Lesbian Sexuality Research Articles

Setting the Agenda: LGBTQ+ and SGM Family Communication

ABSTRACT We call for an expansion of research on the family communication of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other diverse sexualities and gender identities (LGBTQ+), as well as sexual and gender minority people (SGM) who may not identify as LGBTQ+, such as those practicing polyamory. We provide direction on expanding LGBTQ+ and SGM family communication research and invite scholars to expand their programs of research to consider LGBTQ+ and SGM family communication. We also make suggestions for journal editors and reviewers regarding publishing practices.

Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema. By Susan Potter. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.

<i>Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema</i>. By Susan Potter. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.

Gender Performativity in Zandile Nkunzi Nkabinde's Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma: A Way to Rewrite and Re-member Black Lesbian Lives in South Africa

The LGBTQI+ category, with its Western roots, has become a contentious descriptor for sexual minorities in Africa. In South Africa, the rising number of violent and homophobic attacks against sexual minorities and lesbian women, often in the form of “corrective rape”, highlights the tension between marginalised communities becoming more visible and vocal about their rights and a conservative backlash. Of particular significance in post-apartheid South Africa is the growing visibility of black lesbians. Prior to the adoption of South Africa's democratic constitution, visibility of these women was very low, strengthening the erroneous assumption that homosexuality is unAfrican. African identity is often aligned with heteronormative ideals and homosexuality is often referred to as unAfrican, unChristian, and unnatural. Furthermore, the idea that lesbian sexuality is unAfrican and unChristian is used as an excuse for the violence perpetrated against lesbians. However, queer African writers are starting to challenge negative stereotypes. Zandile Nkunzi Nkabinde's 2008 autobiography, Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (Johannesburg: Fanele) is one of the few South African autobiographies that provides a first-person account of being a traditional healer and a black lesbian, which is useful for anchoring discussions around lesbian subjectivity and corrective rape from an African perspective. This article engages with this text, which offers a positive representation of the relationship between African culture and lesbian sexuality and constitutes a unique counter-discourse—a narrative of resistance—in the face of ubiquitous homophobia.

Willa Cather's Letters in the Archive

Stories of how American novelist Willa Cather recalled and burned her letters in order to preserve her privacy are cited widely in biography and criticism. This essay argues that these stories (and related stories about the destruction of letters by Cather’s partner and literary executor, Edith Lewis) have been exaggerated well beyond the mod- est facts. While some letters were destroyed, neither Cather nor Lewis made a systematic practice of recalling and destroying letters, yet claims that they did have shaped the way scholars understand Cather’s experience of her lesbian sexuality. Cather’s extant epistolary archive has turned out to be far more substantial than such stories led scholars to believe. The example of Cather suggests that scholars need to recognize the dynamic nature of preservation and collecting and consider the specific forces and interested parties shaping access to the traces of particular women’s legacies.

Addressing LGBT+ issues in comprehensive sexuality education for learners with visual impairment: guidance from disability professionals

ABSTRACT Despite public outcry, South Africa has decided to roll out comprehensive sexuality education in schools. Currently, however, there are no scripted lesson plans for teachers of learners with visual impairment. Local literature suggests that the current sexuality education curriculum fails to engage with sexuality diversity and is imbued with notions of compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness, perpetuating homophobia, transphobia and ableism in schools and broader communities. The paper sought guidance from disability professionals on how to best address lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexualities’ (LGBT+) issues as part of comprehensive sexuality education for learners with visual impairment. Bourdieu’s work on doxa, orthodoxy and heterodoxy underpinned the study. Three professionals working with learners with visual impairment were interviewed in a focus group, and one school principal working in a school for learners with visual impairment was interviewed individually. Data were thematically analysed. Pre- and in-service teachers are encouraged not to see comprehensive sexuality education offered to learners with visual impairment as different from that provided to their sighted peers. Professionals urged teachers to accept LGBT+ learners with visual impairment in their dress, expression and embodiment. However, teachers need to be aware of learners’ cultural and religious differences. Current lesson plans need to be revisited to safeguard against compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness.

