Lesbian Culture Research Articles

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

The association's ninety-seventh convention will he held 5–7 November 1999 at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, under the sponsorship of the dean of Letters and Sciences and the Departments of English and Languages and Literatures. Inger Olsen is serving as local chair. The program will represent the association members' diverse interests in all matters of language and literature in classical, Western, and non-Western languages. The thirty-one general sessions will include papers on classical, Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, English, American, and Asian literatures, as well as on linguistics, rhetoric, gay and lesbian literature, film, matrilineal culture, autobiography, poetry and poetics, and critical theory. Among the thirty special sessions are sessions on picaresque literature, Shakespeare and popular literature, Native American literature, Russian literature, Slavic literature, Toni Morrison in the 1990s, Caribbean literature, and cybertextbooks in foreign language education. Several special sessions have been organized by Portland State University and PAMLA affiliate organizations Women in French, MELUS, and the Milton Society of America. Registration at the conference will be $35 and $25. All paper sessions are scheduled for classrooms at Portland State University and will begin Friday at 1:00 p.m. and end Sunday at 1:00 p.m.

Noticing Cultural Differences: Ad Meanings Created by Target and Non-Target Markets

Target marketing is an increasingly crucial component of marketing strategy, particularly given the expanding cultural diversity of the nation's population. Prior research suggests marketers need to consider the nontarget market (consumers who perceive themselves not to be the target of an advertisement) as well as the target market. Further, researchers have called for a more meaning-based approach to understanding advertising and consumer behavior. The authors therefore explore the meanings created by target and nontarget viewers of advertising targeting black, white, and gay / lesbian cultures. Their results show that asymmetries in cultural expertise, power, distinctiveness, and stigmatization among those cultural groups influence the meanings created by target and nontarget viewers of ads targeting those groups.

Carryin' On in the Lesbian and Gay South, and: Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968 (review)

Reviewed by: Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South, and: Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948–1968 Allys Dierker (bio) Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South edited by John Howard. New York: New York University Press, 1997, 402 pp., $18.95 paper. Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948–1968 by James T. Sears. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997, 317 pp., $28.00 hardcover, $18.95 paper. Both John Howard’s Carryin’ On and James Sears’s Lonely Hunters address a topic overdue for analysis. The idea of the South, especially for many Southerners, forms a fundamental component of individual and national identity. Entire enterprises—college courses, advanced degrees, societies, journals, and more—dedicate themselves to investigating “the South.” A more recent, though hardly nascent, topic is gay and lesbian culture. Jonathan Katz tracked Gay American History two decades ago, and a quick perusal through any gay and lesbian bookstore (or even through the gay and lesbian shelves in behemoth bookstore chains) yields evidence of a virtual explosion of gay histories written since the 1980s: John D’Emilio, Martin B. Duberman, Lillian Faderman, and Elizabeth Kennedy, and Madeline Davis are only a few oft-cited gay and lesbian historians. The South’s intersection with gay and lesbian culture, then, is ripe for analysis. Until Sears’s and Howard’s volumes, however, gay and lesbian historical roles in the South (and the South’s role in gay and lesbian history) have garnered little attention. Sears’s and Howard’s works, therefore, are some of the first to acknowledge gay and lesbian contributions to the South, and both authors articulate at least the implicit hope that their volumes will change the academic profession specifically and “American culture broadly” (Howard, xi). Sears’s work spans Cold War America from the end of World War II to the year before the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. An “oral history,” Lonely Hunters showcases narrative from Richard Inman (a Florida activist), Merril Mushroom (a Jewish lesbian Floridian), Quinton Baker (a North Carolina African American civil rights organizer), Rose Levinson (a Miami lesbian lawyer from New York), Dawn Langley Simmons (an intersexed Brit living in Charleston), and Jack Nichols (a Washington, D.C., activist). Sears details the chilling Johns Committee purge ( around 1958–1963) of Florida state employees suspected of being homosexuals: in McCarthyesque fashion, the committee staked out university and courtroom bathrooms, entrapped gay men (mostly state university professors), subjected them to intimidating and repeated interrogation, demanded names of other homosexuals and finally, after forcing many professors to quit or to be fired, began searching for gay students. Chapter four addresses North Carolina African Americans’ difficulties [End Page 208] integrating local establishments; Quinton Baker’s account reveals that homosexuality was tolerated, if not accepted, within civil rights groups because all energy was devoted to ending Jim Crow laws. Chapter five on Gordon Langley Hall, later Dawn Langley Simmons, details the difficulties of being an intersexed person in an interracial relationship in South Carolina. Carryin’ On arranges its articles chronologically from the early-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century. The topics are varied: historical southern same-sex relationships, major southern authors, oppressive legislation, localized communities, and theories of place. Sears has contributed a version of his chapter on Hall/Simmons. Elizabeth Knowlton’s and Margaret Rose Gladney’s essays explore contested definitions of “lesbian” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, respectively. The essays of Gladney, William Armstrong Percy, and Martin Duberman narrate difficulties securing permission for primary sources: Gladney details her successful publication of Lillian Smith’s and Paula Snelling’s love letters to each other, despite Smith’s family’s initial resistance; Percy chronicles his “outing” of William Alexander Percy despite his family’s and scholars’ objections; and Duberman suggests that his use of historical letters from Jeff Withers to James Hammond might have been easier had he not sought official permission. Katy Coyle and Nadiene Van Dyke’s, Howard’s, and Meredith Raimondo’s essays analyze place and politics: Coyle and Van Dyke contrast the upper class, Newcomb women’s college campus with the nearby...

