Lesbian Perspective Research Articles

Voice of Dissent: Negation of Heterosexuality in Adrienne Rich's Poetry

This article explores the opposition of heterosexuality in Adrienne Rich’s poems. Rich has questioned the heterosexual institutions in her poetry and has consciously worked to re-create women’s identity taking an oppositional stance towards heterosexuality and trying to establish women's positional stance. Heterosexuality as a political institution is so pervasive that it has not only controlled women's bodies by various means but also has controlled their consciousness. It proved that women should seek their primary emotional and erotic ties in themselves to have women-identified experiences and freedom. Rich’s poems; “Rape”, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”, “Twenty-one Love Poems I” and “Diving into the Wreck” are examined through radical feminism and lesbian perspectives.

Writing as resistance: A testimonio of remembering and reclamation

In this essay the author explores divorce and the internalization of the hustle and grind culture in academia from a Chicana lesbian perspective, arguing that writing as resistance (hooks, 1990) using testimonio (Cruz, 2012) provides a bridge of affirmative epistemological exploration into remembering and reclamation that is necessary for healing and liberation. The author elucidates throughout the essay how her social location and relationship to testimonio and writing as resistance situates her within the genealogies of Chicana lesbian writers (Trujillo, 1991) and Black women writers (Morrison, 2020; hooks, 1990; Lorde, 1984) showcasing that writing is an ongoing dialogue with self and others that co-creates connections within and across communities that is necessary for bridges of healing to hold us up. The author asserts herself as a part of a new generation of Chicana lesbian writers who are compelled to explore one’s interior landscapes that coalesce with exterior circumstances through writing. The essay ends by focusing on the path of conocimiento (Anzaldua, 2002) to demonstrate how younger generations of Chicana lesbians are taking up a critical engagement of introspection. In doing this, the author showcases that nourishment 1 is essential to interrupt logics of domination (to shift), to change and heal (inner works), and to practice sharing knowledge (public acts).

Parallel Universes? Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008) and Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (1991-1996)

Cartoonists Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa, writing in a socially and culturally heteronormative context, give life to a fantasy: worlds that, instead of excluding dykes from public space, are entirely organized around lesbian characters. Both reflect the debates within lesbian feminist groups, the tensions between lesbian and straight feminists, and the strategies that can be deployed in the face of discrimination. They create utopian (Bechdel) and dystopian (DiMassa) universes that parallel and question contemporary US realities. DiMassa presents a caricatured, degraded version of US society, focusing on its relation to minorities, as seen through the eyes of a “homicidal lesbian terrorist” intent on reclaiming their right to exist in the world. Bechdel’s syndicated bi-monthly strip is a twenty-five-year running commentary on US politics viewed from a lesbian perspective, that also discusses such feminist and/or LGBTQ+ issues as gender relations, the sodomy laws, trans rights, marriage equality, etc., and that shows her characters evolving on a number of these issues, as many Americans have since the 1980s. For all their provocation and humor, these comics from the margins have remained eerily topical.

Are you two sisters? Reflections on a long-overdue subtitle

In this article, Susan Krieger reflects on how lesbian realities have figured in her published work over the years, although the word “lesbian” did not appear in the books’ titles. Why the invisibility? What lessons are to be learned from exploring the frequent invisibility of lesbian subject matter? Krieger’s discussion throws light on the challenges of writing and publishing from a lesbian perspective.

