Lesbian Activism Research Articles

Globalizing Korean queers? Project L(esbian), the first exhibition of lesbian arts in South Korea

This paper deals with the influence of queer and visual culture in South Korea by concentrating on the example of Project L, the first exhibition organized by self-proclaimed lesbian artists and curators in South Korea in 2005, followed by the group's second exhibition, Gender Spectrum, in 2008. Conflicts between the dominant curatorial approach toward feminist arts and the identity politics of the Project L team are investigated in order to illustrate major theoretical predicaments in which lesbian activists and artists find themselves in feminist organizations and art exhibitions in Korea. As the title “Globalizing Korean Queer” suggests, this paper also examines contradictory circumstances related to the influence of queer theory in non-western countries. A close analysis of Gender Spectrum sheds light upon how a non-western lesbian group utilizes queer theory to understand the distinctive cultural conditions underlying homophobia, beyond merely importing “advanced” theories from the west.

“Amor Solidario”: art and the politics of revolutionary lesbianism in Mexico City

Images of women clad with rifles alongside slogans that proclaim lesbians as authentic revolutionaries feature prominently in literature and fliers distributed by Mexico City-based lesbian feminist organizations in the late 1970s and 1980s. This article analyzes the significance of activist artwork displayed on movement ephemera such as posters, fliers, and pamphlets to the construction of ideological positions and expressions of solidarity. I argue that lesbian activists depicted lesbians as revolutionaries in an attempt both to express South-South solidarity with transnational revolutionary movements and to radicalize lesbian activism within Mexico. By portraying themselves as revolutionaries, they also sought empathy for their own struggles against state surveillance and harassment. In order to analyze what motivated lesbian activists’ ties with transnational revolutionary groups, I consider the nature of Cold War politics, the emergence of neo-liberal economics, and the restriction of self-expression and activism associated with these politics.

Bringing Gay and Lesbian Activism to the White House: Midge Costanza and the National Gay Task Force Meeting

In March 1977, President Carter's Assistant Margaret “Midge” Costanza made history by meeting with representatives from the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) to hear their grievances about discriminatory federal policies. The effects of the meeting were many, including changes in policies of the Bureau of Prisons and the Public Health Service. It also initiated policy discussions that would continue for decades and contributed to the incorporation of gay rights within the Democratic Party. Midge Costanza was fundamental to the process. It was her decision to hold the meeting and to advocate on behalf of the NGTF, and she bore many of the meeting's political costs. In this article we make use of Costanza's own papers and multiple interviews with her to closely analyze Costanza's role in the historic meeting. In addition to adding detail to its politics and policy impacts of the meeting, we also look at her complex motivations for holding such a controversial meeting. Costanza maintained until her death in 2010 that she was motivated by her feminism and overall commitment to social justice, rather than her own identity or experiences.

Predicting electoral activism among gays and lesbians in the United States

Although battles over gay and lesbian rights have appeared prominently in political arenas, scholars have created few empirical studies on gay and lesbian activism. To address this absence, this quantitative study identified factors that inspired greater electoral engagement among gays and lesbians in the United States (n = 285). After integrating “resource,” “mobilizing,” and “framing” variables into regressions, this study found that electoral activism was inspired by many sorts of motivators. In sum, activist tendencies were swayed by educational levels, perceptions of political potency, a desire to conceal sexual orientations, surviving hate crimes, and joining certain political groups. Interestingly, this study supported “new social movement” theories that downplay economic factors as predictors of involvement in gay and lesbian rights campaigns.

Resisting the Silence: The Use of Tolerance and Equality Arguments by Gay and Lesbian Activist Groups in Russia 1

Abstract In the new, post-Soviet Russia, some people have been excluded from the possibility of possessing human rights based on different identity claims. Lesbians and gay men are among those who are excluded. Though in some states the mechanism of this is manifestly inscribed in the law, in Russia the mechanism is hidden in the field of silence: the field of discourse on homosexuality is full of lacunas. While the most productive speakers are certainly LGBT activists, the most passive ones are the state officials. These forces come into discursive play where rights are at stake. The purpose of this paper, based on original research on the emerging activism of gays and lesbians in Russia, is to uncover the regulative features of silence in the Russian discourse on homosexuality.

