Female Same-sex Desire Research Articles

Relighting the Fire: Visualizing the Lesbian in Contemporary India

This article revisits the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), India's first publicly released film depicting female same-sex desire. The film has become a touchstone for discussions of the representation of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in India. While the majority of critical accounts of the film have rejected the use of “lesbian” on the basis of its Anglo-American specificity, this article seeks to recast lesbians at the heart of Fire by filtering them through the lens of transnational protest, and by offering a close reading of the film's own play on religious and cultural symbolism. Viewed almost two decades after its release, in the light of the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and subsequent events, including the upholding of a law criminalizing gay sex in November 2013, the film now more than ever seems to offer a fantasy of the future, rather than a viable reality in the present day. Within Fire, the circumnavigation of heteronormative power and desire is certainly queer, but the film's labeling as “lesbian” subsequent to its release in India opened up an important public forum for a debate about female desire and independence that continues to resonate today. This article does not attempt to offer a conclusive argument about the use of the term “lesbian” to label the relationship between women that is depicted within the film, but it does examine the way in which the film itself visualizes desire between women, and in particular the use of Hindu narratives, imagery and motifs. The film's interpellation into lesbian politics is facilitated by the strong emphasis on a female-centered desire that is not defined by motherhood, that cannot be contained, and that demands to be seen.

Marriage, Gender, and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy by Edward T. Potter (review)

Reviewed by: Marriage, Gender, and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy by Edward T. Potter Nicole Calian Marriage, Gender, and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy. By Edward T. Potter. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. 210. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-1571135292. Potter’s study examines how various comedic texts of the mid-eighteenth century—the satirical Saxon comedy, the sentimental comedy, and the pastoral play—were involved in generating “their own symbolic universe, in which marriage functioned differently than it did in the contemporary cultural context” (177). This “contemporary cultural context” is explicated mainly in chapter one through Christoph Gottsched’s aesthetic treatises as well as Johann Fürchtegott Gellert’s university lectures. Chapter one functions as the point of departure as well as the theoretical backdrop against which the other plays are read. The plays are then also read against each other to reveal a disjuncture in the Enlightenment project to morally reform a populace by aesthetic means. The “symbolic universe” in the selected comedies promotes cross-dressing, marriage resisters, and male and female same-sex desire as alternatives to the emerging discourse of the new normative concept of marriage (i.e., marriage based on sentiment, not on economic or social considerations). The comparatively obscure dramatic works limited to the time period of the 1740s navigate relatively unchartered territory, which is always exciting. These plays are: J. C. Gottsched’s Atalanta, C. F. Gellert’s Die zärtlichen Schwestern, J. E. Schlegel’s Der Triumph der guten Frauen, G. E. Lessing’s Der Misogyne (the one-act version of 1748, not the more popular three-act version of 1767), and Th. J. Quistorp’s Der Hypochondrist. The choice of comedies rather than tragedies follows Christian Neuhuber’s assertion that comedies “regularly exhibit a potentially destabilizing self-reflexivity that is not present in tragedies” (22). This presumed self-reflexivity serves Potter as procedural focus when he evaluates the poetics and pedagogical aesthetics of selected comedies in their efficacy to convey moral messages. As such Potter’s study situates itself between the methodological approaches of close reading, performance studies, gender studies, queer studies and most importantly, given his focus on meta-reflexive dramatic commentary, reception aesthetics. The approach preferred by Potter himself however is that of a “densely contextualized close reading” (1). While this leads to a very welcome complete paucity of theoretical jargon, when discussing each of the individual comedic texts it also makes an overarching analysis that would situate these individual readings in their highly connoted contextual discursive practices fall somewhat short. When these close readings based on theatrical self-reflexivity work well, ambiguous conflations in reader response vs. efficacy of moral reform are revealed: In chapter two, entitled “The Virgin Huntress Tamed: J. C. Gottsched’s Atalanta and the Erasure of Female Autonomy,” Potter shows that on the surface, the threat of the figure of Atalanta as marriage resister is defused by the evocation of the incest taboo. However, the inter-textual reference to the cognitive failure of Atalanta to reflect upon and reform [End Page 163] her marriage resisting ways independent of biological considerations calls into question the very promotion of the institution of marriage based on love. Potter thus concludes that the efficacy of Gottsched’s own stated theoretical project of moral reform via the theater is not fulfilled by his own concurrent literary output. On the other hand, a different level of supposed female freedom is undercut as chapter four, entitled “The Clothes Make the Man: J. E. Schlegel’s Der Triumph der guten Frauen,” lays out. In Schlegel’s play the character of Hilaria engages in the potentially liberating practice of female cross-dressing. This practice, however, does not explicate female same-sex desire. Rather, the construction of gender identity aids in attaining knowledge, which in turn allows for a shift in the balance of power. The aesthetic function of this shift in power serves to entangle Hilaria in a traditional form of marriage, thus limiting her cross-dressing ways. The play not only negates the potential for female same-sex desire, but it also subjugates its female characters into a normative institution of marriage sustained by fundamentally patriarchal structures of power...

