Lesbian Voices Research Articles

South Africa’s National Arts Festival (review)

Reviewed by: South Africa’s National Arts Festival Megan Lewis South Africa’s National Arts Festival. Grahamstown, South Africa. 2–11 July 2009. South Africa’s constitution is one of the world’s most inclusive, protecting its citizens’ rights to racial, linguistic, gender, and sexual-preference freedoms. While the law guarantees such rights, the country is still plagued by an AIDS pandemic, the highest rape statistics in the world, and rampant homophobia. Fifteen years into this young democracy, the thirty-fifth annual National Arts Festival threw a ten-day coming-out party replete with a range of physical and figurative bodies and their complex stories of identity. Central to many of this year’s offerings was the queering of the multiple narratives of belonging of South Africa’s varied populations. The jewel in the festival’s crown was Jeremy Crutchley’s remarkable portrayal of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in the Baxter Theatre’s South African premiere of Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, directed by Janice Honeyman. “Ich bin ein transvesteit,” Charlotte teased, smoothing her hands over the black headscarf and single strand of pearls that marked her distinctly masculine body as feminine. As s/he told her tale of surviving two repressive forces, the Nazis and the Stasi, we journeyed with her through questions of contradictory accounts of history, complicity with authorities, what human beings do in order to survive repressive regimes, and the courage of an individual to stand against the grain to make safe spaces for others like her. The final image of the play is a photograph of Charlotte as a young boy between two lionesses, an interloper between masculine and feminine, between the Nazis and the Stasi. The image resonated in contemporary South Africa as a potent emblem of the country’s position between its own shifting regimes, and Crutchley’s luminous, playful, and ballsy Charlotte opened the discussion of gender performativity at the festival . . . and beyond. While gay male voices have been heard at the festival before, thanks in large part to the committed vision of Peter Hayes and the Hearts & Eyes Theatre Collective, lesbian voices—and lesbian bodies— came out in force this year. Ncamisa! The Women, directed by Hayes and starring newcomer Pam Ngwabeni, was a bold one-woman show about coming out as a black lesbian in the township of Khayelitsha. Using soccer as her metaphor, the lithe, boyish actress played with the audience as she footed the ball, coyly inviting us into her world— a world where girls kissed (ncamisa in isiXhosa), where she strutted her sexuality with confidence, and where, guiding two handheld work lights over her face and body, she sang, “One day I’ll grow up and be a beautiful woman. . . . But for today I am a child, for today I am a boy.” In this heartfelt story of love, loss, pride, and terror, Ngwabeni tackled the dangers and challenges that lesbians face in the townships, from social stigma and misunderstanding to “corrective rape” and, in particular, the 2006 murder of her friend, Zoliswa Nkonyana. As she slowly began to undress herself, Ngwabeni also spoke of Eudy Simelane, who on 28 April 2008 was “found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema. . . . She has been gang-raped, and brutally beaten before being stabbed twenty-five times in the face, chest, and legs.” The issue of corrective rape was also taken up by lesbian sangoma (traditional healer) Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, who shared her experiences of dancing like a woman and slaughtering like a man at the Spirituality and Sexuality Series of the festival: “I was born a lesbian . . . and [End Page 275] Click for larger view View full resolution Jeremy Crutchley (Charlotte von Mahlsdorf) in I Am My Own Wife. (Photo: Harold Gess.) [End Page 276] I was called to be a sangoma as a lesbian,” she said. “We are not something to be fixed.” Ngwabeni’s performance echoed Nkabinde’s rebel yell, and as she enumerated multiple cases of violence toward lesbians, she painstakingly washed herself clean in a tub of water, singing to Lucinda Williams’s “Unsuffer Me.” Ngwabeni ended the piece with a love scene, dressing up in her hip-hop ball...

Sexuality and personality: The effect of pitch height and contour width on perception in Japanese.

This work investigates how Japanese listeners judge a speaker’s personality characteristics and sexual orientation. Base sentences, produced in Japanese by a male and a female native Japanese speaker, were resynthesized to manipulate specific acoustic characteristics believed to influence perceived sexual orientation or personality. Overall, the higher the fundamental frequency (f0) of the female voice, the less likely it was to be perceived as lesbian. Similarly, the flatter the intonation pattern of the female voice, the more likely it was to be viewed as lesbian. For male voices, the higher the f0, the more likely the voice would be perceived as gay. Pitch variability did not play a significant role in this perception. Finally, out of the four personality scales investigated, two showed a significant correlation to lesbian voices: masculinity and calmness. Male voices showed the same pattern, with gay voices correlating with femininity and emotionality. The influence of the sex of the listener was also...

