Lesbian Feminist Research Articles

Lesbian Feminist Music and Meaningful Community Work

ABSTRACT Through an examination of the lesbian feminist women’s music community, I examine how activists take on the often low- or no-pay work of supporting and creating community music. To explain their labor, I draw on the concept of meaningful work that sustains the core ideologies of the community, as well as addressing the identities of individuals. In doing so, I expand understandings of music within politicized communities and how the work of doing music supports the collective and empowers the individual.

We exist and resist as woven patches: Collective narrative practices in an activist context challenging and responding to an anti-lesbian hate crime

This article describes a participatory process in which a group of feminist, lesbian feminist and dissident activists came together to respond therapeutically to the impacts of anti-lesbian hatred. The therapeutic context was created gradually with the deployment of a set of metaphors related to textile art, inspired by the re-authoring conversations proposed by Michael White. The process included the creation of a collective document that acknowledges and honours the participants’ wisdom, knowledge and particular ways of responding to anti-lesbian hatred. This work was embodied in three different forms: a patchwork quilt, a video and a fanzine. Collectivised through a definitional ceremony, these forms embraced manual-artistic creation and the materiality of fabric as valued means of expression, beyond the limits of the verbal. This work contributed to the visibility, externalisation and politicisation of acts of injustice, acknowledging forms of resistance, care and protest. The process invited us to reflect on the importance of collectivisation, fluidity and flexibility in structuring the therapeutic space, and allowed us to question the roles of therapist and activist as predefined identities.

“Separated, but far from alone”

Our article examines how women built an expansive community during the 1970s and 1980s through the pages of Lesbian Connection, one of the era’s most widely circulated publications of the lesbian feminist movement. To reveal this community, we map thousands of locations that appeared in the periodical, revealing a geography that tilted toward rural areas and mid-sized cities instead of the major metropolitan centers that have received much of the attention within LGBTQ scholarship. Through the magazine’s reader-submitted content, advertisements for lesbian-owned businesses, and a directory of volunteers who served as local contacts for an area, Lesbian Connection bridged the spatial scales of long-distance media networks and in-person interactions to create a vibrant lesbian community that transcended region and locality.

Transformative reproductive futures in Northern Ireland

A foundation of rights-based solidarity has fostered an environment of cooperation between LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) rights and reproductive justice in Northern Ireland (NI) following the introduction of equal marriage and the decriminalization of abortion in 2019. This article provides a grounded look at this reproductive justice organizing in NI as an example of transformative organizing for reproductive futures. The case study considers a conversation with two activists who have been central to this work. Emma Campbell coconvenor of Alliance for Choice and Danielle Roberts the coconvenor of Reclaim the Agenda and former Senior Policy and Development Officer of HERe NI. Reclaim the Agenda is a coalition of feminist, youth, LGBTQ+ and community organizations that connects and mobilizes women to promote feminist activism through education, campaigning and celebration. HERe NI is a community organization and registered charity based in Belfast that supports lesbian and bisexual women and their families across NI. Alliance for Choice campaigns for free, safe legal and local abortion access for everyone who needs it in NI. Together these groups approach reproductive justice using a framework informed by lesbian feminist organizing and an intersectional approach that views access to abortion as part of a broader understanding of gender justice inspired by Black-women led SisterSong through (1) cross-movement organizing (2) centering bodily autonomy and (3) trans affirming feminist approaches to navigating shifting language about gender. The case study will be of interest to those working provide abortion services in a queer-informed way, as well as those navigating the challenges of reforming abortion policy.

Ambivalent Attachments: Queer and Trans Histories of Lesbian Feminism

Ambivalent Attachments: Queer and Trans Histories of Lesbian Feminism

From Lavender Menace to Queer Nation: the transformation of lesbian identity in the baby boom era

Women of the early baby boom years in the U.S. came out into an environment in which same-sex desire was stigmatized and criminalized. For working-class lesbians, the bar scene provided an environment in which women could find companionship and a way to live a life decoupled from traditional heterosexual roles. For middle class women, bar life was fraught with legal and social risk, and some–mostly white–women worked to establish a more “socially acceptable” communal life through organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis. As the women’s movement flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s, women born in the early years of the baby boom (1946–1950) created distinctive lesbian feminist cultures and identities. In contrast to early baby boomers, women born at the tail end of the baby boom (1960–1964) came out in a vastly different cultural context. Second-wave feminism had already peaked, the AIDS epidemic and debates about sexuality changed the context for lesbian identity and activism, and organizing by women of color created the development of an intersectional view of lesbian identity and activism. Through an analysis of feminist magazines, newsletters, and texts of the late 1960s through the 1990s, this paper explores the cultural contexts through which radical lesbian feminist identities arose and, for a period, flourished in the U.S. By the end of the 1980s and 1990s, as second-wave feminism declined, lesbian feminist identity shifted. Over the last decades of the twentieth century, new queer forms of identification emerged, coupled with a decline of lesbian identification among younger people. I argue that these new forms represent both continuity and disruption with earlier forms of lesbian identification.