Bosom Friends and the Sapphic Breasts of Belinda

This article examines Maria Edgeworth’s 1801 novel Belinda in order to argue that the breast at the center of Lady Delacour’s narrative signifies not maternal failure but Sapphic feelings and connections. While previous studies of the novel have discussed the wounded breast of Lady Delacour as a punishment for her transgressions or as an emblem of her patriarchal oppression, this article claims that the wounded breast is both a sign of and a means to female same-sex desire and relationships. This article contrasts the wounded, festering breast with the tableau that ends the novel. The tableau, a constructed vision of social expectations at the time, is undermined by Lady Delacour’s final couplet that encourages the reader to “find the moral” of the story. The wounded breast and the many ways in which it connects the characters of Lady Delacour, Belinda and Mrs. Freke undermine the heteronormative tableau that ends the novel and complicate the suggestion that the moral of the story is easy to understand. By exploring the ways in which the breast functions to connect these women through its wounding and its cure, I argue that Sapphic possibilities arise throughout the novel. These possibilities suggest the centrality of the female same-sex relationships to the novel over the heterosexual ones that figure in the tableau.

Mirror Rubbing: A Critical Genealogy of Pre-Modern Chinese Female Same-Sex Eroticism

This article offers a critical genealogy of pre-modern Chinese female same-sex relationships. Through the analysis of the primary source materials in history, fiction, and drama, the author shows that female homosexuality is silenced and suppressed. To Confucianism, female same-sex relationships threaten to exclude men from accessing female sex and keep women away from participating in extending the family line. Even the Daoist theory of sex can be used to discriminate against female homosexuality by denying women the ability to initiate and maintain the cycle of yin-yang interaction in sexual intercourse. There are 2 recurring themes in the male writers' imaginings of female same-sex eroticism. First, heterosexuality is the preferred sexual order, and female same-sex desire arises due to the lack of sexual access to men. Second, heterosexual relationships and intercourse are the norm that female homosexuality aspires to imitate.

Marriage, gender, and desire in early Enlightenment German comedy

J. C. Gottsched, who reformed early Enlightenment German theater, claimed for comedy the ability to transform morality. The new literary comedies of the 1740s, among the other moral goals that they pursued, propagated a new sentimental discourse promoting marriage based on love while devaluing its traditional socioeconomic foundations. Yet in comedies by well-known dramatists of the period such as Gottsched, Gellert, J. E. Schlegel, Lessing, and Quistorp, alternative gender roles and sexual behaviors call the primacy of marriage into question: there are women who refuse to be integrated into marriage, episodes of cross-dressing that foreground the culturally constructed aspects of gender roles, instances of male same-sex desire, and allusions to female same-sex desire. Edward T. Potter examines this marital discourse in close readings of these authors' plays, uncovering the ambiguity of eighteenth-century comedy's stance on marriage and highlighting its resistance to the emerging discourse of the sentimental marriage. In addition to excavating the connections between the texts and norms regarding gender roles and sexual behavior, Potter also examines how these comedies self-reflexively perform their own reception in plays-within-plays that reflect upon early Enlightenment comedy, poetics, and pedagogical aesthetics and thereby comment on the efficacy of theater as a means of propagating such norms. Edward T. Potter is Associate Professor of German at Mississippi State University.