Skewing the nation: mobilizing queer citizenship in South Africa

ABSTRACT This article is interested in the national imaging and imagining of non-heteronormative genders and sexual orientations – that is, the way in which citizenship, as a form of belonging, is visually negotiated from an LGBTI (that is lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex) perspective. Technologies for framing gender and sexuality (such as photography and film) are central for the visual negotiation of LGBTI citizenship within the South African context. Images that speak of/to the nation on the topic of LGBTI citizenship are complex framings, as they encapsulate a marked sense of difference, while they also reveal a sense for solidarity and reconciliation. Based on the contemporary South African context, this article posits that, while LGBTI subjects are encompassed in a national rhetoric of belonging, LGBTI manifestations of subjectivity are in practice often met with severe scorn and violence. As such, the very idea of national citizenship runs counter to queer subjectivities and strategies, which are not primarily invested in the concept of “belonging,” or ascribing to the normative ideals and delineations of a given political space or cultural territory. The complexity arising from the tensions between belonging and dis-identifying, stasis and movement, is the point of departure for this article, in which a series of visual examples are drawn upon to demonstrate how the idea of sexual and gendered citizenship is negotiated by contemporary South African artists and activists. In addition, this article demonstrates how visualizing technologies impact the lives of LGBTI subjects within contemporary South Africa.

American lesbians are not French women: heterosexual French feminism and the Americanisation of lesbianism in the 1970s

This article examines the ways in which 1970s French feminists who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes – MLF) wielded the spectre of lesbianism as an American idiosyncrasy to counteract the politicisation of lesbianism in France. It argues that the erasure of lesbian difference from the domain of French feminism was a necessary condition for making ‘woman’ an amenable subject for incorporation into the abstract unity of the French nation, wherein heterosexuality is conceived as a democratic crucible where men and women harmoniously come together and differences are deemed divisive. Looking at the history of feminism from the standpoint of a lesbian perspective reveals unforeseen continuities between French ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ genealogies insofar as they rest on common heterosexual and racial foundations. Finally, the article demonstrates that the alleged un-Frenchness ascribed to the word ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s feminist movement spectrally returned in the 1990s when the word ‘gender’ was, in its turn, deemed radically foreign to the French culture by feminist researchers. Fiercely reactionary constituencies against the legalisation of same-sex marriage have more recently taken up this rhetorical weapon against sexual and racial minorities.

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.

Queering the Social Work Classroom: Strategies for Increasing the Inclusion of LGBTQ Persons and Experiences

ABSTRACTThe inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) perspectives and experiences in the social work classroom is necessary to adequately include LGBTQ students and prepare graduates to practice effectively. Drawing from queer theory as a theoretical framework and the authors’ experiences in practice and teaching/learning spaces with LGBTQ youth, this article offers practical strategies for creating classrooms inclusive of LGBTQ persons. Queering the classroom builds skills in students beyond practice with LGBTQ people and communities, thereby enhancing their capacity to engage diversity in practice more generally and to advance human rights and social justice.

The Bisexual Seen: Countering Media Misrepresentation

The Bisexual Seen: Countering Media Misrepresentation

Diversity in gender stereotypes? A comparison of heterosexual, gay and lesbian perspectives

AbstractResearch on gender stereotypes has not examined whether gay men and lesbians hold the same gender stereotypes as heterosexual individuals. To address this gap, we asked participants to indicate how likely they believed it was for a typical gay man, lesbian, heterosexual man, or heterosexual woman to exhibit stereotypical personality traits and engage in stereotypical activities and occupations. Ratings of heterosexual male and female targets' masculinity and femininity were significantly different in the expected direction. However, the difference between the gay man and lesbian target ratings on masculinity and femininity was not statistically significant. Our findings further suggest that gay men and lesbians hold the same gender stereotypes as heterosexuals about both homosexual and heterosexual targets. Copyright © 2017 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Look at the Beijing Conference through Lesbian Eyes

The author is an activist and observer of the ongoing young feminist movement. She interviewed the participants of the 1995 Beijing conference and activists in China's feminist and LGBT movements. This article tries to evaluate the impact of the Beijing 1995 conference from a lesbian perspective on what happened in 1995 regarding their issues, their relationship and connection to the women's movement and how the lesbian1 community and movement has developed since then. This article discusses issues addressed by the Young Feminist Activism Group who took public action following 2012.

