Lesbian Body Research Articles

Audre Lorde and queer ecology: An ecological praxis of Black lesbian identity in Zami

This paper employs Audre Lorde’s theoretical paradigm of anti-binarism and ecofeminism to explore her creation of a distinctive queer space which is achieved through the successful incorporation of ecological elements in her narrative of lesbianism. The central premise of this research lies in the intersection of lesbian concerns and the environmental sensibility in Lorde’s novel, Zami. The detailed analysis of instances of lesbian lovemaking interspersed with ecological references in Zami reveals a close connection between environment and queer sexuality, realised in the phrase “queer ecology”. This study investigates how the erotic contours of Lorde’s lesbian identity are shaped by her sustained engagement with the environmental metaphor derived from her immediate surroundings as well as the geography of her ancestral Grenadian island where the Zami myth originates. The cartographies of the physical landscape of Grenada and Black lesbian bodies intersect to form a combined ethos of lesbian eroticism driven by a strong rootedness in ecological affiliation. Through close examination of Afrekete’s role in Zami’s lesbian erotics, this paper activates a distinctive queer-ecological reading of lesbian relationships derived from a combination of aquatic, green, and edible metaphors. This article is an endeavour to bring about a sustained engagement of queer and environmental concerns by unravelling a symbiotic relationship between the two.

Intersecting gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in Arantxa Echevarría’s film Carmen & Lola (Spain, 2018)

Arantxa Echevarría’s film Carmen y Lola (2018) takes a groundbreaking new approach to intersectionality and lesbian identity contextualizing a lesbian coming-of-age-story and its multicultural background and context. Owing to the colonial gaze and the outsider’s perspective in the story telling, the film makes some major missteps in its representation of the Romani community in Spain. But nonetheless, the intersectional presentation is groundbreaking in terms of representation of lesbian diversity and experiences, since it portrays the lesbian subject as a triple minority: woman, lesbian, and Roma – a minority ethnic group still discriminated against in Spain. The story of two female Roma adolescents coming to terms with their mutual homoerotic desire intertwines with the marginality of their community and a conservative and homophobic environment in which lesbianism does not find a space. I argue that Echevarría’s film explores the topics of minorities both in terms of ethnicity and sexual orientation. The director aims to represent this otherness as a marginalized and decentered subjectivity that intersects with other axes of discrimination. It is from this marginal position that the film explores the forms of resistance against the control of the lesbian body that women directors are carrying out in Spanish cinema.

Flags and fashion: expressions of solidarity through lesbian clothing

The clothes worn by lesbians are rich in meaning. Sometimes, they can help us to understand lesbian history and the social, personal, political, and erotic context of lesbian lives in the past. As LGBTQ communities have grown and the connections between groups within it have become at once stronger and more complicated, the clothes that lesbians (and others) wear can function as narrators. Lesbian fashion can be a tool for solidarity, our ideals worn quite literally on our sleeves. This paper is an analysis of how clothing has been - and is being - used by lesbians to show support for other groups within LGBTQ communities, through a fashion history lens. The focus is on printed t-shirts as well as clothing in different Pride flag colours, which I propose can be understood as a kind of “flagging.” Flagging, here, is a way to understand the intentional choices made by lesbians and other LGBTQ + people when signalling personal identities and intra-community solidarities through dress. When solidarity activism is placed directly onto the lesbian body, it is personal, and can craft specific messages. These messages, constructed from a language of identities, visual culture, and physical garments, are what this paper seeks to examine.

The L Word, the Television Series: Analysis of Its Lesbian Subjectivity

In January 2004, Showtime, a pay cable network, launched the first-ever lesbian-themed serial drama, The L Word, which boldly showed lesbians’ sex life and brought lesbian discourse into the narrative center of queer-themed series. This essay tries to analyze how The L Word presented lesbian subjectivity through the image as well as body construction, and narrative and also discusses some arguments towards the lesbian body presentation in The L Word.

