Lesbian Visibility Research Articles

Alice's identity crisis

On 31 July 1994 the Board of Directors of the Alice Austen House Museum on Staten Island, NY presented its annual Nautical Festival at the Museum. The Festival, like other events the museum hosts throughout the year, celebrates the life and work of photographer Alice Austen (1866–1952), and encourages visits to the museum, a Victorian cottage known as ‘Clear Comfort’, which was her family home. On this particular occasion, visitors to the Festival and museum volunteers were greeted by demonstrators from the Lesbian Avengers, an activist organization ‘dedicated to fighting for lesbian visibility and survival’. 1 To the dismay of some volunteers, demonstrators marched through the grounds proclaiming the Alice Austen House Museum a ‘National Historic Lesbian Landmark’.2 Lesbian Avengers distributed pamphlets at the demonstration, which maintained that although the Board of Directors of the Alice Austen House Museum denies publicly Austen's homosexual orientation, her collection of photographs documents her life as a white, middle-class lesbian at the turn of the century. 3 In addition, Austen shared ‘Clear Comfort’ with her lover, Gertrude Tate, for almost 30 years.4 Their exclusive relationship lasted for 55 years.

The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement

1. Introduction - the Editors 2. Moral Regulation and the Disintegrating Canadian State - Barry D Adam 3. Gay and Lesbian Movements in the United States: Dilemmas of Identity, Diversity, and Political Strategy - Steven Epstein 4. Love and More Desire: The Building of a Brazilian Movement - James N. Green 5. Democracy and Sexual Difference: The Lesbian and Gay Movement in Argentina - Stephen Brown 6. The Lesbian and Gay Movement in Britain: Schisms, Solidarities and Social Worlds - Ken Plummer 7. The Dutch Lesbian and Gay Movement: The Politics of Accommodation - Judith Schuyf and Andre Krouwell 8. Gay and Lesbian Activism in France: Between Integration and Community-Oriented Movements - Olivier Fillieule and Jan Willem Duyvendak 9. Passion for Life: A History of the Lesbian and Gay Movement in Spain - Ricardo Llamas and Fefa Vila, Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Brown 10. Gay and Lesbian Movements in Eastern Europe: Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic - Scott Long 11. Emerging Visibility of Gays and Lesbians in Southern Africa: Contrasting Contexts - Mai Palmberg 12. Japan: Finding Its Way - Wim Lunsing 13. The Largest Street Party in the World: The Gay and Lesbian Movement in Australia - Geoffrey Woolcock and Dennis Altman 14. Gay and Lesbian Movements Beyond Borders? National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement - the Editors About the Contributors Index

British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration

In a post-feminist, post-lesbian feminist, postmodern or queer world, should lesbian work remain clearly identifiable, even when it refuses to claim lesbian identity as such? Scanning anthologies from the past three decades of lesbian poetry, and focusing particularly on the work of Maureen Duffy, Marge Yeo, Dorothea Smartt, Gillian Spraggs and Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Yorke addresses issues of lesbian visibility, lesbian identification, lesbian desire, and lesbian performativity. How do we identify what constitutes a lesbian poetic in an era when ‘lesbian’ as an identity is less overtly defended, and many anthologies gloss over lesbian difference in prioritizing a higher order dedication to theme?

Feminist television criticism: a reader

Introduction Introduction to Part One: Programmes and Heroines 1. The Search for Tomorrow in Today's Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form - Tania Modleski 2. Sex and the and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama - Jane Arthurs 3. Women with a Mission: Lynda La Plante, DCI Jane Tennison and the Reconfiguration of TV Crime Drama - Deborah Jermyn 4. Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African-American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil Rights Popular Culture - Kimberly Springer 5. Ellen, Television and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility - Bonnie J. Dow 6. You'd Better Recognize: Oprah the Iconic and Television Talk - Beretta E. Smith-Shomade 7. Take Responsibility for Yourself Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen - Laurie Ouellette 8. Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess: Postfeminism and Cooking - Joanne Hollows 9. Feminism Without Men: Feminist Media Studies in a Post-Feminist Age - Karen Boyle 10. Girls Rule! Gender, Feminism, and Nickelodeon - Sarah Banet-Weiser 11. The (In)visible Lesbian: Anxieties of representation in the L word - Susan J. Wolfe and Lee Ann Roripaugh Introduction to Part Two: Audiences, Reception Contexts, and Spectatorship 12. Women's Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera, and Theory - Annette Kuhn 13. Melodromatic Identifications: Television Fiction and Women's Fantasy - Ien Ang 14. National Texts and Gendered Lives: An Ethnography of Television Viewers in a North Indian City - Purnima Mankekar 15. Defining Asian Femininity: Chinese Viewers of Japanese TV Dramas in Singapore - Elizabeth MacLachlan and Geok-lian Chua 16. The Globalization of Gender: Ally McBeal in Post-Socialist Slovenia - Ksenija Vidmar-Horvat 17. The Performance and Reception of Televisual 'Ugliness' in Yo soy Betty la Fea - Yeidy M. Rivero 18. Sob Stories, Merriment, and Surprises: The 1950s Audience Participation Show on Network Television and Women's Daytime Reception - Marsha F. Cassidy Bibliography.