Proto-Queer Media Criticism

Lisa Ben's “Cinema Ramblings” in the 1940s underground publication Vice Versa mark some of the first media reviews to focus on homosexual themes, representations, and subtexts from a self-proclaimed lesbian perspective. While still largely unknown, the critical lenses and stylistic methods she employed set a precedent for the kind of radical queer media criticism that reviewers engage in today. Her writings deconstruct heteronormative frameworks by redefining the borders of the “normal” and the “natural”; look to the margins of media texts, often placing more focus on secondary figures than on main characters; rely on intertextual understandings that read films against their adaptation sources; and actively participate in a form of “subtexting,” or, as she puts it, “playing up” suggestive representations. Ben's film reviews present an important and relevant counterframe to cinematic deliberations on the instability of sexual and social relations. This counterframe existed among other counterpublic discourses available at the time and enables a queer reading of 1930s and ’40s film representations such as Children of Loneliness (1934), Club des femmes (1936), and Turnabout (1940). Drawing from reviews and essays published in Vice Versa, I propose a way of reading media representations of transgressive sexuality and gender—an analytic and a vocabulary—that predates queer theory as an institutionalized concern.

A critical exploration of lesbian perspectives on eating disorders

There is now a considerable body of research exploring how culturally dominant gendered norms are implicated in mobilising girls' and women's ‘anorexic’ and ‘bulimic’ experiences and practices. However, much less is known about lesbian experiences of ‘eating disorders’. This article explores some of those specificities. Drawing on interviews with self-identified lesbian women with a history of ‘anorexia’ and/or ‘bulimia’, our analysis suggests that while many of the ways in which participants discursively constituted their ‘eating disorders’ were similar to those identified in research with girls and women assumed to be heterosexual, there were also important differences where participants' actual or emerging lesbian subjectivities were integral to their accounts of developing, living with and recovering from ‘anorexia’ and/or ‘bulimia’. Our analysis suggests that the processes of coming to recognise oneself as a lesbian and of ‘coming out’ to others in predominantly hetero-normative contexts may be profoundly implicated in the discursive production of lesbian women's ‘eating disorders’ and that further research is required to better understand lesbian perspectives on ‘eating disorders’.

The Lesbian Art Project

Critics and artists influenced by the tenets of queer theory have dismissed much of the artwork made in the 1970s from a lesbian feminist perspective. The result has been very little being known or written about this pioneering work. This article is concerned with exploring an often overlooked aspect of lesbian art history: the activities and events associated with the Lesbian Art Project (LAP) founded by Terry Wolverton and Arlene Raven at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles. I argue that what is most significant about the LAP is the way in which the participants articulated lesbian identity and lesbian community through performance, art making, and writing.

Two Poems Genetic LotteryWork of Art

SUMMARY The following poems are an autoethnographic account of body image from the perspective of a 39-year-old bountiful, White-privileged, mixed-race femme dyke. The purpose of the poetic form is to inspire emotional connection and offer analytic commentary on the social construction of body image, aging, and beauty as a social commodity, from a lesbian perspective. Together, the poems present a perspective on lesbian body image that highlights our socialization as women first. Lesbian consciousness has a role in how we construct body image outside of a primarily male gaze, but it does not supplant heteronormative feminity. The poems also show the critical social gaze as reconstructed within us and by our lovers. In addition to social influences, the poems also show the life of the individual as a site of body image activism. The agency of “I” to reconstruct interactions of body acceptance and self-love is as clear as the contexts in which those struggles take place.

Theorizing the Queer Museum

One response to the marginalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) perspectives in museums has been to make a bid for increased inclusivity. Such a gesture potentially foregrounds universalist notions of LGBT identity and desire. Queer theory, however, understands gender and sexuality as relational constructs, subject to historical and cultural variation. Against this backdrop, what would it mean to theorize the queer museum? This article engages with this question on a number of levels: it draws attention to the distorting effects that certain models drawn from contemporary identity politics generate in museums, especially in exhibitions with a historical focus, and it examines the role played by concepts of "public opinion" on representations of gender and sexuality in museum spaces. It also considers the challenge that queerness presents to the idea of the museum as a normalizing, meaning-making entity, and asks how these concerns are already being addressed in museum practice.