“History Digs a Shallow Grave”: Queer Temporality in Emily M. Danforth’s Lesbian Gothic

ABSTRACT: Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) revels in the disruption of time through erotic physicality. Because the Gothic and the queer break the bounds of normative constructions of time, the horror of Plain Bad Heroines arrives in the effect that queer Gothic time has on queer bodies by allowing them to delight in rejecting linearity while they run the risk of destabilizing their identities as they encounter the past. This article demonstrates that such disruption is particularly prevalent in neo-Victorian lesbian Gothic fiction by reading the novel through Freeman’s (2010) concept of erotohistoriography in two ways: first, by focusing on the way queer time effects and facilitates queer embodiment through the setting(s). Second, Gothic doubling is both an erotic and disorderly element of queer time’s effect on the lesbian body in Plain Bad Heroines . Temporal collapse allows the characters to encounter each other and the past, but with dire consequences.

Foucault's Strange Eros

Foucault's Strange Eros

Ruptures et mutations du “m/oi” dans Le Corps lesbien de Monique Wittig

Monique Wittig’s theoretical and literary work interrogates identity as a space for political action. Through a critical analysis of essentialist feminism, Wittig attacks the political subject “woman” in order to denounce that it is impossible to liberate the women of patriarchal oppressions within the binary system of heterosexuality. Wittig argues that lesbians are not women. In The Lesbian Body, the writer deconstructs the feminine anatomy and subjectivity. The self is show as multiple, as a j/e divided by a slash. Wittig updates the very notion of subject, person, myself and another.

Contesting Waters: Queer Signifying in La ciénaga and La niña santa by Lucrecia Martel

Abstract Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001) and La niña santa (2004) explore the problematics of queer representation using thematic and formal elements. La ciénaga posits queer desire as a source of shame and the lesbian body as un-representable within dominant, heteronormative signifying modes. La niña santa demonstrates plural female gazing and the reciprocal gaze outside of gendered binaries of power and submission. Using the swimming pool and water to stage queer signifying, the films include same-sex desire and homosociality, with elements that disrupt spectatorial expectations for spatial and acoustic representations.

The Social Importance of How Bodies Inhabit Spaces with Others: A Queer Reading of Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests

ABSTRACT The article argues that, while the configuration of the lesbian body and of subjectivity in Sarah Waters’s first three novels—Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2003)—is carried out in the discursive and performative terms of postmodernist feminism, her latest novels evince a move towards a queer phenomenological position characterised by a growing interest in the material and socioeconomic conditions of the body and subjectivity. Initiated in The Night Watch (2006) and The Little Stranger (2009), and culminating in The Paying Guests (2014), this phenomenological turn is observable in that these novels are centrally concerned with material issues of class and situated in periods of collective post-war trauma and political unrest that open up the possibility for cultural change and social transformation, thus suggesting a move towards a transmodernist position. The article offers a queer reading of The Paying Guests, based on Sarah Ahmed’s notions of “encounter” and “orientation” as a way to substantiate this assertion.

PERFORMATIVE SUBJECTHOODS: LESBIAN REPRESENTATIONS IN SPLIT BRITCHES’ BELLE REPRIEVE

Emerging postmodern theories of gender and sexuality frame the terms in which society has understood these concepts in an evolutionary way throughout history. The last century has witnessed the radical changes carried out mainly by feminist and LGTB movements. On the other hand, the theater, a subversive space where it is possible to experiment with different forms of subjecthood and communication, has been the laboratory in which it has been attempted to give a plastic form to these new currents of thought. In this sense, the work of Split Britches is remarkable for the innovative ways of bringing the abject to the political forefront. From the lesbian body to drag representation, Belle Reprieve (1991) is developed under the queer premise to dismantle heteropatriarchal hegemony and the binary gender system.

“Blood at the Root”: Cultural Abjection and Thwarted Desire in the Lynching Plays and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké

Well before Billie Holiday’s doleful rendition of “Strange Fruit,” African American women playwrights directly confronted the subject of lynching. In addition, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916) offers a prime example of how Black lesbian writers used coding and nuance to present queer content in lynching dramas. This reading of Grimké’s work reveals how the Black lynched body and the Black lesbian body both become culturally abject within the sexual economy of lynching. Taking a holistic view of Grimké’s oeuvre, I analyze Rachel alongside her erotic poetry and short stories, establishing multiple connections between the theme of lynching and lesbian longing. Grimké kept her own longings private, submerged in her literary output, yet similarities in themes, figures, and images suggest that Grimké resisted racism and homophobia simultaneously. By listening closely for how lesbian desire appears, often through absence, critics can develop new perspectives on these often overwrought, sentimental writings from the earliest moments of the Harlem Renaissance. I urge a more expansive approach to women’s queerness in these incipient years, prior to Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), or the “downlow” coolness of Black women’s blues music.