Naturalized Desires and the Metamorphosis of Iphis

Introduction The story of Iphis and Ianthe is the sole mythological account of female same-sex desire, not only in Ovid but in all of classical literature. (1) In the Metamorphoses (9.666-797), Ovid tells the tale of Iphis, a girl raised as a boy. At marriageable age, Iphis is betrothed to a girl, Ianthe, with whom she falls madly in love. All would be well, except that she realizes, with great sadness, that her desire is 'unnatural' and cannot be consummated. However, on the day before the wedding, the goddess Isis intervenes, transforms Iphis into a young man, and the marriage proceeds as planned. In this article, I integrate two of the main scholarly approaches to the Iphis story--namely, closely reading the myth itself, and exploring its relationship to its neighboring stories--in order to see what the surrounding narrative (Met. 9.450-10.739) reveals about Roman sexuality more broadly. (2) Early scholarship on Iphis tried to deduce a pattern underlying the types of desire catalogued within this narrative set. The framing of this story is in fact significant, as I argue below. The Iphis myth (9.666-797) is preceded by a story in which a girl named Byblis tries, unsuccessfully, to seduce her brother (9.450-665), and is followed by the tale of Orpheus, who turns to a love of boys after losing his wife Eurydice (10.1-85). Next is the brief story of Cyparissus, a boy who accidentally kills his pet deer (10.86-147). Orpheus himself then tells a number of tales, including those of the Cerastae and Propoetides, women punished for their impiety (10.220-42); Pygmalion, who falls in love with an ivory statue (10.243-97); Ganymede and Hyacinthus, both beloved by gods (10.148-219); Myrrha, who knowingly sleeps with her own father (10.298-502); and Venus and her beloved Adonis (10.503-739). It has been variously suggested that Ovid assimilates Iphis to everyone but Byblis and Myrrha on the basis of a generalized unnatural desire (Otis 1970); that he assimilates Iphis to precisely these girls on the basis of their shared forbidden desire (Galinsky 1975); or that he assimilates Iphis to the boy-lovers on the basis of a shared homoerotic desire (Makowski 1996) (3)--though whether Ovid (or 'Ovid') disapproves of or is sympathetic toward female homoerotic desire has been a point of contention. (4) In the past ten years, scholars have investigated primarily what the Iphis story itself can tell us about Ovidian/Roman concepts of gender and sexuality; (5) these enquiries have yielded a number of different, but often complementary, interpretations. Thus, for example, Diane Pintabone (2002) has argued that Ovid simultaneously presents a positive and a negative portrait of woman-for-woman passion, thus appearing (at least temporarily) to question normative gender/sexuality but ultimately reinforcing it. Shilpa Raval (2002) contends that the Iphis story shows, on the one hand, that gender is performative and not necessarily tied to biological sex, and on the other, that social institutions (including heterosexual marriage) depend on and reinforce the notion of stable gender identity predicated on sexual difference. (6) Jonathan Walker (2006) argues that the Iphis story both gives and revokes lesbianism: while the possibility of something like is allowed to emerge in readers' minds, Ovid never allows it to fully materialize. According to Kirk Ormand (2005), Ovid's myth is ultimately not so much about female deviance or lesbianism as it is about the vexed relationship between masculine gender performance and a supposedly stable male sex. (7) Finally, a few scholars have called attention to the impossible or incomprehensible nature of Iphis and Ianthe's desire, whether because it is mutual and lacks hierarchy (Ormand 2005; Boehringer 2007,257-8), because it lacks penetration (Walker 2006), or because it lacks a masculine element (Boehringer 2007, 257-8). My argument focuses on what the Iphis story, read in context, can tell us about Roman conceptions of sexual acts. …

Female Same-sex Desires: Conceptualizing a Disease in Competing Medical Fields in Nineteenth-century Europe

This article examines the ways in which female same-sex desires were represented across a range of nineteenth-century European medical writings. While recognizing the conceptual innovations of the late-nineteenth-century psychiatric idea of "sexual inversion," it argues that the category of "sexual invert" was positioned alongside other medical representations of same-sex desires, such as gynecological descriptions of women with hypertrophy of the clitoris and socio-cultural analyses of the tribade-prostitute. These representations complicate current historical accounts of sexual inversion, which emphasize conceptual ruptures within the history of medicine.

"Be more strange and bold": Kissing Lepers and Female Same-Sex Desire in The Book of Margery Kempe

"Be more strange and bold": Kissing Lepers and Female Same-Sex Desire in <i>The Book of Margery Kempe</i>

“It's a Silent Trade”: Female Same-Sex Intimacies in Post-Colonial Ghana

While in many places same-sex cultures revolve around politically charged subcultural understandings, this paper explores conceptualizations of female same-sex desire beyond constructions of lesbian identity. It looks at a set of practices forged by women who are involved in intimate same-sex relationships in southern Ghana and examines how their self-understandings resist and intersect with the derogatory media representations that frame them. A key term to these representations is the term supi. It implies a close friendship between two adolescent girls, whether or not their relationship has a sexual dimension. In spite of rising tides of homophobia that impact such female intimacies, two factors still allow for the creation of niches for same-sex intimacy: first, southern Ghanaian cultures draw on norms of verbal indirection and discretion, which allow for the concealment of non-normative sexual conduct. Secondly, homosocial spaces of intimacy provide an environment in which female same-sex bonds are expressed through a language of allusion rather than a specialist, subcultural vocabulary. Erotic context is formed through practice and performance and is not discursively named or understood as a social identity. Rather, these understandings of female same-sex passions revolve around the notion of secrecy and are based on tacit but vibrant forms of knowledge.