Book Reviews

Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas. Richard C. Trexler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. 292 pp.Two Spirit People: American Indian Lesbian Women and Gay Men. Lester B. Brown. New York: Haworth Press, 1997. 116 pp.Science and Homosexualities. Vemon A. Rosario. ed. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 308 pp.Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia. David Tuller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 314 pp.Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America. Ellen Lewin. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. 232 pp.

The queer renaissance: contemporary American literature and the reinvention of lesbian and gay identities

Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots ushered in the contemporary gay liberation movement, overt representations of same-sex desire in American literature and the arts were few and far between. Even in the 1970s, when gay and lesbian cultures began to register on our national consciousness, such work was still quite rare. In the 1980s and 90s, however, all that changed. The Queer Renaissance puts a name to the unprecedented outpouring of creative work by openly lesbian and gay novelists, poets, and playwrights in the past two decades. This volume is one of the first to analyze critically this cultural awakening and is one of the only books to consider the work of gay male and lesbian writers together. Most importantly, The Queer Renaissance is the first book to consider how this wave of creative activity has worked in tandem with a flourishing of radical queer politics. The Queer Renaissance explores the work of such important figures as Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Randall Kenan, Gloria Anzalda, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Schulman to question the dichotomy between art and activism. In addition, The Queer Renaissance interrogates the ways queer theory deploys, intersects with, and contests contemporary theoretical movements such as cultural studies, feminist theory, African American theory, and Chicano/a theory.

Body Dissatisfaction Among Lesbian College Students: The Conflict of Straddling Mainstream and Lesbian Cultures

Research examining body dissatisfaction among lesbians has attempted to compare lesbians' and heterosexual women's attitudes toward their bodies. Studies have yielded mixed results, some indicating that lesbians, compared to heterosexual women, are more satisfied with their bodies, and some indicating that the two groups of women are equally dissatisfied. In an attempt to more closely explore lesbians' attitudes toward their bodies, we conducted interviews with 26 lesbian college students and inquired into how the following areas might be related to body-image concerns: (a) lesbian beauty ideals, (b) the sources through which lesbian beauty ideals are conveyed, (c) lesbian conflict about beauty, (d) negative stereotypes about lesbians' appearance, and (e) lesbian concerns about feminine identity. Results indicated that young adult lesbians embrace a beauty ideal that encompasses both thinness and fitness. Whereas mainstream sources, such as women's magazines and peer pressure seem to influence lesbian college students to value a thinner body ideal, sexual relationships with women encouraged acceptance of one's body. Conflict between mainstream and lesbian values about the importance of weight and overall appearance was repeatedly voiced by the respondents. The complexity of lesbians' feelings about their bodies is discussed, and future directions for research are suggested.