Fad Lesbianism: Exposing Media's Posing

The heteronormative appropriation of lesbianism as a fleeting performative act is addressed as “fad” lesbianism. The author contends that advertisements in popular culture that employ “fad” lesbianism negatively impact women who are questioning their sexualities and the “authentic” lesbian community. This position is articulated through the intertextual weaving of the author's academic voice and personal lesbian voice. The experimental and textual approach to the research is utilized in order to illustrate that any reading of “fad” lesbianism in visual culture is informed by multiple personal subjectivities that cannot, and should not, be separated from one another.

Speaking out: perspectives of gay and lesbian practitioners in outdoor education in the UK

Outdoor education has been shaped historically and culturally by many influences. Physically challenging activities out of doors have been appropriated by a number of traditions. These include militaristic, educational and developmental ideologies. Arguably, central to these ideologies are heterosexual, white middle class values. While women have sought to challenge this and feminist and pro-feminist research is evident, very little research has been undertaken into sexuality in relation to teacher or practitioner perspective and experience. Consequently, gay and lesbian voices within outdoor education are all but silenced. This paper explores the perspectives of three lesbian and four gay men who work in the UK outdoor education ‘industry’. In-depth interviews were held with the participants exploring a variety of issues relating to their life histories and their experiences of working in a predominantly heterosexist outdoor education culture. This paper focuses upon the ways in which the participants perceived the need to conceal their lesbian and gay identities and the consequential effects of managing their identities.

A lesbian feminist analysis of the demise of hormone replacement therapy

For many years, radical feminists have been warning about the dangers inherent in the use of Hormone Replacement Therapy. Until the release of the Women's Health Initiative results in 2002, these warnings were dismissed and discredited. In this article I summarise these recent debates. In addition, I also draw upon findings from my doctoral research, the first study in Australia to examine lesbians' experiences of menopause, to highlight how lesbian voices and radical feminist analyses of the medicalisation of midlife are overlooked and dismissed. For the purpose of this article, I restrict my critique to the issue of Hormone Replacement Therapy. Throughout this article I challenge negative, stereotypical views of lesbians at menopause and suggest that listening to lesbians adds a new dimension to the presently narrow, heterosexist and medicalised view of women at midlife.

Response

Monica A. Coleman's essay is a courageous attempt to expose three inherent weaknesses in womanist religious scholarship. By raising critical and constructive questions for both theological and ethical inquiry, Coleman stirs a body of work that has for too long been uncritical of itself and unreceptive of different voices inside and outside of its camp. Although all three points in Coleman's essay are essential and interrelated in depicting these inherent weaknesses that at present exist in womanist religious scholarship, I will expound on the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship. In so doing, I aim to demonstrate how the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship excludes queer voices.1 I also aim to demonstrate how the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship creates an essentialist construction and application [End Page 107] of this opus of work, thus truncating its growth and compromising its academic respectability As an African American Christian lesbian ordained minister, theologian, and activist who speaks, writes, and loves unapologetically from this standpoint, I stand in the womanist religious scholarship camp similarly to the way I do in the Black Church—as a sister outsider.2 As a sister outsider, I am tangentially aligned to these communities with the nagging experience of marginalization, if not complete dispossession. For me and others like me, being both of African descent and queer creates a distinctive epistemology that shapes not only our identity but also the distinctive interpretative lens we use to zoom in on the world with regard to politics, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, issues that contribute to both the church and the academy. Our method of identifying, or "languaging," ourselves as both of African descent and queer is evident in the terms we use, such as "in the life"—an identifier, a code, that derives from the Harlem Renaissance. Another is the term "same-gender loving," which became popular in the African American queer lexicon in the 1990s. Both terms are indeed a radical pronouncement for LGBTQ people of African descent, because they are statements about openly engaging in gender expressions and sexual orientations counter to the accepted norm, and about naming this engagement in the face of virulent homophobia in the Black Church and in African American male religious scholarship in the academy that could very well cost us our careers, if not our lives. Unlike white feminist and African American male religious scholarship that excludes me because I am black, female, and lesbian, womanist religious scholarship appeared to offer hope at first. With Alice Walker's second definition of the term explicitly stating that a womanist is "A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually," I felt the excitement of finally participating in an African American sisterhood organizing across sexualities.3 Also [End Page 108] I experienced the excitement of engaging in an intellectual collaboration with African American women in the nascent stages of development of womanist religious scholarship However, as the women in this field grew in numbers, the dominant and controlling voices in the academy were those of Christian heterosexual women. Noticing how her voice and visibility in womanist religious scholarship was becoming marginalized, womanist lesbian theologian Renee Hill stated, "The lesbian voice is silenced in Christian womanist theology. Heterosexism and homophobia are nonissues in the Christian womanist paradigm for liberation. There is no widespread discussion on sexuality in African American Christian theology in general. Christian womanists, like their male counterparts, focus for the most part on the impact of racism on the Black community."4 Some womanist Christians would say that the battle in womanist religious scholarship is not one between heterosexual and lesbian women but rather, as womanist ethicist Cheryl Sanders argued in 1989, one whose purpose is "to set forth an authentic representation of Walker's concept in [womanist theological and ethical thought]."5 This statement came back to bite Sanders, as her troubles began in not recognizing and honoring the various ways African American women had come to use and to share the term, especially with other women...

