Exploring identity development and gender orientation, Lesbian Epiphanies: Women Coming Out in Later Life contains firsthand information about the experiences and difficulties of women who discover and reveal their newfound lesbian sexuality in later life. Psychologists, social workers, counselors, and professors will find that Lesbian Epiphanies is the first book to extensively quote from interviews of lesbians and bisexuals who had entered into heterosexual marriages. From the analysis of these 24 interviews, the psychological, erotic, and social processes of women who come out as lesbians or bisexuals after a heterosexual marriage are clearly explained so you can better assist your clients throughout this coming-out process. Discussing the personal and societal standards which clouded early self-awareness for these women, Lesbian Epiphanies lifts the veil of confusion to clearly illuminate the issues at hand to assist you in understanding and helping your clients. From the case studies in this important book, you will learn how some women came to realize their same gender attractions and the barriers they faced, including negative attitudes toward lesbian women and the lack of strong role models. Helpful and informative, Lesbian Epiphanies explores the development of sexual identity in women in the Unites States today and provides you with essential information to help you improve your services to lesbian and bisexual clients by: examining how the role of marriage in American culture stifles a woman's self-awareness of her sexuality in order to help clients avoid the mistake of a heterosexual marriage before husbands and children are involved examining reasons behind the lack of valuable sexual information in America that limits a woman's general awareness of herself, her body, her sexuality, and her life options understanding the challenges that lesbians and bisexuals experience when attempting to establish their true identities to assist your clients in overcoming these barriers suggesting support groups for clients who are having a difficult time becoming used to the ideas and feelings of some same gender attractionsThis insightful book knocks down the sociological and psychological barriers that keep women from realizing or acknowledging their real sexual orientation by dispelling societal and cultural myths about what it means to be a woman in the United States. Offering you invaluable advice on how to help clients effectively and happily live with their new identities, Lesbian Epiphanies provides solutions to the challenges that women experience in establishing their other-than-heterosexual orientation in a heterosexist society.

This volume comprises an interdisciplinary collection of papers on Freud's "Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman". This sixth and last case study has received very little attention, in sharp contrast to the Dora case, for example. The editors see this lack of attention as a sign of the marginalization of lesbians in both psychoanalytic theory and in culture. The book provides a forum where questions surrounding this case can be discussed in detail.

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There are areas which can be described as gay space in that they have many lesbians and gays in the population. Queerspace: A History of Urban Sexuality, edited by David Higgs, offers a history of gay space in the major cities form the early modern period to the present. The book focuses on the changing nature of queer experience in London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janiero, San Francisco, Paris, Lisbon and Moscow.
This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of extensive source material, including diaries, poems, legal accounts and journalism. By concentrating the importance of the city and varied meeting places such as parks, river walks, bathing places, the street, bars and even churches, the contributors explore the extent to which gay space existed, the degree of social collectiveness felt by those who used this space and their individual histories.

Love Matters: A Book of Lesbian Romance and Relationships is a collection of advice columns and personal reflections that will help lesbian couples validate and appreciate their unique relationships. With excerpts taken from the author's "Love Matters" column in the lesbian newspaper New Phazes, this book explores real-life questions and issues that lesbians have about dating, sex, love, and relationship longevity. From Love Matters, you?ll receive honest, informative advice that can help you and your partner share a more open and fulfilling relationship.Offering support, care, and understanding for lesbian couples, Love Matters seeks to recognize the "new female role" for lesbian women. Using her 15-year long relationship as a basis for many of the responses, the author provides you with suggestions and insight into topics relating to lesbian relationships, such as: keeping sex alive in a long-term relationship handling finances fairly and successfully supporting your partner through the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes caused by menopause identifying the difficulties of dating and what lesbians look for on a date questioning the purpose of and emotions caused by a long-distance relationship realizing how homophobia affects love and relationshipsWhile focusing on the joys and experiences of couples, this book also addresses depression and loneliness felt by single lesbians, break-ups, and the death of a partner. You?ll find that Love Matters offers comfort, hope, and humor that will help you understand the difficulties and rewards of your lesbian relationship.

