Search

The fearless ancient Amazons have been seen as forebears and prototypes by lesbians, feminists, and transgender men. In this introduction, I will explore why the Greek legends of the Amazons lend themselves to such interpretation. Ancient Greek literature details how the Amazons challenged patriarchy, lived without men, and defeated their male enemies, thus setting a precedent that would later be emulated by feminists and lesbians. Though the Amazons are clearly designated as women they are also identified with men in ancient Greek lore; in ancient Greek vase painting, they wear masculine outfits and engage in masculine habits, including fighting and hunting. Thus I will examine the Amazons' gender transgression in ancient Greek contexts in order to understand how and why these myths set the stage for the adoption of the Amazons as role models by later generations of gender nonconformists. I will also briefly examine the history behind those myths, a history which is just as important to lesbian and other queer communities as the myths which it spawned. Finally, I will weave my analysis of the ancient Greek ideology of Amazons with innovative, new research on the reception of the Amazons found in the six other articles that make up this special edition. These essays explore the powerful place of Amazons and Amazon-like women in the imaginaries of peoples ranging from the ancient Romans to modern lesbian feminists, and the importance of historical and legendary warrior women who defied patriarchy and colonialism in locales ranging from the West to Africa to India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opening with a reflection on lesbian invisibility, "Lesbian Vitality: A Provocation" challenges the idea of lesbian erasure, particularly when it is used in relationship to transgender people. Arguing for a multiplicity of lesbian identities and spaces for capacious lesbian formations, the author draws from the history of the periodical Sinister Wisdom and her experiences editing it to call for lesbian vitality as an alternative to erasure and as a focus for lesbian and queer women's community-making and cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Caribbean region has a long history of violence and conflict due to colonization and contemporary neocolonial policies and structures. The region's political, economic, and social climate is overshadowed by activism that centers legal repeal of homophobic laws left intact by colonial powers. These movements have created a polarization between the mainstream groups seeking legal changes, and those who are denied and erased from these discourses. This article is an examination of lesbian, bisexual, queer and gay women of mixed-race middle-class status in the city of Georgetown, Guyana as they negotiate racialized heteropatriarchal violence, a space that offers a unique place in which to understand how different queer subjects experience violence within Guyana. This article examines a set of interrelated questions: In what ways do women who love women perceive their gender performances? In what ways is femme-ness embodied to resist violence and yet is a site of violence? The analysis reveals the ways in which women embody a strategic femme-ness in a political, racial, class, and gender hierarchical society. As the country becomes increasingly incorporated into a global queer culture, divisions within the queer community are further sharpened, with racial, class, sexual, gender, and regional boundaries shifting and forging new lived realities for queer subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is limited research regarding queer spaces in Turkey, and even less on lesbians because women have struggled to have an active public presence in Turkey. Accordingly, lesbian spaces are more embodied and less explicitly visible in public spaces than in the West. This study aims to make the invisible more visible by examining the space-making strategies of the lesbian community during the late 20th and early 21st century when lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) activism reached a high point in Turkey. In particular, we examined the ways that lesbians challenged narrow conceptions of "territoriality," through their use of spaces such as bars, homes, and restaurants in one neighborhood across time, by reviewing print media archives with LGBTQ coverage and interviewing a sample of activist lesbian women who participated in the lesbian scene in Istanbul during this period. Our findings reveal that lesbians opted to live in Beyoglu due to its multicultural and welcoming character, and formed their businesses as venues to socialize as well as serve LGBTQ clientele. They also expanded the openness of gay bars in the district and opened their houses for home parties within the lesbian community. Furthermore, they used all these arenas as meeting places for lesbian activist support groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Not in my backyard" (NIMBY) movements emerge when a social or political event spurs opposition from local residents. Much research on NIMBY movements concentrates on local residents' efforts to defend their community from unwanted "outsiders" or elements, such as a waste incinerator or sex offenders. Little is written on how NIMBY activism can redefine a place to be more inclusive of sexual minorities and supportive of progressive social initiatives. After the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in favor of marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples citing her religious beliefs. Davis' actions galvanized marriage-equality and religious-freedom activists in the region. Pro-marriage-equality activists included lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, and queer women who viewed Davis' action as an attack on their legitimacy in the community. Drawing on 11 interviews with queer women in Kentucky, we explore how their activist work in Rowan County challenged small-town