A French Materialist and Decolonial Perspective on Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today

This short commentary is part of a book symposium about Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism, edited by Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel. It discusses certain chapters from a French materialist lesbian feminist perspective, as well as from a decolonial feminist perspective. Introducing Colette Guillaumin’s sexage proposal and referring to Monique Wittig’s analysis of the heterosexualization of women and of the “straight mind,” the essay recalls the importance of Black feminists in the United States and elsewhere and proposes a theory of the interlocking social-structural relations of sex, race, and class as complementary elements moving toward a renewal of Marxist-feminist reflections from a historical perspective that also accounts for the colonial roots of today’s discussions on care and reproductive labor.

The myth of lesbian generation loss: Finding intergenerational solidarities in digital sexual selfhood projects

The contemporary preoccupation with lesbian’s potential obsolescence relies on implicit assumptions about the (ir)relevance of lesbian feminism to younger generations. In this article, we use the metaphor of “generation loss” to conceptualize the Gordian knot of affective and ideological ties that lie beneath this preoccupation. Contrary to the narrative of generation loss, we show how young people have begun to take up and share lesbian feminist concepts on social media platforms like TikTok. They do so in the name of resituating lesbian as a political project rather than an exclusionary demographic category. Instead of painting over lesbian feminism with the broad brushes of whiteness and trans-exclusivity, some young lesbians seek out other voices in the archive to debate whether and how this history might be recuperated as a challenge to white, cisnormative heteropatriarchy. Far from finding irrelevance, many revisiting lesbian feminism are excited to discover theories of gender, sexuality, and power that can be adapted to relocate lesbian to more durable and less essentializing territory than its current, narrowly biopolitical home. This presents a crucial opportunity to build bridges across generations and collectively resist the cooptation of lesbians as agents of white supremacist and transphobic political agendas.

Introduction: the appeal of the Amazons

The fearless ancient Amazons have been seen as forebears and prototypes by lesbians, feminists, and transgender men. In this introduction, I will explore why the Greek legends of the Amazons lend themselves to such interpretation. Ancient Greek literature details how the Amazons challenged patriarchy, lived without men, and defeated their male enemies, thus setting a precedent that would later be emulated by feminists and lesbians. Though the Amazons are clearly designated as women they are also identified with men in ancient Greek lore; in ancient Greek vase painting, they wear masculine outfits and engage in masculine habits, including fighting and hunting. Thus I will examine the Amazons’ gender transgression in ancient Greek contexts in order to understand how and why these myths set the stage for the adoption of the Amazons as role models by later generations of gender nonconformists. I will also briefly examine the history behind those myths, a history which is just as important to lesbian and other queer communities as the myths which it spawned. Finally, I will weave my analysis of the ancient Greek ideology of Amazons with innovative, new research on the reception of the Amazons found in the six other articles that make up this special edition. These essays explore the powerful place of Amazons and Amazon-like women in the imaginaries of peoples ranging from the ancient Romans to modern lesbian feminists, and the importance of historical and legendary warrior women who defied patriarchy and colonialism in locales ranging from the West to Africa to India.

“Lesbian nation is Amazon culture: Lesbian separatism and the uses of Amazons”

In this article, Amazon imagery serves as a case study for the complicated relationship of lesbian separatist movements of the 1970s and the classical Greek tradition. I consider how the use of mythological figures allowed lesbian feminists to rewrite and subvert dominant patriarchal narratives in ways that furthered their revolutionary projects. I argue that the nature of mythology is fundamentally fluid, collaborative, and open to queer reinterpretations and appropriations in ways that are rich with symbolic potential. Furthermore, the creation of separatist communities approximates an act of nation-building, and it is useful to consider other attempts to construct and theorize nations, ranging from Homi Bhabha on post-/anticolonial resistance to Berlant and Freeman on Queer Nationality. In particular, when considering a lesbian movement, we should remember that queer theory is messy because queerness itself is messy and resists boundaries and classification. Furthermore, what Ward frames as “dyke methods” (or dyke-centric queer methods) insist on categories that are fluid, messy, and shifting in their classifications and drawn toward as-yet-unknown queer possibilities. To study lesbian separatists with dyke methods is to embark on “an antiessentialist and interdisciplinary project” without necessarily “making a commitment to balanced ideas” (pp. 82–83). It is my hope that a messy, queer analysis of Amazonian symbolism in the construction of a lesbian nationalism will ultimately offer intriguing, if at times contradictory, possibilities.