Loud and Lusty Lesbian Queers

Taking into account recent developments in Germany, it seems to me that Lesbian Studies has its future within Queer Studies-and I am convinced, it can take a self-assured role; not contenting itself with a niche, but claiming its power to design queer from lesbian perspectives.

Imagine a Brown Queer: Inscribing Sexuality in Chicano/a-Latino/a Literary and Cultural Studies

Imagine a Brown Queer:Inscribing Sexuality in Chicano/a-Latino/a Literary and Cultural Studies Richard T. Rodríguez (bio) Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. By Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. 176 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians. By Catrióna Rueda Esquibel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 245 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). El ambiente nuestro: Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Writing. By David William Foster. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2006. 201 pages. $19.00 (paper). In her 1993 essay "Imagine a Lesbian, a Black Lesbian," writer-activist Jewelle Gomez queries the infrequency of African American lesbian representation in the "literary arena." Gomez maintains—as does Barbara Smith before her in the pathbreaking 1977 essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism"—that literary culture plays a critical role for verifying black lesbian existence. For Smith, "Black women are still in a position to 'imagine,' discover, and verify Black lesbian literature because so little has been written from an avowedly lesbian perspective. The near nonexistence of Black lesbian literature [which other Black lesbians and I do deeply feel] has everything to do with the politics of our lives, the total suppression of identity that all Black women, lesbian or not, must face."1 More than a decade and a half later, however, Gomez finds herself reiterating Smith's urgent declaration, foregrounding her predecessor's words so that they serve as the epigraph for her essay and the motivating force behind its title. Gomez's essay has in turn animated my piece, as is evident by its title alone. Yet while the focus here is not specifically on lesbians or on the shared historical consignment to invisibility faced by Chicana/Latina and African American [End Page 493] lesbians in literature (although that project is long overdue), the general concern is with imagining queer Chicano/a and Latino/a sexualities in literary and cultural production. Gomez understands "the art of critical writing" as a necessary component of literary representation; the recent books by Frederick Luis Aldama, Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, and David William Foster critically assess novels, poems, performance, and film and are texts that simultaneously investigate and record brown queer existence.2 Esquibel's study charts an exhaustive archive of Chicana/Latina lesbian literature while critically examining it from thematically interlocking perspectives. Esquibel's "starting point that Chicana lesbians are central to understanding Chicana/o communities, theories, and feminisms" dispels at the fore any assumption that sexuality—particularly lesbian sexuality—can only lead to cursory discussions that lack considerable weightiness (3). Given how "communities, theories, and feminisms" are more often than not contoured by heterosexual and heteronormative presumption, With Her Machete in Her Hand does more than place "the" essential Chicana lesbian center stage but instead vigilantly unveils how Chicana lesbians—in the fitting words of Hortense J. Spillers—"have had to be invented" for safeguarding these allegedly essential attributes.3 Esquibel's concept of "Chicana lesbian fictions" (also the title of the book's first chapter) appropriately captures the complexity of representational politics with which she grapples. Noting how the "issue of visibility . . . is full of ambiguity," Esquibel understands that to locate Chicana lesbian sexuality one cannot simply turn to texts distinctly marked as lesbian. In fact, the "fictions" she requires for "reading Chicana lesbians" span three categories identified as "nonlesbian," "lesbian-friendly," and "lesbian." Illustrating the intertextual relationship between these categories, Esquibel excavates a compelling genealogy of lesbian representation from the intricate terrain of Chicana/Latina literary history. The result is a firm challenge to what qualifies as a lesbian text. Akin to Barbara Smith who, in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," identifies Toni Morrison's Sula as a lesbian novel, Esquibel also grants Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street and Denise Chávez's The Last of the Menu Girls this status (while reading them alongside readily identifiable lesbian texts by Terri de la Peña and Emma Pérez, Margins and Gulf Dreams, respectively) "not because the characters (or their authors) self-consciously claim a lesbian identity, but because the texts, in...