intolerance and religious homophobia and helped to re-form the region as more a progressive space for sexual minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces, gay male practices, sexualities, and priorities often dominate. I argue that in mixed-gender LGBTQ festival spaces in the South, gay aesthetics are normative, which often minimizes the contributions of lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women. I compare two festival events run by the LGBTQ community—Cornyation, a mock debutante pageant that is part of Fiesta in San Antonio, Texas, and Osiris Ball, a formal Carnival ball during Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. This research is based on participant observation data collected at both events over several years and 38 interviews conducted with event participants. I argue that at these events, gay aesthetic power is exerted through the expectation that LBQ women should master these aesthetics, a dynamic that often relies on gay men as arbiters of successful mastery. These processes were more dramatic in organizations and spaces where men were a numerical majority. This marginalization fits within a pattern of androcentric bias in both the arts and the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The postgay era – marked by decreased stigmatization of non-heterosexual identities and increasing assimilation of gays and lesbians into the heterosexual mainstream – may be indicative of a broader pluralization of queer geographies expanding the social and sexual opportunities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)-identified individuals beyond queer spaces. Less is known, however, about how LBQ women experience these pluralized geographies in a postgay era in their search for sexual partners, and how the perceived accessibility of queer and heterosexual spaces informs the search process. Drawing upon twenty-six in-depth qualitative interviews, this study examines queer-identified undergraduate women's searches for same-sex sexual partners at two LGBTQ-friendly universities in the United States. The women in this study described experiences with dating, sex and relationships within three distinct campus "sexual geographies" – queer spaces, virtual communities and heteronormative campus parties – with entry to each of these sites negotiated in relationship to place-based gender and sexual dynamics. While women at both schools viewed their LGBTQ communities as viable spaces to both build community and meet potential sexual partners, this was paired with the understanding that one needed sufficient "queer capital" to stake a claim there. Counter to the notion that a postgay era has rendered queer space obsolete, or just one of many options, this study suggests that perceptions of queer community spaces as exclusionary or inaccessible may partially contribute to the production of alternative queer geographies beyond marked LGBTQ campus spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender Los Angeles (LA) has ignored Latinx queer communities until recently, and lesbian Latinas, particularly those who are migrants and/or refugees, have been especially marginalized. Building on scholarship and creative work by Chicana, Latina, women of color feminist, queer of color, and queer migration activists and scholars, this essay contributes to research on Mexican, Central American, and Latina lesbians in LA. In her research on sexually non-conforming Latinas, Katie L. Acosta argues that to better understand Latinas' sexualities in all their complexities, future scholarly work should address the pleasures and desires of Latina lesbians, as well as the quality and stability of the relationships they nurture in the borderlands. Building on queer migration research and using what Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio Roque Ramírez call "queer oral history," this article focuses on two everyday lesbians in LA whose stories add depth to our understandings of LA queer history and to the lives of queer migrants in the city. The narratives of Luna and Dulce, migrant lesbians from Mexico and Guatemala, respectively, provide a context for better understanding diverse experiences of migrant Latina lesbians in LA. Situating their lives within ongoing research on lesbian Latinas, this essay focuses on three themes—migration, leisure spaces, and family—to explore how these inform the women's everyday choices and shape their practices of freedom. Their stories and perspectives have been instrumental in enabling me to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that I call "finding sequins in the rubble," through which we can recognize and understand how queer Latinx communities engage in processes of queer-world making and radical possibility through everyday acts of resilience and self-care in the midst of familial, institutional, and state violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Russian state ideology has turned towards instituting "traditional family values," an official turn that increased legal and social discrimination against queer families. The concept of "traditional family values" in the contemporary Russian state discourse refers to the "naturalness" of the heterosexual family, consisting of two parents and their biological offspring. This discourse eliminates the possibility of public lesbian parenting. Following the idea of the conceptualizations of queer temporalities in different geo-cultural contexts, I examine the impact of recent oppressive legal changes in Russia on reproductive choices, everyday parenting strategies, and social interactions among lesbian mothers. In this work, I seek to show more than the obvious harm caused by the "anti-gay law" in terms of its effects on lesbian-headed families. To do so, I analyze the strategies applied by Russian lesbian mothers to tackle the rapidly changing state ideologies and legislative landscapes. I do this by discussing the ways in which lesbian mothers in Russia "manipulate" their social