trans women were not necessarily banned, but they were not welcomed either, and in 1991 a trans woman was even asked to leave the festival. It was made clear that the festival was created for a specific kind of woman, that it couldn’t expand to hold space for everyone, especially transgender people.

Instead of adapting to the times, the whole ship is going down with its captain, Lisa Vogel. The festival has officially announced that 2015 will be its last year. We feel a bittersweet nostalgia washing over us, and we’re sad it couldn’t work out between us. Vogel remarked,“We have known in our hearts for some years that the life cycle of the Festival was coming to a time of closure… I ask you to remember that our 40 year Festival has outlived nearly all of her kin. She has served us well.”  We hope that MWMF—its triumphs and weaknesses—are remembered as highly representative of American feminist culture. We also hope to learn from these mistakes, and build new empires that include more universal expressions of of what it means to be a woman.

Images Via, MichiganWomyn’sMusicFestival/Facebook

 

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Founded in 1993, BUST is the inclusive feminist lifestyle trailblazer offering a unique mix of humor, female-focused entertainment, uncensored personal stories, and candid reporting that tells the truth about women’s lives.

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