The Emerging Lesbian Voice in Nigerian Feminist Literature

The Emerging Lesbian Voice in Nigerian Feminist Literature

Lesbian Voices: The Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive and Post-war British Lesbian History

The article examines life history interviews conducted with lesbians, which form part of the Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive at the National Sound Archive. This material is used in order to examine lesbian identities in Britain in the years 1945-1970. The article also explores the issues with using this form of oral history material, in particular, it was necessary to question both how these narratives were constructed to articulate a specific notion of lesbian identity and how they might be deconstructed to reveal the more fractured and contingent nature of post-war lesbian identities. The interviews produced accounts of lesbian experience and identity in the post-war decades, which were profoundly shaped by recent understandings of lesbian identity. It is this impact of contemporary notions of identity on personal narrative, and its significance to the lesbian and gay historian, which forms the focus of this article.

The women’s same-sex forum and African women’s life history project of sex and secrecy: The 4th conference of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture, and Society

The 4th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society (IASSCS), Sex and Secrecy, was held June 2225, 2003, in Johannesburg, South Africa. IASSCS is a relatively new interdisciplinary association organized in 1997 with an explicit focus on the intersections of sexuality, culture, health, and society. As noted on the conference’s current website (http://wiserweb.wits.ac .za/conf2003), the impetus behind the creation of IASSCS was the perceived need to address the fragmentation of studies in sexuality and to provide a forum for expanding and developing sexuality as a legitimate area of scholarship. The organization is both academic and policy oriented, and has developed a strong international network of NGOs, funding organizations, and scholars. Organized around the theme of “Sex and Secrecy,” the conference generated presentations on a wide range of topics, from the politics of sexuality, sexuality and HIV/AIDS, histories of sexuality and prejudice, religion and sexuality, to gender-based violence. In addition to the many excellent presentations on these topics, two forums specifically addressed lesbian sexualities, the Women’s Same-Sex Forum and the African Women’s Life History Project. Since the 1st international meeting of IASSCS, Saskia Wieringa, a Dutch anthropologist, feminist, and activist—and the new president of IASSCS—initiated and organized a women’s same-sex forum to ensure that lesbian voices are represented in the association and at the conferences. The forum consists of a set of panels oriented to topics addressing lesbian identities, sexualities, and health practices. Papers presented in the women’s same-sex forum in Melbourne, Australia (2001) specifically focused on lesbian and female transgender practices in Asia. With the addition of relevant papers from the Johannesburg forum, these papers will be published in a volume edited by Saskia Wieringa, Abha Bhaiya, and Evelyn Blackwood. One of the difficulties in organizing these sessions has been the problem of getting lesbian activist organizers to attend and present papers at the conferences. Since part of the mission of IASSCS is to create a dialogue between academics, practitioners, and activists, forum organizers felt it was important to incorporate lesbian activists who are working on the front lines in their countries to gain visibility and acceptance for lesbians. With the designation of Johannesburg as the site of the 4th conference, Saskia Wieringa collaborated with Ruth Morgan of Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa (GALA) to develop an innovative approach that would encourage lesbian activists in Africa both in their research and activism. With funding from HIVOS, the Humanist Institute for Co-operation with Developing Countries (www.hivos.nl), they created the African Women’s Life