#Metoo. Motståndsberättelser om sexuella trakasserier i(nifrån) socialt arbete i Sverige

#MeToo has become a global digital feminist resistance movement where sexual harassment and sexualized violence have been made visible in different situations and occupations. In Sweden the hashtag #orosanmälan (English: #ReportingWorries) was created in 2018 for social workers. Very few studies have been conducted on sexual harassment in social work, a gap that this study aims to fill. The aim is to make visible, analyze and critically reflect on resistance stories about sexual harassment from within social work in Sweden. The study applies an analytical framework of gender and heteronormativity, age and racialization, emphasizing Butler’s key analytical concepts performativity, heteronormativity and subversion. The method is a narrative analysis of “small stories” (Georgakopoulou 2015) based on the first one hundred entries on the Swedish website #orosanmälan for social workers (https://www. metoo-orosanmalan.nu). The analysis shows how sexual harassment occurs in contexts of unequal power relations constituted through performative acts of speech against women social workers, students and girls who are clients, and focuses on pregnant, young, racialized, and lesbian bodies. Findings demonstrate how both men and women as leaders and colleagues participate in sexual harassment to devaluate women’s competence, and how threats of punishment are used to subordinate and objectify women social workers. #ReportingWorries challenges the discourse of Sweden as a country of equality and the core values of social work as a discipline and profession based on human rights, social justice, respect, and dignity when sexual harassment is investigated from within social work.

Laboring lesbians: Queering emotional labor

Through an ethnographic examination of the everyday lives of lesbians working in gas stations, this article highlights the ways in which sexuality matters within the workplace. One of the unique aspects of the service economy is the position of the body at the center of the market transaction. In other words, it is the body that serves as the point of production between the customer and the company. Within this productive space, the concept of emotional labor highlights how emotions are a critical aspect of labor within a position of service required in order to develop relationships with consumers. The goals of this article are to strengthen the original concept of emotional labor by complicating our understanding of the body with specific reference to sexuality, an intersectional analysis of the assumption of the heteronormative worker, examining the multiple ways in which workers interpret and enact emotional labor and the accompanying rewards and punishments that shape the experience of emotional labor and exploring how gender and sexuality are performed. Ultimately, laboring lesbian bodies are informing, resisting, and playing as well as conforming to this complex production.

Fucking the Body, Rewriting the Text: Proto-Queer Embodiment through Textual Drag in Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (1973)

Inspired by Judith Butler's conceptualization of drag as ‘gender parody’, I develop the conceptual frame of ‘textual drag’ in order to define and examine the relationship between parody, satire and gender. I test this frame by reading two seminal feminist works, Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (The Lesbian Body) (1973). Both texts lend themselves particularly persuasively to analysis with this frame, as they each use parodic strategies to facilitate proto-queer satirical critiques of reductive gender norms. Orlando deploys an exaggerated nineteenth-century biographical style, which foregrounds the protagonist's gender fluidity and her developing critique of the norms and systems that surround her, while Le Corps lesbien rewrites canonical romance narratives from a lesbian perspective, challenging the heterosexism inherent in these narratives and providing new modes of thinking about gender, desire and sexual interaction.

A Journey through Breast Cancer: Exploring the Body in Process in Isabel Franc and Susanna Martín’s Graphic Breast Cancer Narrative

ABSTRACTFocusing on Isabel Franc and Susanna Martín’s Alicia en un mundo real (2010), this article will explore the representation and the visibility of the cancerous body in the graphic form. Based on Franc’s experience, the graphic novel takes the form of a fictional breast cancer memoir as it documents the story of Alicia, a journalist in her mid-fifties, from the moment that she discovers the malignant lump. By emphasising how the patient experiences the different stages of breast cancer in this fictional life story, I argue that Franc and Martín rewrite the breast cancer narrative by presenting the sick body as a body in process, a body that is continually crossing boundaries—from the sick body to the convalescent, the cured, and even the reeroticized and lesbian body. What is more, the visibility of the body in process here is key as Franc and Martín transform the politics of visibility with respect to the sick body—first by making it visible, but then by providing its substitution or replacement with other bodies. I posit that Franc and Martín’s graphic novel is defiant in its presentation of the breast cancer patient’s story as survival and empowerment are the result of visibility, humour, and female solidarity.

