A Collaboration Between Esperanto Magazine and MONSU Womens
Produced by: Caitlin Cefai & Fae Gehren
Photography, Styling and Modelling by: Jackie Zhou, Ilanda Tran, Lola Churchill, Jacquelyn Affidon, Natalie Song & Joanna Samson
Jewellery by: Natalie Song

‘Awakening’ is a story of love. Sapphic love. A love that many women and others experience, yet it has been shrouded in shame, exploited in perverse ways, and become subject to the systems of patriarchy.

Sapphic refers to the relationships of women, or effeminate relationships more broadly.

As the etymology would suggest, the word originates from Sappho, the mystic Greek poet who hailed from the island of Lesbos. More recently, it elicits visions of Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’.

Sapphic love can be gentle, quiet, soft, an abnegation of traditional masculine qualities. But sapphic love can also burn fiery with passion; a storm of female rage at millennia of repression, volcanic love to push the boundaries placed on women.

Produced, modelled, and styled by a group of young diverse people — of gender, race, and sexuality —Esperanto Magazine and MONSU Womens collaborate to create a photoshoot that reflects the depth and nuance that is a modern sapphic love story, styled in the form of a Victorian Gothic tragedy.

Subverting the idea that sapphic love must be hidden behind closed doors, and acknowledging the beauty of “awakening” to discover a love for womanhood, we took a series of photos that portrayed the beauty of sapphic love.

‘Awakening’ is beyond stereotypes. It depicts sapphic love as an experience that embraces femininity; a celebration of women through physical, emotional, and spiritual attraction and intimacy. Sapphic love has taken the broken pieces of womanhood and uplifted them to be something revered. To quote the famous lesbian poet Carol Ann Duffy: “Time hates love, wants love poor/but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.”