Out in Africa: Queer Desire in Some Anthropological and Literary Texts

We need to criss-cross queer theory with postcoloniality, in order to examine the phenomenon of those who are ‘out in Africa’. To date there have been only embryonic attempts to consider the literary representation of same-sex desire in a pan-African context.2 What is more, we lack a comparative approach to queer studies of African literatures, for research remains split between anglophone and francophone, let alone lusophone, studies, patterned on the colonial carving up of the African continent. Research has also privileged the colonial over the postcolonial period and male over female intimacies.3 It has therefore become crucial to identify those literary texts that present, in a subterranean way, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. I have therefore attempted to place my analysis in the historical context of the dominant anthropological discourse and to sketch out an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female samesex desire in the novel while confining my scope to sub-Saharan Africa, even if Islamic homosexualities in the Maghreb and the Mashreq need to be addressed as well.4 Homosexuality is still thought to be not only ‘un-African’ but also a highly suspicious import from the deviant West. As a case in point, in the wake of the trial for sodomy of the first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, his successor Robert Mugabe spoke of homosexuals in his 2002 electioneering speech as ‘mad person[s]’ who will be sent to jail: ‘we don’t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country [Zimbabwe], we have our own culture, our own people’.5 Whereas Dennis Altman contended

WRITING THE MODERN HISTORIES OF HOMOSEXUAL ENGLAND

ABSTRACTThe most useful sexual histories are those that provide depth of context without either assuming sexual identity or anticipating its complete absence; those that do not force taxonomies; histories that resist any simple teleological account of a shift from ‘homosexuality’ as sexual excess to the homosexual as a species. This review examines attempts to write such histories – what has recently been termed the ‘new British queer history’. I will focus on some strands of male and female same-sex desires and their expression in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: male and female same-sex friendships, effeminacy in men and masculinity in women; and representations of lesbianism. This review discusses these histories of desires that resist present-day sexual assumptions.

"When it ceases to be silly it becomes actually wrong": The Cultural Contexts of Female Homoerotic Desire in Rose Terry Cooke's "My Visitation"

In popular antebellum conduct book titled The Young Lady's Friend, Eliza W. R. Farrar advises young female readers of a among young ladies of holding each other's hands, and fondling them before company, had much better be dispensed with. She instructs, All kissing and of your female friends should be kept for your hours of privacy, and never be indulged in before gentlemen. There are some reasons for this, Farrar explains, which will readily suggest themselves, and others, can only be known those acquainted with the but are conclusive against the practice (269). The contains an interesting paradox: [K]issing and caressing between girls is simultaneously encouraged and condemned, innocent and dangerous--innocent for young girls not yet well acquainted with the world, but dangerous in the eyes of gentlemen and mature women like Farrar, who evidently knew better. Only tenuous line between knowledge and ignorance separates pure girlish friendship from its more threatening sexual possibilities (252). The passage is striking for the way it complicates more idealized contemporary images of female romantic friendship. The custom Farrar refers--kissing and caressing between girls--has been documented in countless letters, diaries, and literary works of the era, leading number of cultural historians, most notably Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman, conclude that female homoerotic behavior was condoned and even celebrated during period. While these historians are correct caution against ascribing twentieth- and twenty-first-century attitudes about sexuality the previous century, the dichotomy they create between pre and post-sexology culture overstates the degree female homoerotic behavior was casually accepted in nineteenth-century America. While some scholarship has briefly addressed the anxiety over female homoeroticism revealed in conduct books by Farrar and others, the topic warrants more discussion, especially with regard texts written before the beginning of the medical discourse on homosexuality produced by German sexologists around 1870. (1) One such work is Rose Cooke's 1858 story My Visitation, (2) overtly fictionalizes the tension between girlish friendship and female same-sex desire that appears in conduct books. The date and mainstream publication of story, as as Cooke's popularity, make particularly compelling case for an expansion of thinking about how women's romantic friendships were perceived by pre-sexology nineteenth-century culture and also for how modern lesbian identities have evolved. Susan Koppelman includes My Visitation in Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers. She finds it surprising that the editors of Harper's New Monthly Magazine published the story because they had specifically called on writers to exercise moral self-censorship so that nothing in the magazine would 'violate the house policy of printing only material that could be read aloud in any family circle'; nevertheless, she concludes that perhaps they did so because, at the end, this woman who so passionately loves another woman, is learning love man. Indeed, the lesson of the story is far from subtle. Koppelman suggests the obviousness of female homoeroticism despite double remove ... provided by ghost story and an unreliable (Rose Terry 22); however, Cooke overtly depicts female homoeroticism as the very problem her narrator must overcome. I suggest that Cooke's story presents model of what Sarah Emily Newton calls conduct-fiction, hybrid fiction that combin[es the] behavioral advice of conduct literature with popular fiction. According Newton, fiction, emerged during the colonial period and continued until about 1900, develops mythic model test female virtue as as affirm women's entitlement through motherhood and self-control (140). …

Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women

If t h e a b s e n c e o f a s p e c i f i c terminology to denote lesbianism in medieval Europe seems to have compromised the production of scholarship about same-sex love and desire among women, the existence of the label sahq and sihaqa, musahaqat al-nisa’, or sahiqa (Arabic words for “lesbianism” and “lesbian,” respectively) in medieval Arabic writings did not result in a richer critical production. In fact, if relatively little research has been conducted on female same-sex desire in medieval Europe, even less has been produced on homosexuality in the medieval Arabic literary or Islamicate tradition, and almost no research at all has been done on medieval Arab Islamicate lesbianism. 1 This state of scholarship into alternative sexual practices in the Arab Islamicate world is especially astonishing considering the survival of a noteworthy body of primary texts dealing precisely with this topic. Furthermore, if one broadens the category of medieval Arab lesbian to include women who were “lesbian-like,” as Judith Bennett has invited us to do in our construction of the history of Western female homosexuality, we uncover additional expressions of medieval Arab lesbian I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of the History of Sexuality who made countless helpful suggestions. 1

