Lesbian Politics Research Articles

Reminiscences of Kothas: Exploring Spatial Intimacies in Ruth Vanita’s Memory of Light

This paper aims to study the representation of same-sex desire in Ruth Vanita’s Memory of Light (2020) and analyze how the socio-spatial dynamics of the kotha helps to reconstruct female-to-female intimacy and convey a different idea of community and a sense of belonging in history. The novel, which traces the relationship between two courtesans, is also a recreation of the pre-modern Lucknow and its vibrant kothas with distinct architectural features. Beyond its overt function of entertaining the male patrons, the kothas as all-female establishments also served as a space of security and intimacy for women. The paper outlines the politics of situating same-sex desire in the historical backdrop of pre-colonial era. It uses concepts from Feminist Theory, Cultural Geography and Memory Studies, to examine the importance of kothas as a material and an ideological space, in facilitating discourses on gender variance, intimacy, and friendship that entered the cultural production of the time. In particular, the analysis intends to emphasize the frequent entanglement between the spatial features and women’s intimate practices as a distinct way of articulating same-sex desire that dissolves the binary understanding of hetero/homosexuality. Therefore, by insisting on the remembrance of kothas, the paper delineates how the ‘memory of places’ carves out two functions in the context of lesbian politics. On the one hand, it generates a ‘symbolic continuum’ to the history of women loving women to reframe postcolonial categorical understanding of ‘lesbian’ in contemporary times, and on the other, by infusing strategic use of metafictional elements, it emerges as a subversive mode of narrating stories of same-sex love while negotiating with the historical erasure of spaces of female-to female desire.

“Somos contra la ‘queer-ificacíon’”/“We reject the queer-ification of lesbianism”: lesbian political identity and anti-queer politics among Mexican lesbians and queer Chicanas-Latinas

ABSTRACT This essay provides a critical personal reflection contemplating a 2006 Mexico City-based cross- border dialogue in which sharp divisions emerged between a set of Mexicana lesbianas—declaring their pro-lesbian feminist and anti-queer politics—and a set of queer Chicanas- Latinas—pronouncing their queer women of color politics. The vexing exchange occurred on the eve of the 3rd annual Marcha Lésbica, an explicitly radical lesbian feminist political gathering and at the time the largest public action of its kind to be held in Latin America. I draw new insights about key historical and contemporary lesbian political identity issues by reviewing how Mexican lesbian politics informed by feminism and critiques of neoliberalism produced challenges to the U.S. based participants. I reframe the value of the lesbian Mexicanas’ “anti- queer” proclamation, an affective statement especially unpopular in that period given the provincializing glance at lesbian politics and identity in the U.S. Finally, I revisit this difficult moment to historicize how lesbian remains a freighted category of political identity for Chicanas-Latinas who abide by women of color and trans coalitional politics, while it also opens up affinities for meaningful though precarious cross-border identifications. This multilayered reflection argues for a situated understanding of the meanings that can be ascribed to lesbian identity and politics, which are highly contingent upon spatio-temporalities. Thus, the category “lesbian” is replete with instructive energies whether as an affective critique of queer epistemologies that move along a Global North to Global South axis, or as a reminder of the limits of coalitional politics built across nation-state borders.

Deep Dreaming

AbstractThe Salvadoran postwar, animated by both Cold War detritus and a nascent neoliberalism, engendered a fragmented queer experientiality for emerging lesbian politics. This essay frames the work of early Salvadoran lesbian organizers as deep dreaming, denoting the profound reflection and imagination which broadened feminist horizons in neoliberal democracy. However, this essay also points to the uneven terrain in the global political economy of stillness associated with concerted reflection, as lesbians reconfigured social and political imaginaries in post-conflict Central America. In attending to contingency, this essay hints at the necessary work of political erotics and the imagination in renegotiating otherwise fraught social movement histories and epistemologies. Considering this moment, like any queer isthmian temporality, rife with dogged hope in the unknown, also presents a challenge to approach queer life oriented from positions of precarity with greater seriousness, opening space for generative seepages between modes of past and present isthmian sapphic living.

A history of lesbian politics and the psy professions.