LAUREL and Harvey: Screening militant gay liberalism and lesbian feminist radicalism circa 1980

This essay examines U.S.-based lesbian and gay activism from the turn of 1980 with a focus on tensions between models of activism based in unapologetic demands for visibility versus concerns about the contradictions presented by the recognition of lesbian and gay identities within a punitive political order. The author crafts this historical narrative alongside and through readings of Gus Van Sant's 2008 film Milk and Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames. The essay analyzes how Milk showcases the politics of gay liberalism at its most militant, while Born in Flames highlights a variety of radical feminist activisms. The essay also looks at how the styles of each film bring into focus some of the ways in which liberal and radical lesbian and gay movements of the period limited their engagement with race and racism. The essay then considers how both films thematize the uses of communicative media in the production of social movements. It concludes by asking how these films might provide an opportunity to think about activist history today.

“Xenasubtexttalk”

This article examines how some lesbian fans of the television adventure fantasy series Xena: Warrior Princess (X:WP) (1995–2001) became visible through the development of online fandom and the production of explicit lesbian Internet fan fiction. The self-identity of lesbian fans who are part of the “xenasubtextalk” (XSTT) fan group is explored and celebrated through social networks of lesbian fandom through the “Xenaverse.” Lesbian fans have written copious amounts of fan fiction online enabling a form of lesbian political discourse and activism as well as social and cultural discourses shared throughout the platform of the Internet. Many lesbian fans have been supported to create and write Xena lesbian fan fiction by engaging with various lesbian fan writers from the Xenaverse who offer their advice to develop lesbian fan fiction services for free to “newbie” writers. Their explicit lesbian fan fiction narratives are reproduced and distributed as lesbian stories about the two main characters Xena and Gabrielle from the original television series. I interviewed three women from “xenasubtextalk” who gain pleasure exploring their lesbian identities and fandom through the fan group.

Chleb i pomarańcza na sederowym talerzu. Lesbijskie odczytania tradycji judaizmu

The article is an analyse of two main strategies which are adopted byfeminist and lesbian activists who reinterpret Jewish tradition and ritual. The textshows that lesbians are excluded in both orthodox (conservative) Jewish communityand also in liberal movement. I try to present a deep picture of the excluded groupsituation. However at the same time I present also how lesbian activists reconfigureor reject oppressive patterns and propose their own emancipatory theological ideas.The key question of the text is: if the changes which are presented by feminist andlesbian theology are adopted in different Jewish communities and if they may changethe core of Judaism.

Why Do Social Work Students Engage in Lesbian and Gay Rights Activism?

This paper considers the contexts and motivations as to why some social work students engage in lesbian and gay rights activism. To explain electoral and protesting modes of activism, this study utilized variables from resource, mobilizing, and framing theories of political participation to explain activism related to gay and lesbian rights. After gathering data on 159 undergraduate social work majors, regressions suggest that economic resources failed to explain participation in gay and lesbian politics. Instead, the predictors of gay and lesbian activism more closely aligned with four key variables: educational attainment, communicating with full-fledged activists, having an ability to recognize heterosexism, and maintaining a commitment to social justice.

Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics

The queer movement in India has been adept at documenting itself. A succession of anthologies compiled by leading voices from within the movement has made available to a wider reading public the lives and longings of many of its diverse participants (Sukthankar 1999; Bhattacharyya and Bose 2005; Narrain and Bhan 2006; Narrain and Gupta 2011). Naisargi Dave’s book on queer activism in India offers something new and valuable. A book-length account of the queer political landscape with a focus on lesbian activism, this study is distinctive both for its longer temporal view and for the productively ambivalent positionality of its author. Based in Toronto where she teaches anthropology, Dave presents herself in her writing as both insider and outsider, as both participant in the groups and movements she writes about and critical observer of their everyday activity; sometimes she is neither, inhabiting the liminal position of the diasporic Indian. “Insiders” will read with amusement of her self-avowedly clumsy discovery that “lesbian sexual encounters were there to be had, often in the most unexpected of places” (50), but will also be enlightened by this nuanced cultural history of their own subjectivities. “Outsiders” will find in this book a model of an intimate ethnography by someone who does not pretend to belong.