Love Matters: A Book of Lesbian Romance and Relationships is a collection of advice columns and personal reflections that will help lesbian couples validate and appreciate their unique relationships. With excerpts taken from the author's "Love Matters" column in the lesbian newspaper New Phazes, this book explores real-life questions and issues that lesbians have about dating, sex, love, and relationship longevity. From Love Matters, you?ll receive honest, informative advice that can help you and your partner share a more open and fulfilling relationship.Offering support, care, and understanding for lesbian couples, Love Matters seeks to recognize the "new female role" for lesbian women. Using her 15-year long relationship as a basis for many of the responses, the author provides you with suggestions and insight into topics relating to lesbian relationships, such as: keeping sex alive in a long-term relationship handling finances fairly and successfully supporting your partner through the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes caused by menopause identifying the difficulties of dating and what lesbians look for on a date questioning the purpose of and emotions caused by a long-distance relationship realizing how homophobia affects love and relationshipsWhile focusing on the joys and experiences of couples, this book also addresses depression and loneliness felt by single lesbians, break-ups, and the death of a partner. You?ll find that Love Matters offers comfort, hope, and humor that will help you understand the difficulties and rewards of your lesbian relationship.

There are areas which can be described as gay space in that they have many lesbians and gays in the population. Queerspace: A History of Urban Sexuality, edited by David Higgs, offers a history of gay space in the major cities form the early modern period to the present. The book focuses on the changing nature of queer experience in London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janiero, San Francisco, Paris, Lisbon and Moscow.
This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of extensive source material, including diaries, poems, legal accounts and journalism. By concentrating the importance of the city and varied meeting places such as parks, river walks, bathing places, the street, bars and even churches, the contributors explore the extent to which gay space existed, the degree of social collectiveness felt by those who used this space and their individual histories.

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book's penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint.Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the 'real'and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses: the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society how questions of purity, 'authenticity,'and self-definition complicate the field of representation the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible several 'new wave'performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body what the term 'lesbian playwright'means within contemporary culture 'It's Queer Up North'--a British National Arts Organization the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performanceAnyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of 'positive representation'--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

Pulp and Other Plays by Tasha Fairbanks is an anthology of plays which were written for the British group Siren Theatre Company, a lesbian theatre collective founded in 1979 by women from the punk music scene who worked with their unorthodox performance skills to challenge mainstream traditions of "straight" acting. This anthology of three of the company's plays brings long overdue recognition to the company which was Britain's foremost lesbian collective in the 1980s. This collection indicates the diversity of Siren's theatre work: their radical feminist critique of heterosexuality and male violence in "Curfew," their celebration of lesbian glamour and desire in "Pulp," and a scathing attack on Thatcherite Britain in "Now Wash Your Hands Please."
About the Editors
Gabrielle Griffin is Professor of Women's Studies at Nene College, Northampton. She is author of "Heavenly Love? Lesbian Images in Twentieth Century Women's Writing" (1993) and has most recently edi

How can being closeted or out affect the personal and professional life of a lesbian in academia? This volume, a collection of over thirty personal narratives, explores what it's like to be a lesbian working in a college or university setting. Along with the stories are in-depth analyses of the narratives by other academics. Issues such as race, class and age and how these factors distinguish each individual's "place" in the academy are examined.
The contributors have written from a wide range of experiences-- different degrees of outness, various academic disciplines, many geographic locations, and several types of academic settings.

Creating a Place For Ourselves is a groundbreaking collection of essays which takes an historical look at gay life in the United States before Stonewall and the gay liberation movement. Along with examining areas with large gay communities such as New York, San Francisco and Fire Island, the contributors also consider the thriving gay populations in cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Washington D.C., Birmingham and Flint, demonstrating that gay communities are truly everywhere.

Femininity Played Straight traces the changing relationships of lesbianism and feminist theory from the late 1970s to the present, arguing for accounts of sexuality, gender and subjectivity that make lesbianism intelligible and important.

Femininity Played Straight traces the changing relationships of lesbianism and feminist theory from the late 1970s to the present, arguing for accounts of sexuality, gender and subjectivity that make lesbianism intelligible and important.