This article explores the relationship between lesbian activists and the “psy professions” (especially psychology and psychiatry) in England from the 1960s to the 1980s. We draw on UK-based LGBTQIA+ archive sources and specifically magazines produced by, and for, lesbians. We use this material to identify three key strategies used within the lesbian movement to contest psycho-pathologisation during this 30-year period: from respectable collaborationist forms of activism during the 1960s; to more liberationist oppositional politics during the early 1970s; to radical feminist separatist activism in the 1980s. Whilst these strategies broadly map onto activist strategies deployed within the wider lesbian and gay movement during this time, this article explores how these politics manifested in particular ways, specifically in relation to the psy disciplines in the UK. We describe these strategies, illustrating them with examples of activism from the archives. We then use this history to problematise a linear, overly reductionist or binary history of liberation from psycho-pathologisation. Finally, we explore some complexities in the relationship between sexuality, activism and the psy professions.

Pinning Down the Past: Lesbian Politics and Queer Ecologies in The Duke of Burgundy

Abstract Peter Strickland’s film The Duke of Burgundy (2014) presents an all-female world of lepidopterists whose non-monetary economic exchanges consist of mounted butterfly specimens and whose interpersonal exchanges consist of BDSM roleplay. This essay explores how the film represents a thought experiment in reimagining lesbian-feminist history by reconciling divergent strands of feminist and lesbian politics that occupied opposing camps during the period of the film’s early-1970s setting. The film’s “soft” eroticism and depiction of a non-capitalist economy posits a seductive fantasy of what an all-female separatist world might have looked like, had the various clashes within second-wave feminism found a utopian middle ground over major issues like the shifting place of lesbians within the women’s movement, the acceptability of sadomasochism and pornography as expressions of women’s sexuality, and the ecological implications of queerness.

Black Lesbian Feminist Intellectuals and the Struggle against HIV/AIDS

This essay examines the significance of the work of three black lesbian feminist intellectuals--Cathy Cohen, Evelynn Hammonds, Linda Villarosa--to intellectual genealogies of HIV/AIDS. Since the early era of the AIDS epidemic, these scholars have challenged dominant and indigenous discourses of HIV/AIDS through traditional and public forms of scholarship. Working across an array of disciplines, they have helped us to understand the disproportionate effects of AIDS on black communities not as a matter of “risk” and inherent “deviance,” but as an effect of multiple marginalization. Moreover, these black lesbian feminist intellectuals have challenged some of the prevailing epistemological assumptions about the epidemic: examining how racial, class, gender, and sexual biases shape state and community responses to the epidemic, and the erasure and othering of black women in state and media discourses. Foregrounding the significance of black lesbian feminist identity and politics to their knowledge production, the essay demonstrates how the work of black lesbian feminist intellectuals extends the long history of black health activism into the late 20th and 21st centuries, while stressing the importance of lesbian sexuality to historical examinations of black (women's) intellectual traditions.

Disappearing Dykes? Post-Lesbian Discourse and Shifting Identities and Communities

ABSTRACT Researchers and activists have argued that the term “lesbian” has been disappearing, in decline for decades, and have focused on tensions around gender and sexual identities as the source of its decline. I identify “post-lesbian discourse” as key concept in the changing landscape of LGBTQ terminology, and I highlight four concerns that emerge in this discourse: shifting lesbian politics, a too-inclusive community, a loss of lesbian spaces, and the meaning of embodied lesbian identity. Rather than focusing solely on gender and sexuality, my aim is to explore the development of post-lesbian discourse and its effects on lesbian identities and communities.

Coming-Out Confessions: Negotiating the Burden of Lesbian Identity Politics in South Africa

ABSTRACTFor lesbians, “coming out” or disclosing one’s sexual orientation has come to be seen as a marker of self-acceptance, actualization, and the imperative first step in the authentication of a liberated subjectivity and social identity. However, other critical schools of thought, largely informed by Foucault’s middle writings, have argued that “coming out” is merely a confessional response to an incitement to discourse about sex. This study explored constructions of coming out by a group of self-identified lesbians in South Africa. Data were collected via eight semistructured interviews and subjected to discourse analysis. Although the coming-out stories appear to conform to some discursive practices characterizing confessional modes of response to incitements to speak, they are also de-emphasized as central to the constitution of selfhood. The changing conditions of possibility for the production of sexual subjectivity in contemporary South Africa seem to disrupt understandings of coming out as either solely a confessional or liberatory practice.