Response to Schneider's "The Power of Culture"

Cultural AnthropologyVolume 12, Issue 2 p. 274-278 Response to Schneider's “The Power of Culture” Richard K. Herrell, Richard K. Herrell School of Public Health, University of Illinois at ChicagoSearch for more papers by this author Richard K. Herrell, Richard K. Herrell School of Public Health, University of Illinois at ChicagoSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 January 2008 https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1997.12.2.274AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume12, Issue2May 1997Pages 274-278 RelatedInformation

Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (review)

Reviewed by: Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 Lisa A. Freeman Emma Donoghue. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996). Pp. 314 $13.00. First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Scarlet Press, Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women seeks to “discuss the full range of representations of lesbian culture in British print between 1668 and 1801, in a variety of discourses, from the poetic to the medical, the libertine to the religious” (1). In this endeavor, Donoghue joins a number of literary critics and historians who, in recent years, have worked to expand our ability to recognize lesbian identities in literary and historical writings. To some extent Donoghue takes the work of Lillian Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men) as a model for her historical survey. But she also notes, as have others, the serious shortcoming of Faderman’s vision, most significantly the tendency for the model of romantic friendship to erase the potentially sexual nature of relationships between women. Donoghue calls for reexamination of what she terms the “rigid divisions between friendship and sex, social acceptability and deviance, innocence and experience” (1). Her study is devoted to demonstrating just how widespread and diverse representations—fictional and historical—were of lesbian bodies, lesbian practices, and lesbian cultures in eighteenth-century England. In short, she seeks to correct the misconception that lesbians were and are sexless women who settle for chaste but intense emotional bonds, and to argue instead that sexual interaction, even interpenetration, was at least one among many possible forms of expression in women’s attachments to one another. [End Page 321] Donoghue’s study is a descriptive record of material from the eighteenth century in which women can be found sharing passionate moments. Those familiar with this territory, as well as with the field of women’s writing in general, will find much of Donoghue’s material unsurprising. The recovery and resuscitation of women’s writing over the past twenty-five years and the emergence of lesbian and gay studies brought many of these stories, anecdotes, and historical documents to light. What Donoghue offers here that has not been represented elsewhere, however, is an insistence on viewing these materials from a “lesbian” perspective, to hear the anecdotes with a “lesbian” ear. While some critics may find her usage of the term “lesbian” and her definition of a “lesbian” approach theoretically problematic, Donoghue makes it clear in a polemical introduction that what is at stake is a practical knowledge of the cultural availability of “the extraordinary variety of early writings about love between women,” not some “eternal truth about lesbian existence, but rather theories, stories, possibilities” (11, 17). Donoghue pushes the envelope in the field further, moreover, when she insists that we differentiate lesbian culture and treat it as neither a footnote to nor a mirror image of the history of gay men. As she perceptively puts it, “a study like this one, which looks at lesbians without comparison with gay men, can let us establish our own priorities and ask our own questions” (9). Donoghue divides her study into four primary subjects: gender blurring, under which she includes chapters on the female hermaphrodite (25–58), female husbands (59–86), and the breeches part (87–108); friendship (109–81); sex (182–219); and community (220–68). Many of the works she describes in this study appear under more than one of these headings, and not surprisingly, either to Donoghue or to us, the categories cannot always be easily maintained. In any event, Donoghue concentrates on providing a descriptive summary of the printed material in question; she keeps critical commentary to a minimum. When she does offer critical observations, they range from the banal to the tantalizing. Of the latter, two examples will have to suffice as hints to what kinds of new critical possibilities are opened up for further exploration through Donoghue’s approach to the materials. In the context of discussion of legal treatments of female husbands, she note in passing that the “legal language steers us away from sexuality towards theft” (65). Later, in a discussion of Mary Pixie’s Queen Catherine (1968), she suggests how the...