The woman-made world described in Sappho's songs has been discussed and analysed for centuries. In "Sappho's Sweetbitter Songs," late twentieth century theories of feminism, psychoanalysis and literary criticism are applied to Sappho's lyrics for the first time. The study recreates and examines a voice that sings of the dreams and interactions of women, tells of the bodies, rhythms and desires of the women of Sappho's circle. At the same time it offers an analysis of sexual difference, comparing the homoerotic lyrics of male poets of that era to those of Sappho.

Are bodies sexy? How, and in what sorts of ways? "Sexy Bodies" investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, sexualities of all kinds--dyke, bisexual, transracial, even heterosexual. While celebrating lesbian and queer sexualities, "Sexy Bodies" also explores what runs underneath and within "all" sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally strange about all bodies, all carnalities.
Looking at a pleasurable variety of cultural forms and texts, the contributors consider the particular charms of girls and horses, from "National Velvet" to "Marnie"; discuss figures of the lesbian body, from vampires to tomboys; uncover "virtual" lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson; track desire in the music of legendary Blues singers; and investigate the ever-scrutinized and celebrated body of Elizabeth Taylor. The collection also includes two important pieces of fiction byMary Fallon and Nicole Brossard.
"Sexy Bodies" makes new connections between and among bodies, cruising the borders of the obscene, the pleasurable, the desirable, and the unspoken, rethinking sexuality anew, as deeply and stangely sexy.
Contributors: Sue Best, Nicole Brossard, Dianne Chisholm, Barbara Creed, Angela Davis, Mary Fallon, Anna Gibbs, Sue Golding, Elizabeth Grosz, Melissa Jane Hardie, Lisa Moore, Chantal Nadeau, Elspeth Probyn, Sabina Sawhney, Catherine Waldby

In spite of the attention that Latin American women writers have attracted in recent years, a book dedicated exclusively to those writers whose work primarily articulates a lesbian perspective was until now missing. The purpose of this book, first published in 1996, is to bring attention to and examine the articulation of lesbian themes, motifs and issues in the works of these writers. It aims to study the problems pertaining to the specific literary representations of lesbianism and to examine the dimensions of a lesbian view in the works. By undertaking the study of the works of these women writers, this book contributes to the recognition and legitimization of a lesbian literary discourse.

Contents:
List of Plates Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: On Invisibility and Mortality 1. What is a Nice Lesbian Like You, Doing in a Film Like This? 2. The Meaning of Treut 3. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Texts Cannot Reach 4. Salmonberries: Consuming kd lang 5. Sex in the Summer of '88 6. `If You Don't Play, You Can't Win': Desert Hearts and the Lesbian Romance Film 7. Portrait of a Production 8. The Space Between: Daughters and Lovers in Anne Trister 9. On Not Being Lady Macbeth: Some (Troubled) Thoughts on Lesbian Spectatorship 10. Girl's Camp? The Politics of Parody 11. Looking at Pumping Iron II: The Women 12. Desire and Design - Ripley Undressed 13. Interview with Andrea Weiss and Greta Schiller

"Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image" is the first collection to bring together leading film-makers, academics and activists to discuss films by, for and about lesbians and queer women.
The contributors debate the practice of lesbian and queer film-making, from the queer cinema of Monika Treut to the work of lesbian film-makers Andrea Weiss and Greta Schiller. They explore the pleasures and problems of lesbian spectatorship, both in mainstream Hollywood films including "Aliens" and "Red Sonja," and in independent cinema from "She" "Must Be Seeing Things" to "Salmonberries" and "Desert Hearts."
The authors tackle tricky questions: Can a film such as "Strictly Ballroom" be both pleasurably camp and heterosexist? Is it OK to drool over dyke iconsw like Sigourney Weaver and kd lang? What makes a film lesbian, or queer, or even post-queer? What about showingsex on screen? And why do lesbian screen romances hardly ever have happy endings?
"Immortal, Invisible" is splendidly illustrated with a selection of images from film and television texts, and will a significant contribution to the areas of queer theory and film studies.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The National Lesbian and Gay Survey is a mass observation project set up in 1985 to record the experience of lesbians and gay men. Since that time, lesbian and gay volunteers have provided accounts on a wide range of issues pertinent to lesbian and gay life. "What a Lesbian Looks Like" draws on this material to provide an anthology of personal writings from lesbians nationwide. The volunteers come from all walks of life, from the unemployed to holders of high powered jobs, and represent all age groups. A ll aspects of lesbian experience are covered, including first sexual encounters, long term relationships, the difficulties of "coming out" and Clause 28 This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in the fields of women's studies, gender studies and cultural studies.