Rhetoric versus “Poetry”: Literature and Literary Criticism as Lesbian Politics

Rhetoric versus “Poetry”: Literature and Literary Criticism as Lesbian Politics

Defining the “queers” in India: The politics of academic representation

ABSTRACTIn the last 20 years, research and academic writing on “non-heterosexual” lives, identifications, and sexualities have developed considerably in India, in a context where lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and queer politics have become more and more visible in the public sphere. When it comes to gender and sexuality, researchers are often activists, and scholarship is highly political. In particular, by documenting non-heterosexual lives, practices, and groups, social scientists participate in the construction of social categories that can be mobilized in the public sphere. Using both Pierre Bourdieu’s and Stuart Hall’s views on representation as a discursive process by which representatives shape the group they claim to represent, this article contends that social scientists are engaged in a “work of representation” when it comes to LGBT and queer individuals and groups. Yet, this process is not without tensions, as there is a deep contradiction between the making of an “object of study” that is spoken about, and the promotion of a political subject, who can speak for him- or herself. Drawing on a corpus of about 45 academic publications on LGBT and queer people and issues in the last 25 years, this article explores the contentious discursive formation of “LGBT” and “queer” as analytical and political categories.

The Pornoethnography of Boys in the Sand : Fetishisms of Race and Class in the 1970s Gay Fire Island Pines

Aspiration for the Gay UniversalBoys in the Sand is a lyrical, joyful celebration of a utopian space- Inside-where men take pleasure in one another in the face of normative taboos...An idealized, hypersexual male emerges in each episode from the conjuring imagination of a solitary desiring subject. sex that follows serves to validate and celebrate, while never exactly normalizing, the difference of gay sex.-Linda Williams, Screening SexJoyful and self-absorbed, Boys in the Sand rises and falls on a look that fit well with an understanding of homosexuality: to be liberated does not mean taking to the streets, but creating a utopian space in which to simply be one's sexual self. Thinking too much about the social and political standing of that sex and sexuality is a drag. One daydreams of hot men, and they should simply materialize.-Cindy Patton, L.A. Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film ClassicConceived as an almost abstract visual poem, Boys was intended by its maker to reflect the various aspects of the universal gay experience, moving from discovery to experimentation to first love and the acceptance of life shared with a significant other, ultimately resulting in self-knowledge and sexual bliss.-Dries Vermeulen, the Beginning ...Despite its transgressive subject matter and hardcore action, Wakefield Poole's porn film Boys in the Sand may be described as a dreamlike idyll. low-budget porno chic flick was set and shot in the Fire Island Pines, the gay sexual mecca of the 1960s and 1970s.1 An immediate commercial success upon its premiere at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York City on December 29, 1971, it grossed $44,755 during the first two weeks alone and charted at #46 on Variety's list of 50 Top Grossing Films (Standard Data Corp., NY, 1972). Narratively, the film is composed of three lyrical, nonsequential vignettes entitled Bayside, Poolside, and Inside. It documents the one-on-one sexual encounters of the lead actor Casey Donovan (with Peter Fisk, Danny Di Cioccio, and Tommy Moore) in three disparate yet interlocking spaces in the Pines, as Donovan maneuvers through the wooded landscape of the Meat Rack as well as the constructed space of Fire Island's modernist architecture. As several North American reviewers at the time of the movie's release have pointed out, Boys in the Sand presents what we might here characterize as a brand of sexual pastoralism: in the film's portrayal, gay male sexuality appears to be benign, shame free, and nonthreatening. In an Advocate review enlivened with much camp flair, Jesse St. Ives remarks on the film's mystic bent, for example, by identifying Boys' allusion to Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus in its opening sequence (1972, 25). In a 1977 interview with the film's director, Peter Pappas further notes how sexuality in Poole's cinematic oeuvre more generally is dissociated from stigma and shame (1977,17). In the same interview, Poole himself brings out the pastoralist undertone of Boys quite explicitly in a nostalgic lookback when asked to comment on a sequence in his new production Moving: The first section [of Moving] was really a takeoff on myself, Boys in the Sand again, with Cal and the pretty house and everything's beautiful and green and gorgeous (24).2Three decades later, contemporary commentators, in various historicizing analyses, similarly see the film as engaging in contestation over the meaning of homosexuality. Linda Williams, in Screening Sex, adopts a Foucauldian frame and maintains that the formation of a reverse discourse is central to historically contextualizing the film's idealization of gay sex (2008, 153-54). Cindy Patton, in L.A. Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film Classic, further parses various strands of gay and lesbian politics in early 1970s culture and observes how the film betrays an aspirational-assimilationist leaning in its narrative construction of a depoliticized sexual utopia (2014, 73). …