“The third sex is here to stay”: Rhetorical reconstructions of lesbian sexuality in Vice Versa

ABSTRACTVice Versa, published in Los Angeles from 1947–1948 and regarded as the first lesbian periodical in the United States, was authored and edited by Lisa Ben (anagram for “lesbian”). While Vice Versa is lauded for inspiring later lesbian publications, little scholarship has analyzed the magazine's contents. Queer rhetorical analysis allows me to demonstrate the integral role Vice Versa played in counteracting cultural and medical classifications of lesbians during the 1940s. Through an analysis of Vice Versa's book and movie reviews, an editorial, and creative writing, this article analyzes the way Ben uses queer rhetoric to turn narratives of medical and psychological deviancy and inferiority into a means for empowerment and community building. By foregrounding queer rhetorical and discursive means through which the periodical engaged with and pushed back on culturally dominant views of lesbians as psychologically or biologically “inverted” and deviant within newspapers, film, and novels, my analysis of Vice Versa calls attention to the processes through which the magazine negotiated lesbian identity creation with dominant tropes that categorized lesbian bodies and desires as debased.

Gender expression, body–gender identity incongruence, thin ideal internalization, and lesbian body dissatisfaction.

Gender expression, body–gender identity incongruence, thin ideal internalization, and lesbian body dissatisfaction.

An exploration of bisexual, lesbian, and heterosexual women’s body dissatisfaction, and body hair and cosmetics practices

Body image pressures for heterosexual women are well established. However, lesbian body image is less well understood, while bisexual women have largely been overlooked within the psychological literature. Further, women’s investment in ‘traditional’ appearance practices associated with femininity are underexplored. The current study explored differences between 472 heterosexual, lesbian, and bisexual women on measures of body satisfaction, body hair practices, and cosmetics use. While there were no significant differences between body satisfaction scores, lesbian and bisexual women had more positive attitudes to body hair, and were less likely to remove hair from particular parts of their bodies, than heterosexual women. Cosmetics use was highest among heterosexual women, significantly lower among bisexual women, and lowest among lesbians. We argue that these results highlight the importance of exploring the distinctiveness of bisexual, lesbian and heterosexual women’s appearance concerns and appearance practices.

Celebrating Queer Lesbian Desires with Dorothy Allison: From moral monstrosity to the beautiful materiality of the body

Using social and queer theory on domination, sexuality and gender, this contribution explores how the queer American author Dorothy Allison celebrates the vilified transgressive lesbian body. As, in the 1970s, the mainstream American feminist movement crystallized around the definition of an acceptable sexuality in the name of femininity, female sexual practices were standardized according to strict identity frames, carnal desire was denied, and transgressive lesbians who play with gender roles were defined as abject. In response to this extreme taming of the body, Allison interrogates the notions of masculinity and femininity, domination and submission in her exploration of sexual pleasure and traumatized sexuality. She celebrates the aggressiveness and masculinity of queer lesbianism, promotes the fluidity of gender roles, and asserts the primacy of the flesh, sensuality, and materiality in sexuality.

Black lesbian bodies - reflections on a queer South African archive

‘Homosexuality is unAfrican’ has become a common response to the presence of gay and lesbian groups in South Africa. Contrary to the fact that homosexuality can be traced back to the sixteenth century in Africa, widespread beliefs abound that homosexuality is a Western import. Black South African lesbians are recognised as a vulnerable minority and are victims of ‘corrective rape’ and other forms of homophobic discrimination. South Africa’s transition to democracy has been fraught with sexual identity struggles and violence performed on the black lesbian body is exercised to uphold a patriarchal gender order. This article will explore violence performed on the black lesbian body and the expression of black lesbian sexualities in the work of South African photographer and gay rights activist, Zanele Muholi.