‘Rediscovering the Erotic as Ordinary’ in South African Women’s Short Fiction

In this article, I explore the possibilities of rediscovering the erotic as ordinary, as a strategy for writing queer, feminist erotica in a South African context that successfully negotiates heterosexist, patriarchal, racist and colonial discourses. I focus on two short stories from Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (2008), known as the first erotic anthology by women published in South Africa. South Africa does not have a large body of erotic writing, and the work that does exist is not widely written about. Both stories covered here, ‘Inside’ by Makhosazana Xaba and ‘Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus’ by Suzy Bell, depict erotic tension between women but do not contain graphic sex scenes. They emphasise the ordinary place of sexual desire in the lives of women by detailing the interior life of a female character whose everyday life is limned by the erotic. The focus in these stories is not on the sex act but on the build-up of sexual desire. Furthermore, the erotic is not limited to sexual desire but runs through other aspects of the characters’ lives, including spiritual, intellectual and embodied experiences. It is through these various elements that the two authors imagine the erotic as ordinary. Thus these two stories contest the spectacularisation and abjection of Black female lesbian sexuality and open up interesting possibilities for the representation of the erotic in literature.

‘Queering pornography’: situating lesbian identity and sexuality in the pornoscape and sexual-scape of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT This article intends to start a dialogue between the now globalized LGBT identity labels originated from Euro-American queer identity politics and the local experience of Hong Kong lesbians. In a three-year ethnographic research project conducted in Hong Kong, I found discrepancy between popular discourses on queer identity formation and the experience of Hong Kong consumers. Rather than relying on ‘queer pornography’ as the major point of reference and initiation, my lesbian-identified informants consumed mainstream pornographic videos depicting heterosexual intercourse presumably made for a predominately heterosexual male audience. This article examines what affects their choice(s) of pornography, to shed light on the complexity and agency of these porn-viewing lesbian subjects by not only situating them within the realm of ‘queer porn’ and globalized LGBT culture, but also teasing out the contextual limitations that gave birth to the specific form of lesbianism in the city. This enables insights into the ‘conditions of possibility for the appearance of these practices’ in the East Asian context – that is, how do these informants learn, understand, and interpret themselves as sexual beings, within the sexual culture of Hong Kong.

Queer Girls and Intergenerational Lesbian Sexuality in the 1970s

Drawing on letters and writings by teenage girls and oral history interviews, this article aims to open a scholarly conversation about the existence and significance of intergenerational sexual relationships between minor girls and adult women in the years leading up to and encompassing the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. Lesbian history and culture say very little about sexual connections between youth and adults, sweeping them under the rug in gender-inflected ways that differ from the suppression of speech in gay male history and culture about intergenerational sex between boys and men. Nonetheless, my research suggests that, despite lesbian feminists’ caution and even negativity toward teen girls, erotic and sexual relationships with adult women provided girls access to support, pleasure, mentorship, and community.

Permissible progress: Sexual(ities that) progress in and beyond English primary schools

This paper examines what is permissible sexual progress in English primary schools by exploring the possibilities – but also the limitations – of the introduction of familial sexualities. In recent years, Stonewall (a prominent and politically mainstream Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans charity) have increasingly utilised ‘the family’ as a ‘child-friendly’ topic to encourage primary educators to broach same-sex relationships by incorporating their ‘inclusive’ range of Different Families resources into lessons. This strategic manoeuvre emerges in a socio-political and spatiotemporal context dominated by neoliberal sexual politics and follows ‘moral panics’ surrounding queer progressive politics inspired initiatives, most notably No Outsiders (2006–2009) which previously unsettled institutionalised discourses of ‘childhood (sexual) innocence’ in pursuing radical, but arguably necessary approaches for disrupting and undoing heteronormativity. In spite of this, Stonewall’s Different Families, Same Love initiative is now the dominant approach for introducing lesbian and gay sexualities in English primary schools; yet, little is known about how primary-aged children respond to this intervention. Focusing on a leading exponent of Stonewall’s initiative, I explore 4–9 year olds dis/engagements with gay and lesbian sexualities when introduced in a familial context. Reflecting on mixed ethnographic and focus group data, I question not only which gay and lesbian sexualities ‘progress’ in contemporary English primary schools, but also how well. To this end, recommendations are made for improving families’ curricula without losing sight of the limits of this approach.

Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema by Susan Potter

Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema by Susan Potter

Black LGBTQ/SGL Elders: A Black Transwoman, an African-American Same-Gender Loving Woman, and a Black Lesbian Talking About Sex with a Cisgender White Lesbian Sex Researcher

Black LGBTQ/SGL Elders: A Black Transwoman, an African-American Same-Gender Loving Woman, and a Black Lesbian Talking About Sex with a Cisgender White Lesbian Sex Researcher

Theorizing TL esthetics: Forming a femme gaze through yes or no 2.5

After a long fight, same-sex marriage in Taiwan became legal on 24 May 2019. This milestone does not however address the hegemony that exists inside queer communities, namely, the idea that femininity is the excluded other in gay communities and that femmes are perceived as potential traitors within Taiwanese lesbian society. Such misogynistic ideologies render queer communities less democratic and egalitarian than imagined. This paper coins the term “butchiarchy” as part of an analysis of the Thai lesbian film, Yes or No 2.5 (2015), a box-office hit in Taiwan, in order to reveal the hierarchical structure pervasive within lesbian communities. While reinforcing a butchiarchal norm, the film also mobilizes a femme gaze that plays with the scenes depicting the ambivalent affection between the two butch characters, which echoes the BL (Boys’ Love/Yaoi) fever that has swept the popular culture industry in East Asian countries. To distinguish from BL, this paper intends to adopt the term “TL,” as T stands for butch in East Asia, to describe the concept of “Butches’ Love,” which differentiates from BL that emphasizes Boys’ love. By rethinking terms through which femme is represented as well as experienced, this paper points out how, on the one hand, femme is constantly abjected in order to affirm a constructed lesbian sexuality that problematically recognizes butch as the priori lesbian agent. On the other hand, the femme gazes troubles the butchiarchal surveillance that denies homosexuality in femmes and thus creates a possible scenario that recognizes the operative power of the sub-minority.

“Girl-on-girl culture”

AbstractThis article investigates the construction of sex advice for queer women as it features on the world’s most popular lesbian website, Autostraddle. Based in the United States, the website is a “progressively feminist” online community for lesbian, bisexual and other queer women. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this article explores how representations of sexual and gender identity facilitate the construction of homonormativity on the website. It argues that these representations involve a tension between exclusivity and inclusivity. On the one hand, Autostraddle wants to construct an exclusive markedly lesbian subjectivity and a subcultural model of lesbian sex, which is lacking in mainstream culture. On the other hand, it aims to be inclusive of transgender and bisexual women, and to deconstruct the idea of sexual homogeneity. Findings show that Autostraddle discursively negotiates these competing goals to construct a distinctly “queer female” normativity centred on young cisgender feminine lesbians.

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.

Wanting Pictures After Feminism: Re-reading On Our Backs

This article explores the relationship between photography and feminism that emerges through the pages of the lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs (1984–2006). The San Francisco-based magazine represents an exceptional archive of images made in the context of lesbian community. Returning to the photographs that were published in early issues of the magazine, the article argues that On Our Backs, whilst explicitly addressed to a paucity of available images of lesbian culture, reflects a complex engagement with the meaning of the photographic image in dialogue with contemporaneous feminist debates. Through the work of Tee Corinne, Morgan Gwenwald and Honey Lee Cottrell, a desire for pictures renders the image a site of fantasy in which different ways of inhabiting lesbian identity form in dialogue with a community of readers.