Developmental Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Politics: Fragmented Citizenship in a Fragmented State

Responding to recent criticism that American political development (APD) has yet to fully engage with both contemporary and historical matters related to lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) politics, I use citizenship to provide one way to do so. Drawing on the central insight of APD scholarship that the polity is a composite of multiple clashing governing orders and by viewing citizenship as a relational dynamic between the individual and the state, I argue that citizenship is fractured across time, space, and policy issue. This claim is illustrated by two case studies: first, how gay, lesbian, and bisexual military participation has been redefined over time by the Department of Defense, with each policy shift toward equality revealing previously unseen and persistent inequities, and second, how conflicts between marriage and parental recognition have emerged after states recognize same-sex marriage. I aim to demonstrate how APD concepts can be fruitfully applied to yield new insights about institutional authority and the meaning and content of citizenship status. In short, much can be gained by increased developmental attention to gay and lesbian politics.

Transgender: examining an emerging political identity using three political processes

This study examines the construction of a new political identity category in the USA during the 1990s, transgender, focusing on three political processes: (1) conflict over meanings associated with the identity category; (2) backlash in the form of stigmatization from other groups that prompted frame transformation; and (3) representation, particularly across political venues where information about the new identity category is disseminated. Using a Historical Discourse Analysis approach to the archived documents of transgender social movement activists, publications, and interest groups from 1990 to 1999, this study shows how activists and leaders shaped what had previously been disparate groups into a unified identity category and associated interest group coalition to represent transgender-identified people. While this new identity category and coalition allowed the projection of unity that is necessary in contemporary interest group politics, this analysis shows that it also obscured important differences within the transgender identity category and helped to produce within-group marginalization and exclusions that endure in contemporary transgender, lesbian, and gay politics.

Relighting the Fire: Visualizing the Lesbian in Contemporary India

This article revisits the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), India's first publicly released film depicting female same-sex desire. The film has become a touchstone for discussions of the representation of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in India. While the majority of critical accounts of the film have rejected the use of “lesbian” on the basis of its Anglo-American specificity, this article seeks to recast lesbians at the heart of Fire by filtering them through the lens of transnational protest, and by offering a close reading of the film's own play on religious and cultural symbolism. Viewed almost two decades after its release, in the light of the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and subsequent events, including the upholding of a law criminalizing gay sex in November 2013, the film now more than ever seems to offer a fantasy of the future, rather than a viable reality in the present day. Within Fire, the circumnavigation of heteronormative power and desire is certainly queer, but the film's labeling as “lesbian” subsequent to its release in India opened up an important public forum for a debate about female desire and independence that continues to resonate today. This article does not attempt to offer a conclusive argument about the use of the term “lesbian” to label the relationship between women that is depicted within the film, but it does examine the way in which the film itself visualizes desire between women, and in particular the use of Hindu narratives, imagery and motifs. The film's interpellation into lesbian politics is facilitated by the strong emphasis on a female-centered desire that is not defined by motherhood, that cannot be contained, and that demands to be seen.

Relational Comparison and LGBTQ Activism in European Cities

AbstractThis article examines the role of city twinning as a device for conducting transnational activism around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) politics. It focuses on the city of Leiden in the Netherlands, examining how the city's twinning links with the cities of Torun in Poland and Oxford in the UK have been used at different times as a device to mobilize transnational solidarities with LGBTQ people outside of the Netherlands. Drawing on qualitative semi‐structured interviews with LGBTQ activists in Leiden as part of a wider study of transnational LGBTQ activism in Europe, I seek to understand how twinning links are used to forge sustainable solidarities both across national boundaries and within Leiden. I suggest that relational comparisons about the status and treatment of sexual dissidents in Leiden and its twin cities are central to the production of these solidarities. While twinning has significant potential as a device for the production of sustainable transnational LGBTQ activism, I also suggest that it can be used to advance problematic geo‐temporalities about the relative ‘progressiveness’ or ‘backwardness’ of LGBTQ politics in specific cities.

