Sworn Sister
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digital and urban intervenTion - 2014
Sworn Sister is a political lesbian art project initiated in February 2014.
The work emerged at a pivotal moment in my life: after recognising what I understand as the con of heterosexuality and leaving an abusive marriage, I began to call myself a lesbian. As my understanding and decision were political, I called myself a Political Lesbian. This personal and political shift compelled me to engage deeply with lesbian feminist thought and to share the knowledge I was encountering.
My feminist framework has always been radical, grounded in the pursuit of women’s liberation rather than reformist approaches that seek equality with men within existing violent patriarchal structures. Central to this perspective is the recognition that women’s oppression is systemic and materially enforced. One fundamental step toward liberation, therefore, is the deliberate withdrawal from structures and relationships that expose women to harm.
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Men are the single biggest threat to women’s lives.
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From this understanding grew a simple but urgent logic:
the further women are from men, the safer we are.
In response, I began creating a series of images that deliberately juxtapose sarcastic pink aesthetics with uncompromising, radical language. The sweetness of the visual palette contrasts with the severity of the message, amplifying the rage, clarity, and political awakening that followed years of entrapment. The work functions both as protest and reclamation—an assertion of lesbian feminist resistance and a refusal to soften its critique.
The project was strategically disseminated through Tumblr as a primary digital site of circulation, while concurrently embedding itself within the infrastructure of London’s Underground network through unsanctioned adhesive interventions.
As recorded by Janice Raymon in A Passion for Friends, Sworn Sister is named after southern Chinese marriage resisters, women who refused compulsory heterosexual marriage and pledged themselves to one another. Through oath-bound sisterhoods and self-comb ceremonies, they rejected sexual access, reproductive obligation, and male authority. Some chose collective suicide over submission. This was a structural refusal — a withdrawal from womanhood defined as service.
T -Grace Atkinson wrote: “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice.” The sworn sisters lived this before it was named, severing the heterosexual contract and choosing loyalty over subordination.
Sworn Sister claims that legacy.
