The Future is Female
-
The original “The Future Is Female” T-shirt design was made for Labyris Books, the first women’s bookstore in New York City. The photographer Liza Cowan took a picture of Alix Dobkin, her girlfriend at the time, wearing it in 1975.
-
In the 1970s, radical lesbian “separatists” advocated for women’s complete withdrawal from men and the privileges of heterosexuality, going as far as to establish and live in women-only communes. White feminists were actively excluding lesbians, many white lesbian separatists were pulling the same shit with trans people, bisexual women, and women of color. Reverberations of separatist ideology are still causing rifts in today’s queer feminism. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, have long refused to recognize that trans women are, in fact, women. Alix Dobkin, the feminist folk singer photographed in the original “The Future Is Female” shirt, is one of them.
-
The slogan’s present-day renaissance is largely thanks to a woman named Rachel Berks, the founder of the LA-based retailer and graphic design studio Otherwild. In May 2015, Berks came across the photo of Dobkin on a Instagram, which has become a popular archive of lesbian history. “I had no idea it would blow up,” Berks told me on a recent phone call. After reposting the photo to Otherwild’s Instagram, she decided to make her own version of the shirt using a different typeface. Berks was only planning to run a very limited edition — 24 shirts — but her stock sold out overnight.
-
In 2015, after Cara Delevingne and Annie Clark were photographed wearing Otherwild’s “The Future is Female” design in the New York Times, model and actor made an announcement on her Instagram: Since a lot of people were asking where she got her sweatshirt, she’d decided to start making her own, and was donating the proceeds to a charity that supports girls in developing countries.
-
Rachel Berks called Delevingne out on Otherwild’s Instagram, kicking up a dust cloud of online drama. “I don’t own the slogan,” Berks told me. “I can’t say, ‘Oh no, you can’t use that.’ I obviously can’t. But with Cara Delevingne, it was the identical design.”
-
“It’s thrilling to see people embrace something that came out of the ’70s lesbian separatist moment,” Berks said. “The shirt is about a reaction to a misogynist and patriarchal culture that affects a lot of people. People are recontextualizing it: trans women, men, moms who have sons.” Ms. Cowan acknowledged that most people purchasing the shirt did not know its history. “It’s taken on a life of its own,” she said. “I don’t know what to make of it. But I think the slogan is great, I love that women are wearing it. It’s kind of a call to arms, and it’s a statement of fact.”
-
HEATHER WILHELM “Personally, as a mom who has sons, I’m exhausted by this particular brand of malarkey. What does “the future is female” even mean? Is one half of the human race going into hiding? Fading into irrelevance? Will they be rocketing off to outer space, hunched inside Tesla-designed capsules, never to be seen or heard from again?”