status to avoid possible official or unofficial homophobic actions directed towards them and their children. For example, they may come out selectively, carefully choosing the people to whom they openly present their identity. I argue that to adhere to "ordinary" or "normal" family life, lesbian mothers in Russia use several survival strategies. One of these strategies relates to speculation about immigration to the "West." That is, some lesbian families prepare all of the necessary documentation, secure valid visas, and attend special workshops where they receive legal and informational support on asylum seeking and emigration from Russia. Another set of strategies for maintaining family identity relies on the decision to come out as a co-mother during interactions with official institutions or to choose other identities; for example, godmother or sister of the birth mother of a child. An additional important strategy for lesbian mothers relies on drafting documents that maintain their rights in severe circumstances. This set of actions focuses on legally supporting the parental rights through the use of loopholes in the Russian legislation and drafting documents that maintain their rights to child custody and their partner's property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The absence of scholarship on South Asian discrimination in Western queer discourse contributes to a narrative that South Asians are not subjected to racially charged forms of discrimination in the LGBTQ community, which is fundamentally untrue. This article presents narrative-based accounts of nine queer South Asian women in Toronto, Canada, to examine the ways in which they experience racial discrimination in the LGBTQ community, and the impact that this mistreatment has on identity formation and connectivity to queer spheres. It finds that queer South Asian women experience racial discrimination in the form of racially charged microaggressions, which are evidenced through expectations of assimilation to Western-normative performances of queer identity and erasure of South Asian culture in the LGBTQ community. Further, it reveals that Toronto's LGBTQ community perpetuates a culture of White privilege that discredits the intersectional identity of queer South Asian women, and consequently invisibilizes, alienates, and revokes agency from these women who do not fit the majority's conceptualizations about what a queer woman looks like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from friendship interviews with lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in a small Midwestern city, I argue that non-urban communities might be characterized as ambivalently post-lesbian, as participants explain that shared identities “don't matter” in their friendships, while continuing to insist on the relevance of lesbian identity in their community. This research highlights three sets of concerns about lesbian communities, identities, and friendships. First, given the theoretical purchase of the concept of “post-gay” communities, there is a parallel need to develop the concept of “post-lesbian” as uniquely ambivalent and distinct from post-gay discourses, as the case of LBQ friendship demonstrates. Second, the appearance of post-lesbian narratives beyond major cities suggests a need to reassess the presumably progressive post-gay narrative that gay identities are becoming less central to gay lives. Finally, a focus on close lesbian friendships highlights the central role such relationships continue to play in constituting, and perhaps dismantling, lesbian identities and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines contemporary lesbians’ (and queer women's) urban geographies, drawing from empirical research on Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia. Our argument is grounded in research highlighting lesbians’ distinctive urban experiences: lesbians have both participated in gay villages and gay male spaces and, importantly, carved out their own urban places, including commercial and residential concentrations. In this article we use new mobilities scholarship to delineate historical and contemporary relational geographies materializing since World War II, which continue to rewrite lesbians’ and queer women's inhabitation and experiences of urban landscapes in Toronto and Sydney. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to demystify the notion of a gay vibe from a femme queer woman's perspective. It contextualizes the author's experience of being read by the queer community as straight and of doing femme as a means for placing oneself on the gaydar screen while questioning the role of signifiers in creating a myth that sexuality is always concrete and permanent. Tins article goes further to argue that femme sexuality, because of its occasional invisible stare, has the potential to move between ideological positions in order to destabilize them. This form of differential consciousness has subversive potential because it renders gaydar technology unsubstantial and broken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As temporary but annually re-occurring communities, women's music festivals became a profound symbol of late twentieth century lesbian culture. These summer "Wombstocks" made available the best of lesbian music and comedy in presumably safe settings for sexual display, political networking, and Goddess-centered spirituality. Yet such lesbian utopias were never without conflict. They served as sounding boards for every issue simmering in the lesbian community: racism, classism, lesbian mothers of boy children, S/M, and, most recently, the exclusion of transgender women from woman-only space. The twenty-plus festivals produced from 1974 to the present day each tackled political conflict, production values, and audience/camper services very differently. What was consistent among all festival communities and staff crews was the presentation of lesbian WORK, and the appreciative vibe from those