&lt;em&gt;Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing&lt;/em&gt;, by Krista Lysack

Reviewed by: Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing Lise Shapiro Sanders (bio) Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing, by Krista Lysack; pp. x + 238. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008, $49.95, $26.95 paper, £44.95, £24.50 paper. In Come Buy, Come Buy, Krista Lysack offers a fresh perspective on the study of consumer culture in Victorian England, examining the significance of shopping through the lens of women's desire and pleasure. Analyzing sources ranging from novels and poetry written by women to a prominent suffrage journal, Lysack argues that these texts represent the woman shopper "going to market on her own, not as an object of exchange but as a subject" and that the emergent discourse of women's consumer agency enabled new and "dissident" forms of identity (12). Each of the five chapters incorporates a historicizing approach to primary sources, a thorough account of recent criticism, and original readings of both canonical and lesser-known literary texts. Thus Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862), often read as a narrative of female homosocial desire and self-sacrifice against the backdrop of a dangerous male marketplace, becomes an examination of women's participation in imperialism, whether as consumers of "Eastern" goods distributed by Liberty's and other department stores of the period, or as the poem's own "poachers" of exotic fruits foreign to English soil, sold by racialized "goblin men." According to this reading, Lizzie transgresses the bounds of proper consumer practice through "visual tactics" (48), looking but refusing to buy on the market's terms. Similarly, the eponymous heroine of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) offers another form of transgression in her status as a "disorderly" consumer (58)—a version of the pathological shopper who formed the subject of much mid-century anxiety over the dangers of consumption—whose very identity reveals the artificiality of Victorian femininity. In a chapter on Middlemarch (1871–72), Lysack contrasts Rosamond's class-conscious domestic expenditure with Dorothea's thrift, arguing that both women trade against the future in a way that distinguishes their consumption from traditional forms of domestic economy. Although these texts have been much analyzed in Victorian studies, Lysack succeeds in persuading her readers to think differently about the gendered politics of consumption in each case. The focus of the remaining two chapters and a brief afterword on fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century writing implicitly reorients the terrain of the Victorian to address, to use Rita Felski's phrase, the gender of modernity. Turning to the poetry of Michael Field, Lysack argues that Field's woman-centered lyrics alter the masculine dynamics of the gaze, substituting an alternative method of consumption based on female same-sex desire. For Lysack, Sight and Song (1892) is an example of a reconfigured literary aestheticism based on connoisseurship, which rejects the logic of possession and exchange for a new economy of pleasure shared between women. Lysack concludes her study with an analysis of Votes for Women (1907–18), the organ of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), and details the journal's coverage of shops designed to sell suffrage in the form of pamphlets, buttons, scarves, and related ephemera. This chapter reads the WSPU's use of consumer culture as a tactical engagement with the public sphere in which women's practice of "shopping for the vote" becomes an act of claiming citizenship on their own terms. In her afterword, Lysack considers Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as another depiction of the female [End Page 765] shopper, focusing not on Clarissa but on her daughter Elizabeth, whose meandering path through the West End suggests a new set of possibilities for the modern woman. Lysack ultimately locates Victorian women's agency in their resistance to being coded as objects of exchange and their active pursuit of pleasure through shopping. For theoretical support, she turns to Michel de Certeau, who offers "poaching" as an alternative consumer practice (or "antidiscipline"), and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose model of "becoming-woman" reconfigures desire as plenitude rather...

A lesbian history of Britain: love and sex between women since 1500

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources - court records, newspaper reports, medical records, novels, oral histories and personal papers - A Lesbian History of Britain presents the extraordinary history of lesbian experience in Britain. Covering landmark moments and well-known personalities (such as Radclyffe Hall and the publication and banning of her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness), but also examining the lives and experiences of ordinary women, it brings both variety and nuance to their shared history. In doing so, it also explores cultural representations of, and changing attitudes to, female same-sex desire in Britain. The narrative is arranged chronologically and begins with the accounts of a number of women in the 18th century who passed themselves off as men. The C18th & C19th saw 'Romantic Friendships' between women and, later, the emergence of a science of sexuality, and the concept of the female 'sexual invert. At the same time, 'New Women' were pursuing independent careers, a self-confidence reflected in the publication of a number of novels explicitly about lesbian experience. The 20s and 30s were characterised by parliamentary debates on lesbianism, court cases and scandals, though, with two world wars, lesbian experiences were already changing, and a newly vibrant lesbian 'scene', centred on bars and night-clubs, was emerging, supported by a growing number of lesbian-oriented magazines and societies. The contemporary period has been marked by political movements and campaigns, in which lesbians have been active, and increasingly vocal debates surrounding the 'sex wars'.

