201. Chapter 1: SPEAKING ITS NAME.
- Author
-
Plummer, Ken
- Abstract
This chapter focuses on lesbian and gay studies. Gay and lesbian studies has become a major area of scholarship, smaller but comparable to black studies and womens studies. In universities and colleges around the Western world, courses have been offered. Some of the most prestigious universities in the USA, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, New York City, MIT, Duke, Santa Cruz, San Francisco have hosted conferences or established courses. Gay and lesbian writing does not start in the 1970s, but seeps back into history. A much more explicit and articulate literature starts to emerge however with the advent of the homophile movement trickling into existence throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, and symbolically arriving through the new womens liberation movement and the Stonewall riots of the late 1960s. The analysis of political lesbianism extends the meaning of lesbianism beyond physical sex, progressively to capture an extensive world of womanly feeling, ritual, spirituality, culture.
- Published
- 1992