Representation, Subjectivity and Ethics in Urban Gay Ethnography

IN EXPLORING ISSUES of ethics and subjectivity stemming from two ongoing studies of urban gay life, our purpose is to describe some of the constraints influencing process and product in urban gay ethnography. Often, our status as members of the communities we study forces us to confront problems of responsibility and ethics, and we use both our anthropological training as well as our gay sensibility to mediate professional and personal considerations. Some of the constraints are the potential danger to lesbian and gay communities in disseminating research findings, the loss of a distinctly private gay sphere, and our responsibilities to lesbian and gay cultures.

Becoming Visible: An Art Therapy Support Group for Isolated Low-Income Lesbians

AbstractThe special strength of art therapy is that it encourages us to envision, on our own terms, our definitions of self and reality. Since it provides an opportunity to make oneself seen, art therapy has a special resonance for lesbians because of their historical invisibility and isolation. This paper discusses the imagery and process of an art therapy support group for low-income isolated lesbians, through five related “lenses”: (1) women's relational dynamics and the centrality of relationships in lesbians' lives; (2) trauma; (3) socioeconomic class; (4) lesbian identity, visibility, culture, and gender; and (5) transference. An intertwined constellation of themes—safety, danger, gender, aggression, sexuality, power, intimacy, isolation, autonomy, and family—is traced through the progress of the group's interactions and visual productions.

Homoerotic friendship and college principals, 1880-1960

Abstract This paper is written as a contribution to the debate on the construction and interpretation of those close relationships between women, which took place before or outside the lesbian cultures and identities which have emerged in the twentieth century. The term ‘homoerotic’ was first used by Vicinus to describe close friendships between women in residential educational communities in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this study of four women principals – Mary Allan, Alice Skillicorn, Constance Maynard and Winifred Mercier – it is argued that although these women did not claim a lesbian identity as such, their emotional/sexual bonding with other women, coupled with their refusal of the hegemonic heterosexual discourse places them within the lesbian past. Inside the confines of women's colleges, homoerotic friendship was accepted within certain limits – namely that the friendship remained invisible to the outside world, and that the women concerned did not violate standards of respectability by indiscreet behaviour. Principals also faced an additional difficulty in homoerotic friendship from the necessity of reconciling the power discourse of their public role with their own private gender needs.

Homoerotic friendship and college principals, 1880-1960

Abstract This paper is written as a contribution to the debate on the construction and interpretation of those close relationships between women, which took place before or outside the lesbian cultures and identities which have emerged in the twentieth century. The term ‘homoerotic’ was first used by Vicinus to describe close friendships between women in residential educational communities in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this study of four women principals – Mary Allan, Alice Skillicorn, Constance Maynard and Winifred Mercier – it is argued that although these women did not claim a lesbian identity as such, their emotional/sexual bonding with other women, coupled with their refusal of the hegemonic heterosexual discourse places them within the lesbian past. Inside the confines of women's colleges, homoerotic friendship was accepted within certain limits – namely that the friendship remained invisible to the outside world, and that the women concerned did not violate standards of respectability by indiscreet behaviour. Principals also faced an additional difficulty in homoerotic friendship from the necessity of reconciling the power discourse of their public role with their own private gender needs.

Daring to dissent: lesbian culture from margin to mainstream

This collection of essays examines the full range of lesbian expression and representation in literature, theatre, radio, television, film and photography, reflecting the diversity of lesbian culture. The collection takes a broad-based approach, looking beyond traditional literary genres and focusing instead on those which relate more specifically to lesbians, such as crime writing, and the field of performing and visual arts. Original articles on television, art, theatre and newspaper journalism are presented. A combination of UK- and US-based writers, performers, producers, activists, theorists, journalists and critics have contributed to this contemporary analysis of lesbian culture. Contributors include Mary Wings, Rose Collis, Barbara Wilson and Veronica Groocock.

Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801

Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801

Kathleen Martindale: April 4, 1947 – February 17, 1995

IN MEMORIAM Kathleen Martindale April 4, 1947 - February 17, 1995* I t is difficult for me to write about the life and work of Kathleen Martindale . My personal grief at the loss of a loved friend overwhelms me as it has many times in the last four months since it became inevitable that death must be the outcome of Kathleen’s struggle with cancer, waged though it was with all her enormous energy and abundant gift for life. More partic­ ularly, it is writing within the university “walls” that is the impediment. “Outsider” was how Kathleen saw herself as “an ex-Catholic and a convert to Judaism” who was a “voluntary exile from the United States as well as from heterosexuality” (“Real” 150), one of the “Outsider’s Society” (Woolf 122), looking on at “the procession of the sons of educated men” (73). As Virginia Woolf has characterized this “anonymous and secret society” work­ ing to end violence and to “ensure freedom” (126), it is a group of women who, though striving for “economic independence,” nonetheless find it pos­ sible to exercise “a mind and will” of their own (128-29) to inquire into the ways that the “tyrannies and servilities” of the public and private worlds are interconnected (162). Woolf enjoins such women to “bind themselves to obtain full knowledge of professional practices, and to reveal any instance of tyranny or abuse in their professions” — to “practice their profession ex­ perimentally” (129). In her manifesto, she further counsels: “[wjhat . . . is meant by ‘selling your mind without love’ ?” (107). Kathleen responded to this call fully, making her (our) profession the site of her research, the classroom the place of experiment, both for testing new knowledges and new ways of making knowledge, and as site of scholarly in­ vestigation, resulting in such published texts as “Theorizing Autobiography and Materialist Feminist Pedagogy” where the personal and political con­ verge to reshape the canon, the classroom. Learning and teaching were for *Editor’s note: Space limitations prevented the inclusion of this In Memoriam essay in the June 1995 issue of ESC, Gay-Lesbian Studies II. 251 Kathleen a praxis of resistance, pivotal point for a changing subject. Trans­ formation of the conditions and modes of knowledge production was what Kathleen strove for tirelessly, wittily, passionately. If I who am “hooked on change” find the pace of this transformation slow, Kathleen with her motto “Revolution NOW” found the resistance of the institution to innova­ tion an active instance of “tyranny.” Her work on various university bodies for curricular reform as well as her scholarship in areas of literary theory, women’s studies, and lesbian culture demonstrate her consistent response to frustration: a call, a question, a challenge launched to others to join with her in bringing about change. Collaboration was the crucial aspect of all her interventions. She went further, though, in responding to Woolf’s man­ ifesto: for at the centre of her research and teaching, as of her friendships and interests, was a passionate ethics, a profound concern for social justice that would include the erotic. As she writes (with Martha Saunders) in “Realizing Love and Justice: Lesbian Ethics in the Upper and Lower Case,” an ethical drive working for community, accountability, and entrustment is distinguished, for lesbian feminism, by the erotic as necessary condition of the ethical. This might entail difficult choices, she pointed out, in terms of the kind of community with which lesbians want to identify, to whom they will be accountable: [I]s it the smaller, more intimate community of those with whom one feels relatively safe and protected in an otherwise hostile world? Or is it a larger, or at any rate more broadly conceived, community of all those who are struggling for justice? ( “Real” 152-53) That Kathleen made the less comfortable commitment to justice has been to the enlargement of her circle of friendships and to the benefit of her students and the university community as a whole, for her eye alert to the slightest hint of injustice — sexism, racism, classism, homophobia— while it made life very painful for her personally, gave support to many others because of the quickness of her protest and discovery...

Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801

Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801

Dis-Graceful Images: Della Grace and Lesbian Sado-masochism

In 1991 GMP published a book of Della Grace's lesbian erotic photographs called Love Bites that became instantly controversial when some feminist bookstores refused to stock it because of its explicit sexual and sado-masochistic content. Since 1991, Della Grace has gone on to achieve a prominent profile in lesbian and gay culture (with photographs regularly appearing in the pink press and exhibitions in trendy London venues). In this article I am going to return to the moment of Love Bites in order to assess how its content and reception fit into a wider cultural formation concerned with the representation of SM and lesbian sex. As a book that came out some months before Madonna's Sex