The Activist Cinema-Goer

This article examines the role of cinema in the emergence of gay and lesbian activism in 1970s Sydney. In that decade, a newly politicised homosexual identity was developed and encouraged by gay rights and liberation activists. At the same time, changes to censorship laws radically altered the kinds of films Australians were allowed to watch. Activists put these films to use in the development of new forms of identity. It was not just the films that were important, however, but also the spaces in which they were screened. The article examines the history of two particular cinemas to argue that it was through such spaces that gay and lesbian people began to see themselves as a community, a public and an audience.This article has been peer-reviewed.

Equals before the Law? Public Religion and Queer Activism in the Age of Judicial Politics in South Africa

Abstract On a global scale, the politics around the recognition of same-sex relationships has turned into legal controversies while opposition to it is often framed in religious terms. This article takes the case of Christian mobilization around the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in South Africa to investigate the intertwinement of religious and sexual rights struggles. Linking the anthropology of law, the sociolegal literature on judicialization, and studies of public religion, it argues that both same-sex activism and religious mobilization should be understood in terms of judicial politics. The article analyses religious responses to lesbian and gay judicial activism and presents a typology that reveals the structured diversity of these responses in terms of public discourse, political strategy, and legal argument. Two dimensions are key to conceptualizing these responses: religious communities’ ontological concepts of the world, including ideas about human agency and God, and their relationships to the world, construed in terms of political habitus.

Emotional Attachments and Secular Imaginings

Through an analysis of Western lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) activist responses to the executions of two youths in Iran in 2005, this article considers why an interpretation of the executions as a case of antigay persecution became predominant despite reasons for doubt. I argue that this interpretation gained power because of how it resonated emotionally with the activists' liberal, secular imagination. A story of homophobic persecution cast these victims as exemplars of a universal “gay” experience and of a “civilizational divide” between a violently intolerant Islam and a progressively more tolerant West. This dynamic of identification and differentiation was powerfully articulated through expressions of love, fear, and disgust. Furthermore, the Internet, which facilitated the rapid circulation of images of, stories about, and reactions to the case, also proliferated emotional and affective responses that further validated this interpretation as a kind of “felt truth.”

Queer knowledge and the politics of the gaze in contemporary South African photography: Zanele Muholi and others

This article is concerned chiefly with work by the contemporary South African lesbian photographer and activist Zanele Muholi, drawing some comparisons with photographs by Sabelo Mlangeni and Lunga Kama. All of these photographers are concerned with the visibility of sexual minorities, the politics of the gaze, the construction of archives, the role of photography that is activist, and the generation of new ideas about community and citizenship. Muholi's work, in particular, speaks to tensions between the body politic and the biopolitics of the black body, the autochthonous subject of tradition and the queer agent of utopian possibility. In teasing out some of the complexities of these tensions and their implications for audiences of the photographs, this article considers thematic concerns and formal attributes of a number of works. It interrogates, too, their implications for thinking about queer futurity in the postcolony, and what their reception reveals about the judgement – and tolerance – of the new custodians of national cultural identities in South Africa.

Negotiating the field: rethinking ethnographic authority, experience and the frontiers of research

This article derives from my own fieldwork experience as a female anthropologist working in the field of gender and male sexual dissidence. Taking my early fieldwork in the 1990s as a departure point, and drawing on my recent fieldwork with Spanish Lesbian, Gay, Transsexual and Bisexual activists, I reflect on the researcher’s position, both in the field and in the construction of the field, through a discussion on ethnographic authority and management of the roles of insider/outsider. In adopting a critical perspective, I propose that the position of the researcher and of other actors in these social situations be continually and thoroughly negotiated, thus revealing the flexiblilty of the frontiers of/in research. This negotiation of positions is related to the complex process by which anthropological ‘difference’ is constructed, and to the dynamic configurations of ethnographic ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ in fieldwork. Positions, alterations, intersections and negotiations are seen to be permeated by the rational and the emotional construction of ‘otherness’.