Making a Spectacle of Herself

The now-famous photograph of singer k.d. lang and model Cindy Crawford on the cover of the August 1993 Vanity Fair magazine was notable for being one of the first images in popular culture to feature a self-identified lesbian in an image with lesbian thematic content. This paper explores Vanity Fair's cover in terms of lesbian visibility issues, different interpretive strategies for constructing meaning, and the use of lesbian/gay symbology and aesthetics. The appropriational relationship of the image to other representational forms in popular culture and the significance of lesbian sexual imagery are discussed. Examination of the use of inversion, hyperbole, and irony reveals the image's polysemic references to both lesbian re/presentations and mainstream society's stereotypes.

Lesbian Visibility and Sexual Rights at Beijing

Previous articleNext article No AccessConference ReportsLesbian Visibility and Sexual Rights at BeijingAra WilsonAra Wilson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 22, Number 1Autumn, 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495146 Views: 3Total views on this site Citations: 10Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Juliana Cesario Alvim Gomes Direitos sexuais e reprodutivos ou direitos sexuais e direitos reprodutivos? Dilemas e contradições nos marcos normativos nacionais e internacionais, Revista Direito GV 17, no.33 (Jan 2021).https://doi.org/10.1590/2317-6172202136Hongwei Bao ‘We Are Here’: the politics of memory in narrating China’s queer feminist history, Continuum 34, no.44 (Jun 2020): 514–529.https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2020.1785079Elizabeth S. Corredor Unpacking “Gender Ideology” and the Global Right’s Antigender Countermovement, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no.33 (Feb 2019): 613–638.https://doi.org/10.1086/701171Eve Ng LGBT Advocacy and Transnational Funding in Singapore and Malaysia, Development and Change 49, no.44 (Apr 2018): 1093–1114.https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12406Tingting Wei A Look at the Beijing Conference through Lesbian Eyes, Asian Journal of Women's Studies 21, no.33 (Oct 2015): 316–325.https://doi.org/10.1080/12259276.2015.1072944Jonathan Symons, Dennis Altman International norm polarization: sexuality as a subject of human rights protection, International Theory 7, no.11 (Feb 2015): 61–95.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971914000384Jia-Wei Tu, Tien-Tsung Lee The Effects of Media Usage and Interpersonal Contacts on the Stereotyping of Lesbians and Gay Men in China, Journal of Homosexuality 61, no.77 (May 2014): 980–1002.https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2014.871904Kate Sheill Losing out in the intersections: lesbians, human rights, law and activism, Contemporary Politics 15, no.11 (Mar 2009): 55–71.https://doi.org/10.1080/13569770802674212Anick Druelle Que célébrer 30 ans après l’Année internationale de la femme : une crise au sein des mouvements internationaux de femmes1 ?, Recherches féministes 17, no.22 (Apr 2006): 115–169.https://doi.org/10.7202/012402arClifford Bob Culture Wars Gone Global, (): 36–71.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139031042.004

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

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

Lesbian (in)visibility in Italian Renaissance culture: Diana and other cases of donna con donna.

Current conceptualizations of sexual identity in the West are not necessarily useful to an historian investigating "lesbianism" in the social history and visual representations of different periods. After an overview of Renaissance documents treating donna con donna relations which examines the potentially positive effects of condemnation and silence, the paper focuses on Diana, the goddess of chastity, who bathed with her nymphs as an exemplar of female bodies preserved for heterosexual, reproductive pleasures. Yet the self-sufficiency and bodily contact sometimes represented in images of this secluded all-female gathering might suggest "deviant" responses from their viewers.

The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West

First published in 1986 to wide critical acclaim, The Sexual Perspective broke new ground by bringing together and discussing the painting, sculpture and photography of artists who were gay/lesbian/queer/bisexual. The lavishly illustrated new edition discusses the greater lesbian visibility within the visual arts and artist's responses to the AIDS epidemic. Emmanuel Cooper places the art in its artistic, social and legal contexts, making it a vital contribution to current debates about art, gender, identity and sexuality.