attending--many of whom declared that the feeling of freedom from one festival week each summer fueled their energy for the entire year that followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This account, with photos, from a northern California lesbian land group, presents a brief overview of a twenty-five year experiment with consensus decision-making, shared land ownership and use, and both common and separate housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2000, Vermont established "civil unions" meant for same-sex couples. This form of marriage relies on the existence of a local gay and lesbian community, while contributing to the development of "gay and lesbian tourism" and pushing certain churches to revisit their treatment of same-sex couples. Gay and lesbian rights and rural communities are not mutually exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the Lesbian-hatred the author and her first lover experienced as teenagers and how finding a strong Lesbian-identified community in 1970 made all the difference for her as a lifelong Lesbian. The Lesbian Feminist politics and ideals of equality and support and questioning all patriarchal/heterosexual/mainstream values and oppressive attitudes in the Lesbian community also made a huge difference for her since she is working-class. It was a wonderful time of female-only space with many kinds of events, and later Lesbian writing and Lesbian music (euphemistically called "Women's Music.") That community is mostly gone now and what remains is often segregated by more privileged Lesbians from less privileged Lesbians because of classism and other oppressions. Increasing acceptance of "Male to Female Transsexuals" as Lesbians, as well as increased embracing of male-identified "femininity" continues to damage what remains of Lesbian community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceiving of a "lesbian community" as the process and/or the end product of a lesbian's going outside herself or her intimate relationship to connect with other lesbians, this paper explores the experiences of lesbians in entering the community in Tokyo, Japan, which lesbians refer to as "community debut." Based on the personal accounts gathered through interviewing 24 women in 2002 in the Tokyo area, this paper examines the personal contexts in which the women entered a lesbian community, which included searching for and defining themselves, accepting themselves, and acting out the new identity to make changes in their lives. Some of the women interviewed were prompted by a need to understand themselves as lesbians. Others with a lesbian identity searched for further affirmation through connecting with "the world of lesbians" beyond their immediate contexts. For some other women interviewed, entering the community was a way to help them start their lives anew by getting out of their previous (married) lives. The paper also specifically touches on the significance of the Internet as a source of information for individual women and as a way of creating a lesbian community, identifying both positive and negative aspects. Although the research reported in this paper leaves for further exploration how boundaries of the communities are negotiated and drawn, the norms of the communities, and conflicts and negotiations among individuals and groups, it has provided one piece of the mosaic of lesbian communities in Japan. The communities, while still largely invisible in the mainstream society, are nonetheless an important part of life, albeit in different ways, of many lesbians. The research process leads the author to anticipate greater visibility of lesbians and lesbian communities in Japan in the not too distant future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Susan Krieger reflects on lessons learned from her classic study of a lesbian community, The Mirror Dance, first published in 1983. Krieger's study was unusual in that it eschewed a traditional social scientist's narrative voice, and instead was written from the point of view of the multiple voices of community members. In this retrospective piece, Krieger again challenges us to think in "multiple voices" about the importance of lesbian communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers several lesbian-produced safe sex tapes which engage pornographic vernacular with a dual purpose, offering both a very pointed counter to the dearth of erotic imagery depicting lesbian sex/sexuality specifically by and for women, but also functioning as pedagogical (self-help) tools for rethinking safe sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, lesbian-identified bisexual-what do we call women who have sex with other women? What about the character "Ellen," played by actor/comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who identifies as gay but has not (yet?) slept with a woman? Can she legitimately call herself, gay? More significantly, what exactly is a "legitimate" lesbian? Further, what does the Ellen show tell the millions who viewed the "coming out episodes" about lesbianism? Ellen provides an interesting, and highly public, test-case for these questions. This essay will examine three texts: (1) the three "coming-out" episodes, (2) `the coverage in the popular press, and (3) the coverage in the queer press. We critique the ways in which the straight and gay communities interpret lesbian identity via their representation of the character "Ellen." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a foreword regarding articles found in "The Journal of Lesbian Studies." Project to find out more about lesbian communities; Articles on communities of lesbians who live together, communities that meet yearly, and virtual communities via the Internet; Statement that there is now a lesbian society comprised of many different lesbian communities; Needs that the lesbian communities fulfill including emotional support and creative expression; Discussion of the coming out experience among lesbian communities.