Aemilia Lanyer's Pathetic Phallacy

In her groundbreaking 1992 article, (In)significance of 'Lesbian' Desire on Renaissance Stage, Valerie Traub described two contrasting models of female same-sex desire appear in textual legacy of early modern England. On one hand, in medical and travel literature one encounters figure of tribade, a woman who sexually penetrates other women using her enlarged clitoris or a dildo.1 Typically an object of moral condemnation and fear, tribade was considered transgressive because she usurped sexual prerogatives reserved for men. On other hand, in fictional literature of period we find relationships Traub, in a conscious anachronism, describes as femme-femme-loving, equal friendships between women are often erotically charged. According to Traub, such depictions of female homoerotic bonds seem to have escaped moral opprobrium reserved for tribade because femme friends did not transgress normative gender roles. Traub speculates such fictional depictions of female friendship may point toward a set of early modern sexual practices similarly existed under radar because they did not challenge gender norms. She admits, however, one with her account is her presumption that erotic practices of 'tribades' and 'femmes' were radically discontinuous; only 'tribades,' for instance, used dildoes on their partners (79).In following pages, I will address this conceptual problem by focusing on Aemilia Lanyer's 1611 Description of Cooke-ham, a work describes a loving relationship between women. The does not mention dildos, and any conclusions one might draw from it about early modern women's sexual interactions must remain highly speculative. does, however, portray poet's desire to induce both pleasure and gratitude in her female addressee by means of a specific literary technique-the pathetic fallacy. In demonstrating writer's power to imbue inanimate objects-in this case natural and built environment of a country estate-with human feeling, Lanyer's explores an eroticized power dynamic between women is mediated by artificial devices. In doing so, constructs a vision of female homoerotic desire English Renaissance scholars have thus far overlooked-one cannot be defined in terms of polarized categories of tribadism and femme-femme love.2Lanyer was one of first English women to publish her original literary works. Her single volume of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, appeared in 1611 prefaced with no less than nine dedications in verse and prose to various noblewomen. The book therefore appears to have been a bid for patronage, one directed most pointedly at Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, who seems to have granted Lanyer favor in past.3 Both long title and Description of Cooke-ham are addressed to Clifford. The latter describes an idyllic summer Lanyer once spent with Clifford on estate at Cookham, where Lanyer composed poetry to please her noble friend and countess's daughter, Anne. It appears since time Lanyer had fallen into financial difficulties, and most critics interpret as her attempt to re-establish a patronage relationship with her powerful female acquaintances.4 Near end of poem, Lanyer recounts how Margaret Clifford said her farewells beneath an oak tree where women had spent much of their time. Elaine Beilin describes this as the single dramatic event of poem in which the countess leaves a 'chaste, yet loving' parting kiss on great oak, which poet immediately steals for herself, as if trying to absorb countess's love and spirit (205).While Beilin depicts episode as rather benign, an expression of affection between women at a site had sentimental meaning for them both, actual lines of are more jarring:To this faire tree, taking me by hand,You did repeat pleasures which had past,Seeming to grieve they could no longer last,And with a chaste, yet loving kisse tooke leave,Of which sweet kisse I did it soone bereave:Scorning a sencelesse creature should possesseSo rare a favour, so great happinesse. …

