Rich's ‘lesbian continuum’ incorporates multiple forms of woman– woman relationships that give first priority to emotional links to women. This community of women differs significantly from the materialist notion of a sex–class, revealing as it does the intimate connection between women's role in reproduction and compulsory heterosexuality. Patriarchal discourse, according to Rich, has produced a social system of coercion, which demands that women form primary relationships with men and sever their original ties to the mother. The different ways of associating with women covered by the lesbian continuum reach from rediscovering images of women in literature and history/historiography (as delineated above) to revealing the possibility of erotic relationships among women. Joanna Russ's texts experiment on this continuum, exploring the liberatory potential of consciously inhabiting the female body and connecting to others— precisely because this body is produced and reproduced by the patriarchal discourses that feminist thinking seeks to disrupt.

In her essay ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’ (1981) Russ identifies a theme in contemporary feminist utopian writing which she calls ‘the rescue of the female child’ (79). In these utopias, the following narra–tive pattern emerges: an older woman, who has struggled to an awareness of her position within a patriarchal culture, rescues a younger woman or girl from her initiation into a mature life fully determined by patriarchy. Russ explains this pattern: