Violence and Social Injustice Against Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People helps you look past the stereotypical picture of violence against sexual minorities--the public physical assaults on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youth by hypermasculine male thugs--and directs you toward the many daily acts of quiet violence that go on, unhindered, in the workaday settings of our legal, social, educational, and law-enforcement institutions. You'll learn about the frightening prevelance of complacency, homophobic ignorance, and apathy that pervades our police departments, courts, high schools, and churches. Also, armed with this critical insight and statistical research, you'll be better equipped to wage a non-violent war of fairness and mutual respect against the daily, senseless violence of policy and practice that threatens to render gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people unwelcome and battered citizens in their own communities.You'll find that Violence and Social Injustice Against Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People is ideal for aiding social workers, counselors, teachers, and criminal justice officials in removing the unseen acts of violence from the policies and practices of the public sector. These and other specific areas will give you the information and the fortitude necessary to evoke positive change in your community: legal issues relating to same-sex marriage the connection between social injustice and violence violence against sexual minority youth sexual identity and ethnic minorities practice and policy recommendations As this book shows, violence against sexual minorities can be subtly woven into the very fabric of some of our most long-standing, respected social institutions. For too long, the sexual minorities of color, for example, and the lesbian who suffers physical assault at the hands of a partner, have had little or no help from social workers, law enforcement, or education for fear of receiving either complete negligence or increased antagonism.But now, in Violence and Social Injustice Against Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People, you'll find the facts and tools necessary for turning the ugliness of communal violence into social justice for people of all sexual orientations.

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.

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.

Claudette Kulkarni explores lesbian experience from a Jungian and feminist perspective, through interviews with women who see themselves as lesbians or who are in a lesbian relationship.
Although a feminist treatment of the subject challenges the heterosexism of Jungian theory, the author presents a link between theory and experience that is consistent with both approaches.
She concludes that when a woman finds herself loving another woman she is often responding to a profound psychological instinct to act, in spite of internal conflict or external opposition, and that this is a significant move in the service of personal and collective individuation and a movement toward achieving self-understanding

Social Services for Senior Gay Men and Lesbians is an important new reference that provides those in the helping professions with practical information on how to work with the older gay and lesbian population. Although older gays and lesbians are the same in many ways as their heterosexual counterparts, they have an extra "layer" of concerns that are unique to their sexual orientation, including "coming out" to family and medical professionals, fear of discrimination, isolation, and loneliness. This new book helps social service providers address these and other concerns of the aging homosexual.Social Services for Senior Gay Men and Lesbians examines the history of homosexuality and how practitioners have developed ways to better serve this population. The book features case studies of topics that face practitioners and their older gay clients, including: housing needs of older gay and lesbian adults group therapy for older gay males long-term care dilemmas for older lesbians counseling an older gay male who is "coming out" staff development for non-gay social service providers historical review of gay and lesbian issuesBecause so little information exists in these and other areas, Social Services for Older Gay Men and Lesbians is an excellent resource for social workers, psychologists, nurses, counselors, and physicians.

Classics in Lesbian Studies takes a major step in giving the lesbian experience its own unique voice within scholarship and the larger world society. Thus, it is devoted exclusively to the lesbian experience and serves as a vehicle for the promotion of scholarship and commentary on lesbianism from an international perspective. Not only does it ensure that "classic" pieces are not forgotten by new generations of students and scholars, it also spurs further lesbian research, writing, theory, and scholarship.In Classics in Lesbian Studies, you are introduced to descriptive, theoretical, empirical, applied, and multicultural perspectives in the field of lesbian studies. Interdisciplinary, the book presents pieces from various academic areas in multiple formats, including personal accounts, poetry, editorials, debates, and commentaries. For your convenience, the chapters are organized primarily across four categories: identity, history and literature, physical and social sciences, and "back to lesbian politics." You will find the discussions of the following issues and subjects provocative and insightful: ways black women in the diaspora construct and name their sexual and romantic feelings for other women lesbian identity formation in a changing social environment how lesbians maneuver in the dominant culture and their own subculture lesbianism as a political movement the experiences of lesbian adolescents teaching lesbian studies lesbians and societal institutions, including the work place, the media, the political arena, the legal system, and religion using lesbian-feminist scholarship to reexamine women's lives in the pastStudents, scholars, lesbian feminists, and others interested in lesbian studies will find Classics in Lesbian Studies a vital examination of lesbianism since its grass roots. Not only does it consider the progress made since the initial days of fighting for liberation, it also explores a more distant, repressed past and anticipates future possibilities lying before us. This powerful, insightful collection is sure to become a classic as it grapples with virtually all aspects of lesbianism, from its inception as a political movement to its identity as a lifestyle choice to its implications of community.

This book provides chemical dependency clinicians a sampling of the work being done in the fields of gay and lesbian chemical dependency to enable clinicians to provide better care for their gay and lesbian clients.After an overview of 7 research studies which examine the incidence of alcoholism and/or chemical dependency in gay and lesbian persons, the contributing authors explore the special concerns of recovering gay and lesbian addicts.Chapters focus not only on issues in the fields of gay and lesbian chemical dependency but how clinicians can use this knowledge to better care for their gay and lesbian clients. Readers will find new information on: working with HIV positive persons homophobia as a critical root in chemically dependent gays and lesbians positive changes for dysfunctional relationships common with gays and lesbians spirituality in gay and lesbian communities the special needs of the rural gay/lesbian client gay men's groups in AA a retrospective of NALGAP resources and referrals for chemically dependent gay and lesbian personsAddiction and Recovery in Gay and Lesbian Persons assists social workers and other helping professionals working with chemically dependent clients learn more about how to adequately treat them. Gay and lesbian persons recovering from a chemical addiction will also find this book enlightening.

This book provides chemical dependency clinicians a sampling of the work being done in the fields of gay and lesbian chemical dependency to enable clinicians to provide better care for their gay and lesbian clients.After an overview of 7 research studies which examine the incidence of alcoholism and/or chemical dependency in gay and lesbian persons, the contributing authors explore the special concerns of recovering gay and lesbian addicts.Chapters focus not only on issues in the fields of gay and lesbian chemical dependency but how clinicians can use this knowledge to better care for their gay and lesbian clients. Readers will find new information on: working with HIV positive persons homophobia as a critical root in chemically dependent gays and lesbians positive changes for dysfunctional relationships common with gays and lesbians spirituality in gay and lesbian communities the special needs of the rural gay/lesbian client gay men's groups in AA a retrospective of NALGAP resources and referrals for chemically dependent gay and lesbian personsAddiction and Recovery in Gay and Lesbian Persons assists social workers and other helping professionals working with chemically dependent clients learn more about how to adequately treat them. Gay and lesbian persons recovering from a chemical addiction will also find this book enlightening.

A comprehensive bibliography of lesbian studies articles published in nationally and internationally distributed periodicals, comprising some 3,500 entries by and about lesbians. Citations are cross-referenced and multiply -listed in over 100 categories, including traditional topics in the humaniti

Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible - gay women of color - in a book that challenges long-standing ideas about racial identity, family formation, and motherhood. Drawing from interviews and surveys of one hundred black gay women in New York City, "Invisible Families" explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families. In particular, the study looks at the ways in which the past experiences of women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s shape their thinking, and have structured their lives in communities that are not always accepting of their openly gay status. Overturning generalizations about lesbian families derived largely from research focused on white, middle-class feminists, "Invisible Families" reveals experiences within black American and Caribbean communities as it asks how people with multiple stigmatized identities imagine and construct an individual and collective sense of self.

Members of social groups, including communities, routinely exert subtle forms of social control on others. The Web: Social Control in a Lesbian Community is a sociological study examining the effects of informal social control the response to behavior or people regarded as deviant, problematic, threatening, or undesirable in everyday life. The context of this study is a lesbian community situated in the heartland of the United States. Based on interviews, participant-observation, and document sources gathered over a period of nine years, the book analyzes the effects of social control on relations of power (based on race, class, and sexual identity) among diverse members of a lesbian community. Although much of what is represented in this book is unique to this lesbian community, the forms and functions of social control analyzed here can be found in any human community.

This volume showcases a vibrant wave of scholarship that explores the intersection of queer theory and Sinophone studies, consolidating an interdisciplinary framework for furthering transnational research into non-conforming genders, sexualities and bodies. Engaging with contemporary debates and controversies, Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies presents a definitive collection of original contributions, which are both theoretically and empirically grounded and cross-disciplinary in nature. Individual chapters offer an in-depth study of new empirical data and case studies, covering keywords such as transpacific, viscerality, fandom, postcoloniality, ethnicity and activism. Imagining new conversations across several fields, including literature, film, communication, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, sociology and politics, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Queer Studies and Asian culture, literature and film, as well as gender and sexuality.

Healing Victims of Sexual Assault Through Transformative Journaling "This is the most essential book on writing practice I know ... Every writing teacher, writing coach, writing workshop or group leader and every person with a history of any kind of trauma needs this book." -Pat Schneider, author of How the Light Gets In and founder of the Amherst Writers & Artists method #1 Best Seller in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Study Aids One in six women is the victim of sexual assault. Using her own hard-won wisdom, author Jen Cross shows how to heal through journaling and personal writing Rape victims and victims of other sexual abuse. Writing Ourselves Whole is a collection of essays and creative writing encouragements for sexual trauma survivors who want to risk writing a different story. Each short chapter offers encouragement, experience, and exercises. A book that could change your life. When you can find language for the stories that are locked inside, you can change your life. Talk therapy can only go so far for the millions of Americans struggling in the aftermath of sexual abuse and sexual assault. Sexual assault survivors can heal themselves. Sexual trauma survivor communities (and their allies) have the capacity to hold and hear one another's stories-we do not have to relegate ourselves solely to the individual isolation of the therapist's office. What You'll Learn Inside Writing Ourselves Whole: How to reconnect with your creative instinct through freewriting How freewriting can help you reclaim the parts of yourself and your history How "restorying" the old myths about sexual trauma survivors can set you free If you have read books such as The Body Keeps the Score, The Artist's Way, Writing Down the Bones, or Writing as a Way of Healing, you will want to read Writing Ourselves Whole. Also try Jen Cross's self-care journal, Write to Restore.

This is the unusual and compelling story of Diana, a tantalizingly beautiful woman who sought love in the strange by-paths of Lesbos. Fearless and outspoken, it dares to reveal that hidden world where perfumed caresses and half-whispered endearments constitute the forbidden fruits in a Garden of Eden where men are never accepted.

This is how "Diana: A Strange Autobiography" was described when it was published in paperback in 1952. The original 1939 hardcover edition carried with it a Publisher's Note: This is the autobiography of a woman who tried to be normal.

In the book, Diana is presented as the unexceptional daughter of an unexceptional plutocratic family. During adolescence, she finds herself drawn with mysterious intensity to a girl friend. The narrative follows Diana's progress through college; a trial marriage that proves she is incapable of heterosexuality; intellectual and sexual education in Europe; and a series of lesbian relationships culminating in a final tormented triangular struggle with two other women for the individual salvation to be found in a happy couple.

In her introduction, Julie Abraham argues that Diana is not really an autobiography at all, but a deliberate synthesis of different archetypes of this confessional genre, echoing, as it does, more than a half-dozen novels. Hitting all the high and low points of the lesbian novel, the book, Abraham illustrates, offers a defense of lesbian relationships that was unprecedented in 1939 and radical for decades afterwards.

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to providing a helpful orientation to key literary-historical periods, critical concepts, theoretical debates and literary genres, this Companion considers the work of such well-known authors as Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel and Sarah Waters. Written by a host of leading critics and covering subjects as diverse as lesbian desire in the long eighteenth century and same-sex love in a postcolonial context, this Companion delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.

Marou Izumo and Claire Maree met at a bar in Tokyo. Separated by seventeen years difference in age, by their cultural origins, and by the requirements of visas, they have managed to maintain their relationship through these vicissitudes. Autobiography, duobiography, love story, cross-cultural reflections, lesbian history -- this book is all of these things and more. It looks at different perceptions and attitudes towards lesbians in Japan and Australia.

In the Berlin of 1942, Lilly Wust was married to a soldier and was the mother of four children. Her quiet domestic life was forever changed when she met and fell in love with Jewish Felice Schragenheim. Aimee and Jaguar, as the two called one another, embarked on an ecstatic affair, exchanging letters and poems and even signing a marriage contract. After only a year, their happiness was destroyed by the Gestapo: Felice was taken away to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Lilly received a last letter from Felice in 1945. Erica Fisher has documented this extraordinary story after spending countless hours talking to 80-year-old Lilly, and to friends and acquaintances of the two women. Her account, together with a collection of photographs, is a witness to an unusual love in a time of extremes.

Spoiler Alert: the lesbian character always dies. That is what seems to happen in television shows and films from all around the world. But is it true and is it something new? And does it even matter when women who love women can be found right across the media landscape? Looking at the fates of characters over decades, this wide-ranging and lively book argues that killing off the lesbian-even if she only appears via the subtext-is nothing new. It is a form of symbolic annihilation that has an impact in real life. Industry surveys and scholarly studies show that it is now easier for actors to come out and be role models. When more women are working behind the scenes the quality of what appears on-screen also becomes more diverse, but the storylines do not necessarily change. From the Xenaverse to GLAAD to the Lexa Pledge, fans have demanded better from the entertainment industry. As their fan fiction migrates from the computer screen to the printed page, they reanimate the dead and insist on happy endings.

The product of many years of research, this unique book presents fascinating perspectives on contemporary lesbian life in India and unravels some of the history of lesbian desire from centuries past. Through detailed examination of mythology, cosmology, ancient art and artefacts and her exegesis of ancient Sanskrit texts, Thadani constructs a tapestry of feminine kinship, genealogy and sexual or erotic bonding between women (sakhiyani) in ancient India. The author offers an historical perspective on the effect of colonization upon lesbian identities in India, showing how women were viewed by Western imperialists either as soft victims or as sexually dangerous, possessing an overgrown clitoris and in need of heterosexual domestication. The second half of the book focuses on contemporary lesbian realities and issues, including lesbian marriages, suicide pacts, forging lesbian space, lesbian human rights, lesbophobia, sexual exile and the different construction of gender, family and possible kinship alliances.

In this book, Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary Renaissance in Southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union of women's liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature. With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade Southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space. Including in her study well-known authors-including Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker-as well as overlooked writers, publishers, and editors, Harker reconfigures the Southern literary canon and the feminist canon, challenging histories of feminism and queer studies to include the South in a formative role.

"The Well of Loneliness" is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and certainly the most widely read. It contains no explicit sex scenes, yet in 1928, the year in which the novel was published, it was deemed obscene in a British court of law for its defense of sexual inversion and was forbidden for sale or import into England. Its author, Radclyffe Hall, was already well-known as a writer and West End celebrity, but the fame and notoriety of that one book has all but eclipsed a literary output of some half-dozen other novels and several volumes of poetry.In "Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing" Richard Dellamora offers the first full look at the entire range of Hall's published and unpublished works of fiction, poetry, and autobiography and reads through them to demonstrate how she continually played with the details of her own life to help fashion her own identity as well as to bring into existence a public lesbian culture. Along the way, Dellamora revises many of the truisms about Hall that had their origins in the memoirs of her long-term partner, Una Troubridge, and that have found an afterlife in the writings of Hall's biographers.In detailing Hall's explorations of the self, Dellamora is the first seriously to consider their contexts in Freudian psychoanalysis as understood in England in the 1920s. As important, he uncovers Hall's involvement with other modes of speculative psychology, including Spiritualism, Theosophy, and an eclectic brand of Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Dellamora's Hall is a woman of complex accommodations, able to reconcile her marriage to Troubridge with her passionate affairs with other women, and her experimental approach to gender and sexuality with her conservative politics and Catholicism. She is, above all, a thinker continually inventive about the connections between selfhood and desire, a figure who has much to contribute to our own efforts to understand transgendered and transsexual existence today.