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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gay & Lesbian studies > Lesbian studies
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 handbook offers diverse perspectives on queer Africa, incorporating scholarly contributions on themes that reflect and inflect the trajectories of queer contributions to African studies within and outside academia. The Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies incorporates a range of unique perspectives, reflecting ongoing struggles between regimes of inclusion and those of transformation premised upon different relational and reflexive engagements between queer embodiment and Africa's subjectivities. All sections of this handbook blend contributions from public intellectuals and practitioners with academic reflections on topics not limited to neoliberalism, social care, morality and ethics, social education, and technology, through the lens of queer African studies. The book renders visible the ongoing transformations and resistance within African societies as well as the inventiveness of queer presence in negotiating belonging. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality in Africa, queer studies, and African culture and society.
As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.
In this candid and revelatory memoir, Erin O. White shares her hunger for both romantic and divine love, and how these desires transformed her life. In the late 1990s, she spent Saturday nights with her girlfriend and Sunday mornings in Catholic confirmation classes. But when the Church closed its doors to her, she was faced with a question: What does a lesbian believer do with her longing for God? Given Up for You explores these yearnings with bittersweet conviction, plumbing the depths of heart and soul.
This unique book sheds new light on the most invisible members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Hidden from view by a combination of prevailing cultural assumptions and their own unwillingness to be seen, older lesbians have been consistently under-represented in both popular culture and research. This ground-breaking study, based on an unprecedentedly large research sample of nearly four hundred lesbian-identified women between the ages of 60 and 90, offers a fascinating insight into the lives of older lesbians in the UK. Drawing on data from a comprehensive questionnaire survey and illustrated with vivid personal testimonies, it explores both the diversity and the distinct collective identity of the older lesbian community, arguing that understanding their past experience is crucial to providing for their needs in the future. It is essential reading for scholars in the fields of women's studies and genders and sexualities, and will also appeal to sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, social and cultural historians, and experts in ageing, gerontology, nursing and social work.
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.
Take Stage! is the first comprehensive "how-to" book for lesbians wanting to produce or direct lesbian theatre. Controversial and anecdotal, Take Stage! is written for the lesbian with no previous experience with theatre or lesbian organization. In addition to chapters on auditioning, rehearsals, selecting the script, booking space, and assembling a staff, the book includes chapters on issues of special interest to lesbians. Take Stage! includes information on how to challenge the "isms"-lookism, racism, classism, ageism, and other prejudices with which lesbian culture is currently engaged. It also looks at problems of accountability in non-hierarchal structures, boundary-setting among all-volunteer staffs, sabotage via hidden agendas or disassociative behaviors, horizontal hostility, and internalized homophobia. The appendix contains sample contracts, audition forms, light plots, budgets, and schedules. From the decision to produce the play to opening night and touring, Take Stage! covers all the bases and provides a healthy dose of moral support.
"Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer have put together an excellent collection of original articles which demonstrates the range of lesbian literary scholarship as a field and the important nuance and insight it is contributing to our knowledge of Woolf's life and writing in particular."--"Woolf Studies Annual" The last two decades have seen a resurgence of critical and popular attention to Virginia Woolf's life and work. Such traditional institutions as "The New York Review of Books" now pair her with William Shakespeare in promotional advertisements; her face is used to sell everything from Barnes & Noble books to Bass Ale. Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings represents the first book devoted to Woolf's lesbianism. Divided into two sections, Lesbian Intersections and Lesbian Readings of Woolf's Novels, these essays focus on how Woolf's private and public experience and knowledge of same-sex love influences her shorter fiction and novels. Lesbian Intersections includes personal narratives that trace the experience of reading Woolf through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Lesbian Readings of Woolf's Novels provides lesbian interpretations of the individual novels, including "Orlando, The Waves," and "The Years," Breaking new ground in our understanding of the role Woolf's love for women plays in her major writing, these essays shift the emphasis of lesbian interpretations from Woolf's life to her work.
The subject of bisexuality continues to divide the lesbian and gay community. At pride marches, in films such as Go Fish, at academic conferences, the role and status of bisexuals is hotly contested. Within lesbian communities, formed to support lesbians in a patriarchal and heterosexist society, bisexual women are often perceived as a threat or as a political weakness. Bisexual women feel that they are regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not openly scorned. Drawing on her research with over 400 bisexual and lesbian women, surveying the treatment of bisexuality in the lesbian and gay press, and examining the recent growth of a self-consciously political bisexual movement, Paula Rust addresses a range of questions pertaining to the political and social relationships between lesbians and bisexual women. By tracing the roots of the controversy over bisexuality among lesbians back to the early lesbian feminist debates of the 1970s, Rust argues that those debates created the circumstances in which bisexuality became an inevitable challenge to lesbian politics. She also traces it forward, predicting the future of sexual politics. Paula C. Rust is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College.
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.
Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century. Based on diaries, letters, and poetry, among other original documents, the research traces the women's lives in sharp detail. Charity Bryant was born in 1777 to a consumptive mother who died a month later. Raised in Massachusetts, Charity developed into a brilliant and strong-willed woman with a passion for her own sex. After being banished from her family home by her father at age twenty, she traveled throughout Massachusetts, working as a teacher, making intimate female friends, and becoming the subject of gossip wherever she lived. At age twenty-nine, still defiantly single, Charity visited friends in Weybridge, Vermont. There she met Sylvia Drake, a pious and studious young woman whose family had moved to the frontier village after losing their Massachusetts farm during the Revolution. The two soon became so inseparable that Charity decided to rent rooms in Weybridge. Sylvia came to join her on July 3, 1807, commencing a forty-four year union that lasted until Charity's death. Over the years, the women came to be recognized as a married couple, or something like it. Charity took the role of husband, and Sylvia of wife, within the marriage. Revered by their community, Charity and Sylvia operated a tailor shop employing many local women, served as guiding lights within their church, and participated in raising more than one hundred nieces and nephews. Most extraordinary, all the while the sexual potential of their union remained an open secret, cloaked in silence to preserve their reputations. The story of Charity and Sylvia overturns today's conventional wisdom that same-sex marriage is a modern innovation, and reveals that early America was both more diverse and more accommodating than modern society imagines.
"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.
Sexual identity has emerged into the national discourse of post-apartheid South Africa, bringing the subject of rights and the question of gender relations and cultural authenticity into the focus of the nation state s politics. This book is a fascinating reflection on the effects of these discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and intimacy and on the country more generally. While in 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world that explicitly incorporated lesbian and gay rights within a Bill of Rights, much of the country has continued to see homosexuality as un-African. Henriette Gunkel examines how colonialism and apartheid have historically shaped constructions of gender and sexuality and how these concepts have not only been re-introduced and shaped by understandings of homosexuality as un-African but also by the post-apartheid constitution and continued discourse within the nation.
This book, the first full-length study of its kind, dares to
probe the biggest taboo in contemporary Arab culture with scholarly
intent and integrity - female homosexuality. Habib argues that female homosexuality has a long history in
Arabic literature and scholarship, beginning in the ninth century,
and she traces the destruction of Medieval discourses on female
homosexuality and the replacement of these with a new religious
orthodoxy that is no longer permissive of a variety of sexual
behaviours.
Habib also engages with recent gay historiography in the West and challenges institutionalized constructionist notions of sexuality.
Providing Support if Your Child is Transgender or LGBTQ+Winner of the Sixth Annual Bisexual Book Award for Non-fiction, 2017 #1 Bestseller in Lesbian Studies Unconditional is a parenting guide book that provides parents of an LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning) child with a framework for helping their LGBT child navigate a world that isn't always welcoming. Tips from a mother with experience. In Unconditional, author Telaina Eriksen, a professor at Michigan State University, explains what she and her husband have learned through the experience of parenting a gay child. She covers topics like how to handle kids coming out, being an advocate for LGBTQ+ children, how to help your child deal with stress unique to LGBTQ+ kids, and finding a LGBTQ+ family. This book is a must read for anyone who thinks their child is transgender or otherwise LGBTQ+. A guide for supporting your LGBT child. What if my child is transgender? Eriksen covers the science of gender, understanding gender dysphoria, and how to help a transgender child through the stages of development. What if I have more general LGBTQ+ family needs? Throughout the book, both parents and kids share their stories, and Eriksen directs parents to various resources online for help. This LGBT family book teaches the principles of unconditional parenting, love, and learning. Inside, learn: How to advocate for policies that protect your child Ways to educate well-meaning, but misguided friends or family Strategies keep your kid talking if your child is transgender or LGBTQ+ Signs of unhealthy relationships When to consider therapy for your child or your family How to find an LGBTQ+ community (including inclusive churches) If you liked LGBT books, best sellers like The Gender Identity Guide for Parents, The Savvy Ally, or The End of Gender, you'll love Unconditional.
The Lesbian Revolution argues that lesbian feminists were a vital force in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). They did not just play a fundamental role in the important changes wrought by second wave feminism, but created a powerful revolution in lesbian theory, culture and practice. Yet this lesbian revolution is undocumented. The book shows that lesbian feminists were founders of feminist institutions such as resources for women survivors of men's violence, including refuges and rape crisis centres, and that they were central to campaigns against this violence. They created a feminist squatting movement, theatre groups, bands, art and poetry and conducted campaigns for lesbian rights. They also created a profound and challenging analysis of sexuality which has disappeared from the historical record. They analysed heterosexuality as a political institution, arguing that lesbianism was a political choice for feminists and, indeed, a form of resistance in itself. Using interviews with prominent lesbian feminists from the time of the WLM, and informed by the author's personal experience, this book aims to challenge the way the work and ideas of lesbian feminists have been eclipsed and to document the lesbian revolution. The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of women's history, the history of feminism, the politics of sexuality, women's studies, gender studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as to the lay reader interested in the WLM and feminism more generally.