Redrawing the lesbian: The memory of lesbian feminism in Kate Charlesworth’s Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide

Kate Charlesworth’s graphic narrative Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide (2019), part memoir and part documentary of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex life and activism in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 2019, remembers the time when the LGBTQI+ and feminist movements met and influenced each other deeply, namely in lesbian feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on feminist historiography and memory studies, this article discusses the role the figure of the lesbian has played in the collective memory of lesbian feminism. With a focus on the expressive capacities of comics, it examines how the work revisits this figure at a time when women’s and LGBTQI+ rights face a backlash led by anti-gender campaigners, some of whom draw on discourses associated with lesbian feminism. It concludes that the work challenges dominant narratives about the relationship between lesbian, queer, and trans feminism and enables a reconsideration of these movements as parts of a common political project.

Strange Bedfellows: Anti-trans Feminists, VOX Supporters and Biologicist Academics

In 2015 and 2016, Professor Esther Mayoko Arjonilla and I wrote two articles that demonstrated the absence of major conflicts between feminist and trans movements in Spain. We explained that since the democratic transition of the 1970s, Spanish feminism had been strongly committed to the sexual and reproductive rights of ‘women’, an inclusive category. This also applied to lesbians, though not without some internal struggles to claim that space (Pineda 2008). We hypothesized that lesbian feminist groups had been the necessary allies for the inclusion of trans women, often based on factors like personal friendship ties, and their leadership in addressing sexual rights (Platero & Arjonilla, 2015). Another key element was the overlap between the two movements in the feminist critique of the pathologization of women, in consonance with critiques of the psychopathologization of trans women.

Stories of Antiracist Gay/Lesbian Gender Alliance: Articulating Intersectional Solidarity in the 1980s

This article shows how in the early 1980s, Black and White Men Together (BWMT), an interracial group of antiracist gay men, constructed relations of connection with antiracist feminist lesbians of color. My analysis details how BWMT engaged in storytelling through newsletters, reporting their creation of relations of connection with Black, “Third World,” antiracist lesbians and constructing these relations as a multidimensional gender alliance involving important processes of creating networks of reciprocal solidarity, forging political alignment, and creating intentional spaces of camaraderie to sustain intersectional solidarity. This research substantively expands our understanding of U.S. LGBTQ+ intersectional movement(s) activism with the concept of multidimensional gender alliance and analytically expands our understandings of intersectional solidarity.

La Caldosa: Afro-Lesbian Space-Making and Transnational Politics in Havana

This essay tells the story of a caldosa (both a stew and the gathering where it is served) hosted in 2016 by a network of Black lesbian activists in Havana, Cuba, that took place on the morning after the Pulse massacre in Orlando, Florida. The author explores the caldosa as both an example of and a metaphor for the transnational, coalitional, and space-making politics of Black lesbian activists in the island. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and a participatory mapping project, the author shows how the work of making caldosa connects the local practice of space-making to a hemispheric and anticipatory Black lesbian politic. The essay builds on previous work on Black lesbian feminism in Cuba and provides insight into the type of activism that was happening in the island in the mid-2010s, which laid the groundwork for the growth in Afro-feminist and Afro-queer activism in the following years.

Why are conflicts about race a point of no return for feminist organizations?

AbstractThis article seeks to advance scholarship on conflict in feminist organizations. Using the theoretical framework on agonistic conflict of Chantal Mouffe, it analyzes a conflict about racism that arose in a feminist lesbian, bi and trans social movement organization, located in Paris (France). The main contribution lies in offering a framework to analyze the mechanisms that prevented this conflict from constructively fostering the intersectional politics of the feminist organization. The ethnographic findings show that the organization's inability to challenge its racism and whiteness is linked to its post‐political vision of feminism, which translates into attempts to suppress conflict related to multiple and competing identifications. Thus, this article contributes to existing research on conflict in feminist organizing by suggesting that the subduing of conflict associated with such a post‐political vision of feminism prevents feminist organizing from being “anti‐oppressive”.