Cassandra Rios e a lésbica genuína em Eu sou uma lésbica (1980)

In this article, I analyze the novel, Eu sou uma lésbica (1980), by Brazilian author Cassandra Rios (1932-2002). I examine how Rios's text discusses the lesbianism and sexuality of Flávia, the protagonist of the novel, as well as the sexual and love relationship that the seven-year-old Flávia has with an adult woman. The work of authors such as Judith Butler, Marilyn R. Farwell, Teresa De Lauretis, Adrianne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Jeffrey Weeks informs my theoretical framework. I propose that the novel presents Flávia's sexuality as natural and genuine in order to challenge traditional discourses surrounding lesbianism and children’s sexuality. While the representation of lesbian sexuality in children is transgressive and empowering, as it establishes same-sex desire among women as natural and dating back to infancy, I contend however that the novel’s treatment of adult lesbian sexuality perpetuates traditional corporal, racial, and class hierarchies.

‘When I do “bad stuff,” I make the most difference’: exploring doubt, demoralization, and contradictions in LGBTQIA + ally work

Research has demonstrated that teacher allies are integral to social justice work that strives to ensure safety and success for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other gender and sexuality non-conforming (LGBTQIA+) students. However, prevailing discussions present allyhood in ways that ignore the complexities and contradictions that shape an ally’s efforts and experiences. Drawing on narrative-based interviews with ‘Bailey,’ and integrating conceptual frameworks that seek to make doubt and failure productive, this paper seeks to redefine ally activism in ways that challenge prevailing notions of ally work and that more fully consider sociocultural and political contexts.

Unethical Adaptation: Indigenization and Sex in Chan-wook Park’s The Handmaiden (2016)

Abstract In contemporary cultural scenes saturated by ‘intermediality’ and ‘transmediality’, adaptation studies have challenged the distinction and hierarchy between the source and its adaptation, the author and the reader-spectator, and a variety of genres and media. While early critics of adaptation studies centred on fidelity criticism, recently Linda Hutcheon breaks free from literary elitism and emphasizes how stories, ‘like genes’, adapt to new environments ‘by virtue of mutation’. Hutcheon argues, ‘the fittest [stories] do more than survive; they flourish’ in today’s fierce competition for ‘cultural selection’. This postmodernist notion of adaptation as proliferation, however, remains curiously reticent about the ‘value’ of such proliferation. My article argues that in the era of textual proliferation, adaptation has an ethical responsibility to voice the story of the socially and sexually ‘unfit’. I then analyse The Handmaiden as a failed attempt at this ethical project. Directed by Chan-wook Park, a South Korean auteur, The Handmaiden borrows from Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), a novel about female romantic friendship in nineteenth-century England. Although Park’s visually stunning film epitomizes the indigenization of the ‘fittest’ story, its graphic portrayal of lesbian sex and change of setting leaves the question of sexual objectification of Asian women and Japanese colonization unanswered.