Lesbian Lacunae: Invisible Spaces in Dance Education

Recent research about sexuality and dance has begun to address the needs of gay male dancers, yet the needs of lesbian dancers have remained mostly absent from scholarly discourse. Exploring the lesbian lacunae, or invisible spaces of dance education, reveals the personal, political, and pedagogical implications of their existence within the dance community. The experiences of lesbian dancers “on the fringe” combined with new approaches to acknowledging lesbian artists and perspectives within dance history suggest the need for re-envisioning lesbian invisibility as a “liminal presence” within dance. In addition, ways dance educators can reduce the effects of heterocentrism within their institutions and celebrate the contributions of lesbian artists and educators to the field are proposed. By reconfiguring the invisibility of lesbian dancers as a liminal presence, we make visible the borders and limits of the dance profession's notions of sexuality and gender, acceptance and equality, and thereby strengthen our potential for dancing beyond them.

Spiral Women: Locating Lesbian Activism in New Zealand Feminist Art, 1975-1992

Spiral Women: Locating Lesbian Activism in New Zealand Feminist Art, 1975–1992 Judith Collard University of Otago The connection between art and activism is rarely discussed in New Zealand art historical writing.1 Yet acknowledging this link is essential for understanding the choices made, both aesthetic and iconographic, by lesbian feminist artists associated with the collective that produced the art magazine Spiral in the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1970s in New Zealand as elsewhere, the women's art movement emerged from within wider feminist politics that embraced the arts as well as social and political issues. The separation between artist and activist is an artificial one, as members of a woman's theater group were also likely to be involved in the Women's Refuge Movement, which provided shelter and support for [End Page 292] women escaping domestic violence. Just as artists were inspired by issues encountered in feminist publications and consciousness-raising, so too was the wider movement sustained by the broad transformation of cultural practices. These conjunctions saw the emergence of women's art, music, and literature as well as women's presses, bookshops, and other associated groups. A distinctively lesbian politics also emerged that informed yet clashed with this broader feminist movement. Many of those involved in Spiral participated in this wider environment of women's activism, which directly shaped their approaches to art. It is through recognition of this involvement, and the practices and critiques that emerged from such activist groups, that the nature of the projects undertaken and decisions made by members of Spiral can be best understood. In this article my particular focus is on the art and writings of the lesbian artists and writers who moved in and out of the Spiral circle, particularly Allie Eagle, Heather McPherson, Jane Zusters, and Sharon Alston. All four were involved, as participants or organizers, in the public forums for which the group was best known and also in the Spiral art and literary magazine, the Women's Gallery, and A Women's Picture Book. In addition, each had a commitment to feminist and lesbian activities and saw her art practice as contributing to this wider political community. I am interested in examining how the original Spiral collective and its journal evolved as much out of this activist background as from an interest in women's art. In the first section I explore how the group's interest in opening up artistic practice and exhibition to a variety of different women was also a direct result of this commitment to activism. While the art that resulted from this involvement was often overtly feminist, it did not necessarily reflect a distinctively lesbian perspective. For example, the works of Allie Eagle such as This Woman Died: I care reflected wider debates on abortion law reform that were occurring during its production. The desire for creating coalitions with Maori and other groups at times also conflicted with these artists' own lesbian feminist politics. In the second and third sections of this essay I explore this dilemma through discussions of two different artists, Jane Zusters and Sharon Alston. Jane Zusters articulated, both in her art and her writing, the difficulties of negotiating a path between a lesbian politics and the mainstream art world. The final section focuses on Sharon Alston's painting, My bloody hand, and the controversy it created around Maori and Pakeha (non-Maori) understandings of menstruation and the perceived need to assert a visible lesbian sexuality within A Women's Picture Book. The Emergence of Spiral The literature about Spiral is sparse. In part this is because there has been a focus on individual artists and their work rather than contextualization, [End Page 293] but this absence also highlights the tensions between the radical agenda of the feminist art movement and the art establishment. Christina Barton has drawn attention to this reluctance to address a feminist presence in art historical writing in her essay...