Lavender Sounds: From Lesbian Radio to Queer Feminist Soundwork

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Lavender Sounds: From Lesbian Radio to Queer Feminist Soundwork

by Stacey Copeland

University of Michigan Press, 2026

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07814-1

Paper: 978-0-472-05814-3

eISBN: 978-0-472-90593-5 (OA)

About the Book

Stacey Copeland’s Lavender Sounds explores lesbian radio history and its evolution into queer feminist podcasting today, exploring the politics, aesthetics, and cultural activism embedded in queer feminist soundwork. Through deeply personal and archival explorations, Stacey Copeland traces the emergence of queer feminist soundwork—a unique blend of community-led storytelling, political resistance, and creative expression rooted in feminist and LGBTQ+ activism. At the heart of the book lies a powerful idea: sound is not just heard but felt, connecting generations through shared voices and struggles. In conversation with award-winning and cutting-edge queer and feminist podcast producers from across Canada and the U.S., Lavender Sounds invites us to turn a feminist-embodied ear to the past to uncover the ways gender, race, and sexual orientations are embedded in our everyday media listening practices. From pioneering Canadian radio shows like Vancouver's The Lesbian Show and Montreal's Dykes on Mykes to today’s queer chumcasts and audio documentary, Lavender Sounds is a journey through auditory landscapes where joy, protest, intimacy, and identity intersect. This book opens a vibrant conversation about how radio and podcasting are vital tools for marginalized communities to connect, create, and claim space in the media world.

About the Author

Stacey Copeland is Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage and Identity at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen.

Reviews

“The sounds of queer feminism past and present take shape through meticulous archival research and interviews with contemporary podcasters who have made this aesthetic anew. Listening to these archives with a sensibility rooted in the present, Stacey Copeland theorizes an auditory aesthetic that goes beyond feminist historiography’s emphasis on visual and print culture. The affects and urgencies of a movement come alive across generations through Copeland’s text, which tells a rich story about what listening together can do for feminism.”

— Cait McKinney, Simon Fraser University

“Lavender Sounds represents the best sort of scholarship: erudite, original, and engaging. Stacey Copeland's skilful weaving together of different bodies of knowledge, archive materials, and careful critique demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of current scholarship and careful personal reflections. This book will bring a nuanced, multifaceted account of queer feminist practice into radio and sound studies, and a rare focus on audio production to feminist media and cultural studies.”— Kate Lacey, University of Sussex

“Lavender Sounds provides a rare insight into how lesbian radio and queer feminist soundwork helped inform audiences during a time when few other resources were available. With the inclusion of interviews and show transcripts, the reader can hear the times in which they were produced, from the concerns, hopes, and dreams to the reality of the ongoing struggle."— Phylis West Johnson, San Jose State University

“Rigorous in its evidence and radical in its imagination, Lavender Sounds invites us to orient ourselves toward networks of queer and feminist soundworkers that transcend time and place. In the process, this book reminds us that listening to our queer pasts is a vital tool for imagining our queer futures.”

— Hannah McGregor, Simon Fraser University