Sister Acts: Victorian Porn, Lesbian Drag, and Queer Reproduction

Sister Acts:Victorian Porn, Lesbian Drag, and Queer Reproduction Kiki Loveday (bio) "It was Olga Nethersole in quite another atmosphere than the public sees her—a healthy, air-loving woman with a mentality strong enough and broad enough to grant her healthy views upon an unhealthy subject." This description of British actress-manager Olga Nethersole appeared in the Detroit News on January 1, 1900. In just a few short weeks, her theatrical production of Sapho would explode onto the national stage, making her the most famous actress in America and culminating in her arrest for public indecency.1 In the calm before the coming storm Nethersole is quoted as follows: Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. French Postcard, circa 1900, private collection. First of all … we must bring ourselves to understand and admit that there [End Page 201] is good in everyone. This is true, I believe, of all that class of women who is held at arm's length. It is this one thing which makes these women what they are to literature and the drama. … For such women are human, they have hearts and souls and flesh and blood, and can suffer as much, if not more than their sisters whose lives extend but little beyond the home.2 What do we make of Nethersole's appeal to sisterhood in this preemptive defense of Sapho? What might this seemingly innocuous Victorian voice tell us about the meaning of Sapphic sisterhood in the era of cinema's so-called "birth"? In 1989, Teresa de Lauretis decried "the sweeping of lesbian sexuality … under the rug of sisterhood."3 Yet, in the second half of the nineteenth century, sisterhood was being aggressively mobilized by Olga Nethersole, and other artists, to make public lesbian meanings that radically challenged the patriarchal family and social structures of the Victorian Era. Nethersole's call for sisterhood in the passage above activated a broader lesbian discourse of Sapphic kinship that was a crucial component of lesbian culture at the time and that I contend is central to understanding the lesbian pleasures of the silent screen. Consider the following mid-nineteenth-century Staffordshire figurine of the prototypical star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet. Modeled on an 1846 drawing of famed American actress Charlotte Cushman playing Romeo opposite her sister Susan as Juliet, these mass-produced artifacts ostensibly commemorate the Cushman sisters' performance.4 Lisa Merrill has persuasively read the figurines as a mark of Charlotte Cushman's iconicity and respectability. Merrill's groundbreaking work on Cushman certainly recognizes the sexual significance of what one critic in 1846 described as Cushman's "Sapphic Romeo."5 Merrill clearly points out that the figurine records "the complexity of two women performing as … romantic lovers."6 Yet, in her reading, this queer record is not just enabled by—but ultimately overdetermined by—the performers actual sisterhood that functions as evidence of Cushman's "respectability."7 Although not specifically tied to the Staffordshire figurine, film scholar Hilary Hallett's recent reading of Cushman as the most important foremother to the "Pickford revolution" (which brought film actresses to the forefront of the popular imagination) also hinges on notions of respectability, personal virtue, and moral character.8 Likewise, in her important volume Girls Will Be Boys, Laura Horak has connected the "cult following" for Cushman's Romeo to the hundreds of films featuring cross-dressed women produced during the silent era—and she too argues that such performances were "associated with wholesome entertainment."9 In contrast, I argue that rather than evincing Cushman's iconic respectability, the cross-dressed representation of Sapphic Sisterhood formally embodied in the figurine activates a "lurid," ripped-from-the-headlines meaning in the tradition [End Page 202] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. (left). Staffordshire figurine, Charlotte and Susan Cushman as Romeo and Juliet, circa 1852, private collection. Courtesy of Aldridges of Bath, Fine Art & Chattel Auctioneers. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. (right). Staffordshire figurine, The Assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corde, circa 1794, private collection. of Staffordshire pottery during this period.10 The popular trend of figurines embodying murderers and other scandalous personalities has been traced to the...

Promiscuous versus Romantic Lesbianism in Films

There is a lack of queer visibility in the mainstream Hollywood films because of the Production Code Administration in October 1961 that prohibited the presentation of “sexual perversion” on screen. However, the amendment of this code and gay liberation movements in 1970s, and the era of “new queer cinema” in the 1990s increased media representations of sexual minorities. Based on this context, the article critically analyzes the depiction of lesbian characters and their romance in the films The Killing of Sister George (1968) and Blue is the Warmest Color (2013). The Killing of Sister George depicts the life story of June Buckridge who loses her career and her relationship due to her sexuality, and Blue is the Warmest Color is a story about Adele, who explores her sexuality as a teenager. Whereas the former film depicts lesbianism from a promiscuous lens, the latter approaches this topic from a realistic and contemporary perspective. Thus, the films represent lesbian sexuality in unique ways that allows us to investigate the progression of queer depiction in the mainstream cinema. The similarities and differences between the queer representation in the films, as well as the way the film portrayal of lesbian romance relate to the current research literature are discussed.