This groundbreaking new book weaves personal portraits of lesbian and gay Southerners with interdisciplinary commentary about the impact of culture, race, and gender on the development of sexual identity. Growing Up Gay in the South is an important book that focuses on the distinct features of Southern life. It will enrich your understanding of the unique pressures faced by gay men and lesbians in this region--the pervasiveness of fundamental religious beliefs; the acceptance of racial, gender, and class community boundaries; the importance of family name and family honor; the unbending view of appropriate childhood behaviors; and the intensity of adolescent culture.You will learn what it is like to grow up gay in the South as these Southern lesbians and gay men candidly share their attitudes and feelings about themselves, their families, their schooling, and their search for a sexual identity. These insightful biographies illustrate the diversity of persons who identify themselves as gay or lesbian and depict the range of prejudice and problems they have encountered as sexual rebels. Not just a simple compilation of "coming out" stories, this landmark volume is a human testament to the process of social questioning in the search for psychological wholeness, examining the personal and social significance of acquiring a lesbian or gay identity within the Southern culture. Growing Up Gay in the South combines intriguing personal biographies with the extensive use of scholarship from lesbian and gay studies, Southern history and literature, and educational thought and practice. These features, together with an extensive bibliography and appendices of data, make this essential reading for educators and other professionals working with gay and lesbian youth.

This special issue of "Feminist Review" maps the field of contemporary lesbian politics and culture and highlights lesbians' special contribution to debates at the heart of feminism. This book should be of interest to wide general as well as students and lecturers in the fields of women's studies, history, cultural studies, sociology.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

This book, first published in 2000, explores the intersections of race, gender and gay identities in writings by contemporary American lesbians of colour in order to show how this subject is sometimes ignored, sometimes brutalised and is very rarely able to survive on her own terms by constructing her own identity acts of cultural revision. The author places the lesbian of colour in the context of current identity theories showing the ever-present blind spots within current theoretical paradigms, she then reads a variety of writings by lesbians of colour describing the possibilities that exist for these subjects in textual and social realities. The author shows the varied communities that threaten the existence of this subject, as well as the limits that dictate the subject's ability to create her self. By bridging Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and Gloria Anzaldua's New Mestiza she describes how lesbians of colour can survive numerous sites of hostility by constructing a positive identity within her home community through revising cultural traditions and history. After considering the power of these acts of revision, the author calls for the empowered performance of the mestiza state - the state of contradiction wherein the lesbian of colour finds herself. This book is the first to analyse creative and theoretical works by African American, Asian American, Latina and Native American communities and writers through the lens of lesbian studies. Authors include recognised figures such as Audre Lorde, Ana Castillo and Paula Gunn Allen, as well as lesser known authors like Best Brant, Natashia Lopez and Willyce Kim. It provides a corrective to Butler's empowering but essentially white vision of performing identity, so that lesbians of colour can claim their identities and remain tied to their own cultural traditions. Ultimately, the author asks for a reconsideration of the value of identity studies that articulate monolithic identities and whose analyses perpetuate what they seek to disrupt.

Taking lesbians in Singapore as a case study, this book explores the possibility of a modern gay identity in a postcolonial society, that is not dependent on Western queer norms. It looks at the core question of how this identity can be reconciled with local culture and how it relates to global modernities and dominant understandings of what it means to be queer. It engages with debates about globalization, post-colonialism and sexuality, while emphasising the specificity, diversity and interconnectedness of local lesbian sexualities.