Chemo Killed the Small-Talk Gene

Urvashi Vaid is a community organizer and writer active in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and social justice movements for over three decades. She is currently Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University Law School. She is founder of LPAC, the first lesbian political action committee, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Gill Foundation. Vaid's past positions include Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, Deputy Director of Governance and Civil Society Unit for the Ford Foundation, Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and staff attorney for the ACLU National Prison Project. She is author of the books Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and The Assumptions of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Politics, and Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation, and co-editor of the book Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights. Urvashi has had thyroid cancer and stage III breast cancer.

Consuming Sexual Liberation: Gay Business, Politics, and Toronto’s Barracks Bathhouse Raids

On 9 December 1978, the Toronto police raided the Barracks Bathhouse. The Barracks owners and several employees were charged with allegedly keeping a common bawdy house and a number of attendees were charged with related morals offenses. This essay argues that the Barracks raid marks a significant moment in gay activism in Canada as it brought together two largely antithetical groups, gay businessmen and activists, and, in the process, reworked understandings of gay bathhouses as important community institutions in the Toronto context. Second, the Barracks events also need to be positioned within a larger set of processes ultimately resulting in a reimagining of the nature of gay “institutions” within the gay “ghetto” as a central and important location for gay and lesbian political, economic, and social life.

(Un)holy Toledo: Intersectionality, Interdependence, and Neighborhood (Trans)formation in Toledo, Ohio

Research on large metropolitan areas dominates understandings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) urban lives. Investigating cities further down the urban hierarchy can nuance accounting of LGBT and queer place-making, neighborhood formation, and cultural politics. Comparative analysis can further illuminate the local foundations of place-based logics. Through the conceptual lenses of intersectionality and interdependence, this article looks at the appropriation and formation of Toledo's LGBT neighborhood, the Old West End, and its relation to another central-city neighborhood, Vistula; the development of the local LGBT and queer community more broadly; and the interrelation of these gay and queer neighborhoods with other social sites and spaces. This qualitative study involving oral histories and archival research demonstrates that community organizing and neighborhood (trans)formation depend on a host of socio-spatial conditions. Although LGBT neighborhood transformation is often conflated with gentrification, my findings suggest that intersectionality and interdependence play a large role in LGBT neighborhood transformation. The critical quality for development of the neighborhoods I investigated was an emerging arena for local lesbian and gay cultural politics, which relied heavily on an intersectionality and interdependence between and among religion, sexuality, and class.

‘Like a Bomb in the Gasoline Station’: East–West Migration and Transnational Activism around Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Politics in Poland

This article examines the relationship between East–West migration in Europe and activism around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) politics in Poland. EU accession in 2004 was accompanied by an intensification of homophobia in Polish political discourse particularly associated with neo-populist Radical Right parties such as Law and Justice and the League of Polish Families. Marches for the tolerance and equality of lesbians, gay men and other sexual dissidents were banned or attacked by far-right counter-protestors in a number of Polish cities. This article examines the connections between East–West (and other) migrant flows to and from Poland and the emergence of transnational activist networks forged in response to these events. These migratory flows facilitated the forging of these networks and activist solidarities, generating material and affective support. The discussion of these issues draws on interviews with activists participating in these networks. Our argument shows that there is concern among activists about how to represent the post-accession East–West migration of lesbian and gay Poles and the extent to which this is due to homophobic oppression in Poland. Moreover we find that there is considerable investment in the potential for East–West migration to transform the attitudes of socially conservative Polish citizens.

The Political Saliency of LGBTs in Sub-Saharan Africa

One key political development in the past decade in many, but not all, countries across Africa has been the growing saliency of morality politics in general, and of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics in particular. I argue that the uneven upward trend in the political saliency of LGBTs is closely related to two recent political processes: (i) a rapid growth of Pentecostal, Evangelical and related Renewalist or Spirit-filled churches (demand-side factor) and (ii) a democratization process leading to heightened political competition (supply side). To evaluate the above proposition, I created an original, fine-grained longitudinal dataset of media coverage of LGBTs in Africa, which I use as a measure of issue saliency. Using a series of negative binomial regression models, I find robust evidence that the saliency of LGBTs increases with a country's population share of Renewalist Christians, and that this effect increases with rising levels of political competition.