Passing: Henry Green and Working-Class Identity

Passing:Henry Green and Working-Class Identity Peter Hitchcock (bio) We have many working-class writers who have come to know the rich man's life, no other rich man who has shared by function, not by slumming, the manual worker's life. Of course, it was a masquerade. . . . —Angus Wilson on Henry Green's Living It would seem almost anachronistic to talk of an aristocrat "passing" for a proletarian: have not both classes passed away? Yet the phenomenon of class crossing, if not certain class formations, is newly prescient given increasingly sophisticated theories on shifting identities in culture: from closeted epistemologies of sexuality and articulations of racial constituency to gender bending and cross dressing, there is no identity that is not always already transgressed, if not transgressive. The ambiguities of class affiliation or identification are not simply an adjunct to such discussions. In some ways, the radicalism of transvestism, Queer Theory, "race matters" (to borrow from Cornel West) and gay and lesbian culture lies in their break from, or supercession of, a reductionism in prior class-based [End Page 1] models; but curiously, perhaps, the problem of class and culture stubbornly highlights some unresolved and unresolvable reckonings in identity politics. Informed that Western culture is not only post-Cold War, but post-ideology and post-history as well, the diffused and defused nature of its working classes provides relatively little comfort. Even if "working-class identity" has the aura of a museum diarama (and representation, here, will provide the conceptual knot), intimations of class at all signify not so much categorical residue but more a sense that the whole issue might reinvent itself like some vast intractable compulsion. Of course, the question of reinvention is doubly pertinent when considering Henry Green (1905-73)—author, industrialist, iconoclast, recluse—both because of the class positions he occupies and the modernist tradition to which he is attached. There is little doubt that the reevaluation of Green is becoming a cause célèbre: recently, two collections of his novels and his mid-life autobiography have been republished, a volume of previously uncollected works has appeared, a TV documentary on Green was shown, several important reassessments have argued for a Green revival (Kenner, Treglown, and Updike, among others) and a biography is clearly in the offing.1 It is not easy, however, to rescue modernists (still less "class") in a world that measures an aesthetic edge by the degree to which it curves towards "post."2 Nevertheless, that Green is rapidly becoming the hot ticket in modernist resurrection can be indicated by a snippet from Kirkus Reviews which has one eye on the market and the other on merit when it dares to ask: "Who knows that it won't be Henry Green, not Joyce or Woolf, that history finally will favor as the greatest English prose-extender of the century?"3 Whatever Green's status as canon-fodder, a general reassessment now seems possible for a variety of reasons including but not limited to the following points: the mode of modernist experimentation he championed is neither threatening nor scandalous (as Fredric Jameson avers of high modernism, "not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather 'realistic'" [4]); concomitantly, cultural theory now provides alternative forms of evaluative criteria than those which revel in the linguistic opacity of illusion and allusion, and which make a text an etymology of aesthetic angst and acuity; and, as class-based politics are reordered, or New World Ordered, certain modes of class identification and negotiation are thrown into relief in a typically Benjaminian "moment of danger." These elements only hint at the complex relations through which a re-reading of Green might proceed. I am [End Page 2] interested, however, in how Green, and particularly his 1929 novel Living, might now speak to the cultural politics of shifting identity, not just towards modernism and class, but also to the way these inflect on the task of the storyteller; in other words, how the author writes the other into subjectivity, and how this subject can "pass" for others.4 Why passing? At the linguistic level, much has been made of...

Lesbian culture: an anthology

Lesbian culture: an anthology

Come to me baby or what's wrong with lesbian sm

Synopsis Lesbian sm was spawned and spurned by different parts of the lesbian community. In this article, the authors examine the relationship between lesbian sm as an emergent discourse, and the community/subculture in which it surfaced via its representation in erotic fiction and texts with more incidental erotic content whose readership is drawn from a lesbian mainstream. Within its historical context and through analysis which posits the ability of cultural representation to form a subject's sense of the world and of self, the authors argue that the increasing acceptability and impact of lesbian sm on lesbian culture in general is formative of lesbian experience and self-definitions. The transgressive nature of lesbian sm and its therapeutic value are challenged while an increasing sexual frankness and analytical complexity are regarded as a direct benefit of the debates around sm. Because the article's central part was written in 1990 and its introduction and conclusion were completed 2 years later, the authors benefit from a hindsight informed by a new queer politics and regard many of its suppositions as having been realised.