The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870–1900

The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870–1900 Chiara Beccalossi (bio) Before the term “sexual inversion ” entered the vocabulary of the Italian medical community with the forensic physician Arrigo Tamassia’s case history of a male sexual invert in 1878, there already existed notions of female same-sex desires.1 These ideas linked female homosexuality to excessive sexual longing, virility, and specific women-only environments. This framework of understanding returned in later studies of female “sexual inversion,” but it assumed a more sophisticated conceptual form. The aim of this article is to map the debates around female same-sex desires that took place as Italian sexology developed by the end of the nineteenth century. In Della pazzia in genere, e in specie (On Insanity in Genera and in Species), published in 1793, Vincenzo Chiarugi, the father of Italian psychiatry, divided mental illness into three types: mania, melancholia, and amentia. In this classification love and sexual desire were critical. Due to the gap between perceptual and intellectual functions, for example, an individual suffering from mania lacks insight and is at the mercy of his or her instincts, as shown by the tendency to eat inedible things and engage in abnormal sexual practices. The maniac does not know the restraint of reason, and his or her feelings, including sexual feelings, become excessive. Such an individual “impudently and insatiably seeks sexual pleasure, making use of whatever outlet can be found for a stimulating and consuming libido, just as irrational animals would do.”2 Within this context, then, Chiarugi discussed erotomania, nymphomania, and satyriasis. Melancholia, according to Chiarugi, was, in contrast, an error of judgment or the ability to [End Page 103] reason, restricted to one or a few pertinent objects.3 It was, so to speak, a fixation on one idea. Among the many kinds of melancholia to which he drew attention was what he called “Scythian melancholia”: Scythian melancholia, according to Hippocrates, should be considered another cause of the second species discussed above. As Hippocrates tells us, these nomads, because of their continual riding without stirrups, become eunuchs (that is, incapable of procreating), performing feminine duties, and in everything appearing and speaking like women. Nor is there sadness or serious displeasure in them, for when they go to their wives later on, so Hippocrates continues, and find themselves incapable of coitus, they keep quiet, thinking that nothing is wrong. But when after trying in vain for the second or third time and beyond, they still can make no progress, they come to think that they must have offended God and throw the blame on Him. They take to wearing women’s clothing, and on that account they openly declare themselves emasculated. As they live tranquilly and contentedly in their mistaken opinions, they must be said to suffer from Linnaeus’ vesania [madness] rather than from the melancholia of the ancients.4 Did Chiarugi, in explaining and interpreting Hippocrates’ Scythian melancholia, have in mind anything close to the nineteenth century’s “sexual inversion”?5 There is certainly a similarity between Scythian melancholia and the later notion. One of the main ideas incorporated in the concept of sexual inversion was that of gender inversion: homosexual men were considered effeminate, and homosexual women were virile. Inborn or acquired effeminacy or masculinity explained how a man desired another man and a woman desired another woman. Men affected by Scythian melancholia, according to Chiarugi, became effeminate and lost their sexual desire for women. However, an inborn taint of same-sex desire was critical for the late-nineteenth-century concept of homosexuality, even if sexologists in this period also acknowledged acquired sexual inversion. If nothing else, Chiarugi’s treatise shows that traditional Italian discourse on disease dealt with sexuality and what were later called “abnormal” forms of love. Ideas About Same-Sex Desires Before Sexual Inversion Following the specialization of medicine in the nineteenth century, new medical sciences such as gynecology, venereology, forensic medicine, and incipient psychiatry explored the human manifestation of sexual instinct [End Page 104] in its “normal” and “abnormal” forms.6 Among other things, this first generation of psychiatrists focused on anomalous forms of sexuality, as can be seen in the tradition...

Friendship, Marriage, andBetween Women

Friendship, Marriage, and Between Women Richard Dellamora (bio) In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus has impressively combined portions of two, or even three, books. Of these, the one that I find especially enjoyable is Part Two, "Mobile Objects: Female Desire," in which she offers a witty parody, full of reversals and inversions, of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 1985 book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. At its time of publication, Sedgwick's book posed some major challenges to practitioners of feminist literary studies. With a few notable exceptions, feminist literary scholars of the preceding decade had focused on establishing a female literary canon. Sedgwick's book was dramatically different, focusing as it did exclusively on works from the classic male literary canon. In addition, Sedgwick showed little interest in relations between women. Instead, she anatomized male homosocial desire—the rivalrous, potentially deadly attraction/repulsion acted out in the representation of desire triangulated between two men and a woman. Women's agency was so diminished in this Sedgwickian model that in the key chapter of the book, a brilliant reading of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Sedgwick argued that Lizzie Hexam, the "courageous" (178) working-class female heroine, was reduced to the status of a "slave" by her marriage at the end of the novel (179).1 [End Page 67] Revisiting Between Men two decades later, in Part One of her book, Marcus reclaims female-female desire for gender and sexuality studies of the Victorian novel by arguing that the marriage plot of Victorian fiction has as much—or more—to do with fostering lifelong friendships between women as it has to do with successful courtship. In Part Two, Marcus focuses on material culture: first, in the exchange of female same-sex attraction and pleasure in the commodified world of female fashion; and second, in the sadomasochistic female same-sex fantasies that inhabit the world of doll literature. Marcus's gleeful pursuit of perversity in both of these contexts carries through to the main literary analysis that appears in this section, her counter-reading of Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61) as a narrative of desire triangulated not according to Sedgwick's model but between two women and a man. Marcus persuasively argues that Pip, the young male protagonist, learns opposite-sex desire by imitating Miss Havisham's desire for Estella. While Marcus's reversals of Sedgwick are queer in their affirmation of sadomasochistic female same-sex desire, they also return feminist sex/gender studies to where it was before Sedgwick's advent: namely, to a focus on female gender and on desiring relations between women. In its interest in gender-crossing, transgender, and transsexuality, queer theory by Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others has crucially revised this approach to gender studies. But while Marcus's Pip is a gender-crosser, "Mobile Objects" in the title of Part Two refers mainly to how female same-sex pleasure and desire circulate through a world of commodities designed for female consumption. In Part One, Marcus sets the stage for this analysis by linking the study of female friendship (approached via many examples of female life-writing composed between 1830 and 1880) with what she describes as the plot of "female amity" in Victorian novels. In Part Three, she focuses on what she refers to as "female marriage" in the fiction of Anthony Trollope and in mid-Victorian anthropological and legal debates about the character of marriage as an institution. Despite this emphasis on female friendship and marriage, Marcus argues that her approach debunks classic 1970s studies of female intimacy by writers who tended to see close ties between women as subversive of male privilege. Marcus asserts instead that female marriages were accepted within middle- and upper-class society. This assessment is not in itself novel. Sally Cline, for example, says with regard to Radclyffe Hall's early infatuation with the singer Agnes Nicholls: [End Page 68] Certain restrictions . . . were placed on these friendships. Should two women . . . wish to pursue their attachment by forming an established ménage, they had to remember three caveats: first, that if an eligible male appeared he must not...