Lesbian and gay voices: an annotated bibliography and guide to literature for children and young adults

Lesbian and gay voices: an annotated bibliography and guide to literature for children and young adults

Lesbian Voices from Latin America

Lesbian Voices from Latin America

Straight news: gays, lesbians, and the news media

Addressing the critical role of the media in creating a public image of gay issues and lives, this is a comprehensive survey of how the news media have covered, or failed to cover, major lesbian and gay issues since the 1940s. A former CNN reporter, the author provides an insider's view of the changing fortunes of lesbians and gays in American print and broadcasting media. The book traces the stories on gay and lesbian issues which have been featured in the American press, and the changing attitudes towards those issues which they represent. Through close examination of the stories to which the media failed to devote attention, such as the Stonewall rebellion of 1969 and the mass murder at New York's Ramrod bar in 1980, the book sheds light on processes by which news items are generated, assigned and edited, and how these processes have more often than not translated into the exclusion of gay and lesbian voices and concerns.

Lesbian voices from Latin America: breaking ground

Lesbian voices from Latin America: breaking ground

Sophia Parnok: the life and work of Russia's Sappho

The weather in Moscow is good, there's no cholera, there's also no lesbian love...Brrr! Remembering those persons of whom you write me makes me nauseous as if I'd eaten a rotten sardine. Moscow doesn't have them--and that's marvellous. --Anton Chekhov, writing to his publisher in 1895 Chekhov's barbed comment suggests the climate in which Sophia Parnok was writing, and is an added testament to to the strength and confidence with which she pursued both her personal and artistic life. Author of five volumes of poetry, and lover of Marina Tsvetaeva, Sophia Parnok was the only openly lesbian voice in Russian poetry during the Silver Age of Russian letters. Despite her unique contribution to modern Russian lyricism however, Parnok's life and work have essentially been forgotten. Parnok was not a political activist, and she had no engagement with the feminism vogueish in young Russian intellectual circles. From a young age, however, she deplored all forms of male posturing and condescension and felt alienated from what she called patriarchal virtues. Parnok's approach to her sexuality was equally forthright. Accepting lesbianism as her natural disposition, Parnok acknowledged her relationships with women, both sexual and non-sexual, to be the centre of her creative existence. Diana Burgin's extensively researched life of Parnok is deliberately woven around the poet's own account, visible in her writings. The book is divided into seven chapters, which reflect seven natural divisions in Parnok's life. This lends Burgin's work a particular poetic resonance, owing to its structural affinity with one of Parnok's last and greatest poetic achievements, the cycle of love lyrics Ursa Major. Dedicated to her last lover, Parnok refers to this cycle as a seven-star of verses, after the seven stars that make up the constellation. Parnok's poems, translated here for the first time in English, added to a wealth of biographical material, make this book a fascinating and lyrical account of an important Russian poet. Burgin's work is essential reading for students of Russian literature, lesbian history and women's studies.

Editorial

In 2003, I published a paper entitled “Is There a Lesbian Identity in the Arab Culture?” in al-Raida. Many years later, I was honored when al-Raida invited me to be a guest editor of a special issue. On a personal level, editing this issue offered me the chance to provide a critical analysis of the concept of lesbian subjectivity from a non-heteronormative lesbian perspective. It also provided several scholars with the platform to submit their views and papers on various topics that had largely been suppressed, misjudged, denied, or misunderstood in many places in the Arab world. Despite the fact that this issue appears to be a theme-less one, the selected papers are connected by a thread that revolves around lesbian issues, social activism, and the dilemma between integration and segregation both within andro-centric ‘Queer’ organizations and hetero-centric feminist organizations. Hence, this issue brings to the forefront various perspectives of self-identified lesbian scholars and social activists, and reveals the multiplicity of lesbian voices and their experiences in the Arab region. Moreover, central to this issue are the challenges of identity politics within the complicated socio-political structures of Arab cultures.