16th Annual Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year Is your church wrestling with LGBT questions from membership to marriage? Travis Collins has been there. A pastor who has walked congregations through the complex issues surrounding gay Christians, he knows firsthand the confusion and hurt that often follow. He has also seen churches have these conversations with grace and understanding. In this practical resource, readers will gain insight into relevant biblical passages and, while the author is working from a traditional perspective, he offers insights from interpreters on both sides of the debate. They will consider the implications of their convictions for ministry practice, relationships, church policy, and more. They will hear testimonies from gay friends and family members about their experiences in the church. Collins calls readers to both grace and truth, with humility. What Does It Mean to Be Welcoming? considers how we might welcome everyone into the church while calling for all to be transformed.
Prairie Fairies draws upon a wealth of oral, archival, and cultural histories to recover the experiences of queer urban and rural people in the prairies. Focusing on five major urban centres, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary, Prairie Fairies explores the regional experiences and activism of queer men and women by looking at the community centres, newsletters, magazines, and organizations that they created from 1930 to 1985. Challenging the preconceived narratives of queer history, Valerie J. Korinek argues that the LGBTTQ community has a long history in the prairie west, and that its history, previously marginalized or omitted, deserves attention. Korinek pays tribute to the prairie activists and actors who were responsible for creating spaces for socializing, politicizing, and organizing this community, both in cities and rural areas. Far from the stereotype of the isolated, insular Canadian prairies of small towns and farming communities populated by faithful farm families, Prairie Fairies historicizes the transformation of prairie cities, and ultimately the region itself, into a predominantly urban and diverse place.
Drawing on the incredible wealth of diversity of languages, cultures and movements in which lesbian feminisms have been articulated, this book confronts the historic devaluation of lesbian-feminist politics within Anglo-American discourse and ignites a transnational and transgenerational discussion regarding the relevance of lesbian feminisms in today's world, a discussion that challenges the view of lesbian feminism as static and essentialist. Through careful consideration of contemporary debates, these writers, theorists, academics and activists consider the wider place of lesbian feminisms within queer theory, post-colonial feminism, and the movement for LGBT rights. It considers how lesbian feminisms can contribute to discussions on intersectionality, engage with trans activism and the need for trans-inclusion, to ultimately show how lesbian feminisms can offer a transformative approach to today's sexual and gender politics.
Looking Queer: Body Image in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities contains research, firsthand accounts, poetry, theory, and journalistic essays that address and outline the special needs of sexual minorities when dealing with eating disorders and appearance obsession. Looking Queer will give members of these communities hope, insight, and information into body image issues, helping you to accept and to love your body. In addition, scholars, health care professionals, and body image activists will not only learn about queer experiences and identity and how they affect individuals, but will also understand how some of the issues involved affect society as a whole. Dismantling the myth that body image issues affect only heterosexual women, Looking Queer explores body issues based on gender, race, class, age, and disability. Furthermore, this groundbreaking book attests to the struggles, pain, and triumph of queer people in an open and comprehensive manner. More than 60 contributors provide their knowledge and personal experiences in dealing with body image issues exclusive to the gay and transgender communities, including: exploring and breaking down the categories of gender and sexuality that are found in many body image issues finding ways to heal yourself and your community discovering what it means to "look like a dyke" or to "look gay" fearing fat as a sign of femininity determining what race has to do with the gay ideal discussing the stereotyped "double negative"--being a fat lesbian learning strategies of resistance to societal ideals critiquing "the culture of desire" within gay men's communities that emphasizes looks above everything elseRevealing new and complex dimensions to body image issues, Looking Queer not only discusses the struggles and hardships of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons, but looks at the processes that can lead to acceptance of oneself. Written by both men and women, the topics and research in Looking Queer offer insight into the lives of people you can relate to, enabling you to learn from their experiences so you, too, can find joy and happiness in accepting your body.Visit Dawn Atkin's website at: http: //home.earthlink.net/ dawn_atkins/
Holly Hughes is one of the most popular and controversial out-there-and-in-your-face writer-performers around, and in this collection of some of her greatest hits she describes her career as an "escape" artist: how she escaped her conservative upbringing in a part of the country "where silence was the first language" to become an award-winning performance artist and playwright as well as a central figure in America's culture wars. As the Los Angeles Times observed, "Holly Hughes is everything you always wanted in a lesbian performance artist-and less." |
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