Girl Friend or Girlfriend?

SUMMARY Diamond (2000a, 2002) has demonstrated that young women have deep and intense same-sex “passionate friendships” while in adolescence. Young women's friendships are often more physically and emotionally intimate than young men's friendships and can result in feelings and behaviors that often resemble (heterosexual) romantic relationships (Diamond, 2002; Griffin, 2002; Reis, 1998). Additionally, recent shifts in popular culture have produced an increase in images of female same-sex desire in the media and sexual experimentation with female friends. In this paper, I address these bisexual images in the media and emotionally intense (and sometimes sexual) same-sex friendships as creating a context for the questioning process of some young women who may ultimately experience flexibility in their sexual identity.

Film Studies: Women in Contemporary Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Film Studies: Women in Contemporary Cinema Anne Morey (bio) Alexandra Heidi Karriker, ed., Film Studies: Women in Contemporary Cinema. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. xxii + 199 pp. $25.95 (paper). Alexandra Karriker's preface to Women in Contemporary Cinema observes that the anthology emerged from conferences held at the University of Oklahoma. While one of the book's merits is certainly its openness to a variety of approaches and topics, its heterogeneity also reflects its origins in conference proceedings, which may be the source of some of its shortcomings. The essays are often workman-like and engaging, but the anthology as a whole might have gained force from tighter focus and a firmer editorial hand, especially given the enormous scope of the topic. A preface that did more than preview the arguments of the essays to follow would have helped, but wherever Karriker wishes to draw our attention to recent general work on women and cinema, she simply provides footnotes for further reading rather than offering some sort of unifying take on the state of the discussion about women and film. Two aspects of the anthology design may have inhibited tighter focus for the collection. To begin with, the geographical range covered by the ten essays is considerable—five deal with Anglophone cinemas (three for New Zealand and one each for the United States and Great Britain), while the remainder take up films from France, Paraguay, post-Soviet Russia, and the Ivory Coast. The critical approaches on display are less varied but still quite heterogeneous from essay to essay and sometimes within an essay. Karriker notes that the "narrative stances" of the essays include "theoretical, descriptive, aesthetic, [End Page 178] and production orientations" (xi). What the reader typically gets are invocations of Laura Mulvey, some postcolonial theory, and close readings inflected by some contextual information (the approach taken by the majority of the essays). Only four of the essays approach film as a primarily visual medium, with the remainder more interested in exploring films emphasizing the experiences of women as manifestations of some other social or cultural formation. The essays that involve themselves with the filmic properties of cinema (generally the most successful in this collection) include Susan Smith Nash's fluent and learned account of Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schembori's Artefacto de la Primera Necesidad. Nash attaches her reading of the film to a great deal of helpful context about Paraguayan culture and language while also engaging with the film as a visual text. Similarly, Karen Boyle's account of Heavenly Creatures and Sister My Sister unites a consideration of film style (Peter Jackson's reliance on slasher-film tropes at the commencement of his film, for example) with ways in which representations of female same-sex desire both explain and displace the murders her two films explore. More obviously, Katherine Patterson is concerned with how Agnès Varda's Vagabond defies the typical scopophilic way of looking at women in an argument that is nonetheless well written and well presented. Finally, in the most theoretically sophisticated but least user-friendly essay by far, Binnie Brook Martin examines the relationship between sound and image in Désiré Ecaré's Faces of Women. While the close examination the film receives here is to be applauded, the writing is nearly impenetrable. The reader needs to be rescued from sentences such as "Time images are the lacunas outside of the screen construction of the 'understood' narrative world, gaps that open to a specular world that is not iconoclast with meanings" (181). As opposed to Nash's graceful presentation of a filmmaking context little known even to most film scholars, Martin's essay relies exclusively on theory, leaving the reader to speculate about potentially important historical or institutional issues that also seem relevant to her argument. Ecaré, for example, was trained by the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, and one wonders how Ecaré's preparation in anthropological filmmaking might fit into Martin's view of a cinematic style that exploits disjunctions between image and text to suggest female empowerment. More typical of the anthology as a whole are those essays that look at film as an illustration of some...