‘We Thought We were the Only Lesbians in the World’: 1971 Vancouver and the Rise of Lesbian and Transnational Feminist Identities Between Canada and the USA

AbstractLesbian feminists in Vancouver cite the 1971 Vancouver Indochinese Women's Conference (VIWC) as a critical moment in the formation of solidarity networks and community building. In the months leading up to, and during the 1971 VIWC, lesbians forged long‐lasting connections with one another across regional and international borders. As a result of these efforts, these early lesbian feminists developed meaningful lesbian support networks that would continue for over fifty years. The VIWC was a watershed event for lesbians across the North American West.

Queering Time, Ageing and Relationships with Split Britches

This article begins by outlining some dominant narratives that produce ageism by socially constructing older age as a time of linear decline, social dependency, social isolation and intergenerational conflict. It then concentrates on recent work by elder lesbian feminist performance company Split Britches: Ruff (2012), Unexploded Ordnances (2018), What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and Having Sex (2013) and Last Gasp (2020–1). It explores the alternative narratives of older age – or elder life – that Split Britches propose, as a time of futurity, desire, unexplored potential and intergenerational as well as intra-generational relationality. It also explores how Split Britches responds to chrononormative practices – which make socially produced understandings of time appear natural – by queering them. The article argues that Split Britches model socially progressive visions of elder life and relationships, both across generations and within their own, by queering dominant expectations and practices of relationships and time – including ageing.

Feminist Approaches In Islamic Studies

The purpose of this writing is to understand 3 things: first, the concrete form of the feminist approach. Second, the factors that influence the existence of a feminist approach in Islamic studies. Third, the implications of academic feminist approaches to the dynamics of Islamic studies. The author uses the literature method by using a feminist approach in studying Islam. The results of this study show that first, feminist etymology comes from the word femme (single woman) who fought to fight for the rights of women as a social class. In terminology a women's movement that demands full equality. Second, internal factors include low knowledge and understanding of the community about religious values related to the role and function of women, the reality of Muslim society that still experiences gender bias, as well as the essence of women's bodies.external factors include the number of religious interpreters who harm the position and role of women as well as patriarchal culture that has long dominated in society (political, economic, and biased interpretation of religious texts gender). Third, positive impact: The existence of the term career woman makes women become more independent women, women are not oppressed by the capitalist system, and are productive in doing things outside the domstic. Negative impact: Negative impact (the birth of various lesbian feminism movements or the practice of free sex between women and women), and There are several ideologies of the feminism movement that are not in accordance with Islamic corridors

Organic Transitioning and Queer Topophilia in Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Abstract: Andrea Lawlor's (2017) historical picaresque novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tracks the ephemeral embodiments and identifications of Paul Polydoris, a gender-fluid, shape-shifting anti-hero who adapts to queer environments across the United States during 1993–1995, a time when gay hedonism, lesbian feminism, punk anti-homonormativity, and LGBTQ responses to AIDS combined to make a complex heyday of queer culture. Paul exemplifies "organic" transitioning in that his gender processes complicate the culture/nature binary, resist anthropocentrism, emphasize empathetic interrelation with other organisms, and privilege understanding of the complex involvement of biology, culture, and individual will in transition. Paul's body is an enchanted site of meaning that is created in situ and in which he is then positioned to participate in local culture, moving the concept "sense of place" from green trope to queer fantasy of limitless engendering. Approaching the novel from a queer ecological/ecofeminist perspective, this paper argues that as a magical, marginal bricoleur who assembles performative selves from biological forms and cultural references via passionate liminal engagement with queer spaces, Paul inhabits a self-directed transness that challenges conventional understandings of the "natural" and the "human," modeling a dynamic, queer topophilia.

“How Not to Get Killed”: Feminist Aftercare in the Dorothy Allison Papers

Born from a deep dive into Dorothy Allison’s published works and personal papers, this article proposes a praxis of perverting the archives to make room for promiscuous readings that emerge from the unpredictable confluence of pleasure and danger in archival research. I argue that perverted readings can serve as an imperative form of aftercare (to borrow from S/M terminology) that opens up multiple pathways for excavating the webs of care that arose during the lesbian/feminist sex wars. Allison and her work with S/M communities convey a sexual politics rooted in reflexivity, critique, and a lesbian feminist framework of collective care for women’s sexual realties. Moreover, I argue that narrating histories of the sex wars through the lenses of care work and erotic labor creates more possibilities for holding together the diverse perspectives that constituted these debates, which tend to be glossed in popular accounts of feminist histories as dichotomous or otherwise at odds with each other.