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Beyond the Game or Business as Usual?: Daily Newspaper and Wire-Service Coverage of John Amaechi's Coming Out

Through a sociology of news framework, this project examines how daily newspaper and wire-service sports reporters and columnists covered former NBA player John Amaechi's 2007 announcement that he is gay. Specifically, this study was interested in discovering what types of sources reporters used and if non-official sources such as those from gay and/or lesbian activist organizations were included in coverage. Results found that official sources dominated coverage and non-official sources were rarely heard from.

Glad to be Gay Behind the Wall: Gay and Lesbian Activism in 1970s East Germany

��� The Gartenstrasse swimming pool lay tucked away in a sleepy corner of East Berlin, fenced in on two sides by the Berlin Wall. Its sauna was a well-known meeting ground for gay men, who sweated underneath a magnificently homoerotic stained-glass window designed by the Expressionist Max Pechstein. In 1971, in this apt municipal space, eighteen-year-old Michael Eggert and twenty-one-year-old Peter Rausch began a friendship which would lead to the founding of Eastern Europe’s first gay liberation group. From 1973 to 1979, the HIB (Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft Berlin, or Homosexual Interest Group Berlin) organized regular meetings, discussions, parties, social events, made films and lobbied the authorities for the recognition of gay and lesbian rights. Its events were attended by up to 200 people, and it attracted the attention of numerous socialist authority figures, including the police and the Stasi. Yet despite these successes, the HIB is largely unknown. 1 When discussed at all, it is as part of the pre-history of the more widespread gay and lesbian activism of the 1980s, much of which took place under the mantle of the Protestant Church. Such church-based activism fits neatly into the dominant narrative of state socialism, which stresses growing disillusion and opposition in the 1980s, culminating with communism’s collapse in 1989. This article argues that the HIB was not simply a forerunner of the activism of the 1980s, since it also disrupts such narratives and draws our attention to important aspects of the history of late state socialism, as yet unwritten. The recent burst of historiographical interest in the 1970s has largely bypassed Eastern Europe. It has generally been assumed that the post-1968 social movements of the West had no counterpart on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Stefan Wolle, for example, describes East Germany’s 1968 as a ‘failed revolution’ which was easily crushed by the state authorities. 2 However, new research suggests that the social, cultural and even political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s left their mark on Eastern Europe too. In particular, work on the Eastern European ‘1968’ and its aftermath has suggested that activists were well-informed about events in the West. 3 Furthermore, this new literature points out that the mixture of

Mapping Québécois Sexual Nationalism in Times of ‘Crisis of Reasonable Accommodations’

The language of gender equality and sexual emancipation has become increasingly pivotal to Western immigration and integration governmentality, giving rise to a new brand of nationalism in which women's rights and gay-and-lesbian rights are deemed core civilisational values of the West, while migrant communities, particularly Muslims, are cast as menacing them. Operating through a reconfigured Orientalism and the rhetoric and politics of ‘clash of civilisations’, these collusions come with serious national and international consequences and should be analysed not only as a new inflection of contemporary racism, in an era boisterously declared committed to diversity though anti-multiculturalist and post-racial, but also in their connections with neo-liberalism that links biopolitics to geopolitics and made marketable a range of social movements such as feminism and gay and lesbian activism. Expanding on a critical framework inspired by postcolonial feminist and queer anti-racist writings, this paper uncovers the ways in which gender and sexuality have become a key mode through which technologies of racialised governmentality come into existence via discourses of ‘feminism vs. multiculturalism’, ‘secularism’ and ‘human rights’, during the recent Québécois ‘reasonable accommodation crisis’, which was seemingly about the extent to which minority religious accommodation should be practiced, hence ‘not about race’.

Resources, Social Networks, and Collective Action Frames of College Students Who Join the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement

This article explores the reasons why some college students join the gay and lesbian rights movements. After addressing the frequency of students joining this social movement, the article then considers the contexts and motivations behind such actions. To explore the catalysts to gay and lesbian rights activism, this study utilizes variables from resource, mobilizing, and framing theories of political participation. Using data from 820 heterosexual, lesbian, gay, and bisexual students, we found that economic and educational resources failed to explain participation in gay and lesbian politics. Instead, predictors of gay and lesbian activism were more closely aligned to four key variables: the political orientations of trusted peers, knowing full-fledged activists, an ability to recognize heterosexism, and participants' maintenance of activist identities.