Hey, Sister, What's Your Sign?

Has your girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend) ever told you to stop being such a sloppy Sagittarius? Have you ever wanted to crack the shell of the cute but quiet Cancer shelving books in your local bookshop? Do you read the monthly horoscope columns in your favorite lesbian magazine and wonder what it all means? Well...attention all women who wear comfortable shoes, lipstick lesbians, and drag kings! Listen up, fems, butches, pillow queens, and all women who refuse to be labeled! HerScopes is the key to unlocking the mysteries of the stars, full of insight and enlightenment about every aspect of your life.

Speaking as one girlfriend to another, Charlene Lichtenstein, one of the foremost astrologers in the gay and lesbian press, offers a comprehensive guide to the zodiac that is infused with wit, wisdom, and a nod to all that makes lesbian life unique.

HerScopes offers a detailed description of the characteristics of women born under every sign, and a revealing glimpse into sign-by-sign compatibilty -- in love, in friendship, and in work. Complete with a list of famous gals (and some guys) who might share your birthday and irresistible profiles of some of your favorite stars and icons, HerScopes is a welcome resource for all the strong, smart, and courageous women striving to understand their place in the universe.

Since its original publications in 1978, Our Right to Love's resources, interviews, and essays have evolved to cover every aspect of the ever-changing, everyday lives of lesbians. The complete lesbian resource guide, Our Right to Love instantly became a classic when it was first published in 1978. Now fully revised and expanded for the 1990s, this new edition includes over 60 articles and interviews covering the many aspects of lesbian life: relationships, sexuality, health, activism, education and sports, religion and spirituality, the law and legal issues, multiethnic lesbian experience, and lesbian culture. A group of essays explores the lesbian experience across cultures (African American, Latina, Asian, Native American) and age groups. Interviews with notable lesbians Martina Navratilova, Melissa Etheridge, Margarethe Cammermeyer, and Minnesota State Representative Karen Clark examine the particular experiences of highly visible out lesbians. An extensive bibliography, resource lists, and index make this the complete lesbian reference.

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.

Using a rich array of oral histories and archival sources, Tomboys and bachelor girls provides the first detailed academic study of lesbian identity and culture in post-war Britain. Described by psychiatrists as immature and neurotic, and widely ignored as taboo by mainstream society, lesbians nevertheless recognised and accepted their same-sex desire and sought out women like themselves. Challenging the conventional picture of the post-war decades as years of austerity and conservative femininity, this book traces the emergence of a vibrant lesbian social scene in Britain, centred on the metropolitan nightclubs of post-war London, but also developing across the country, through lesbian magazines and social organisations. This fascinating book brings to life the rich history of post-war lesbian culture for the scholarly and general reader alike. -- .

This book takes the globally recognised phenomenon of drag king performances as an opportunity for critical inquiry into the rise and fall of an urban scene for lesbian and queer women in Sydney, Australia (circa 1999-2012). Exploring how a series of weekly events provided the site for intimate encounters, Drysdale reveals the investments made by participants that worked to sustain the sense of a small world and anchor the expansive imaginary of lesbian cultural life. But what happens when scenes fade, as they invariably do? Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures is unique in capturing the perspective of a scene at the moment of its decline, revealing the process by which a contemporary movement becomes layered with historical significance. Bringing together the theoretical tradition of scene studies with recent work on the affective potentialities of the everyday and the mobile urban spaces they inhabit, this book has appeal to scholars working across gender, sexuality and culture.

Use Your Words to Heal with This Self-Care Journal Praise for Jen Cross's Writing Ourselves Whole, the companion to this Write to Restore journal. "This is the most essential book on writing practice I know..." Pat Schneider, author of How the Light Gets In and founder of the Amherst Writers & Artists method #1 Bestseller in Gay & Lesbian Studies Jen Cross has worked with sexual trauma survivors for over fifteen years and founded an organization that is devoted to creating spaces for survivors to write and talk about their experiences. A holistic self-care journaling approach to trauma and recovery. Creative writing is increasingly becoming a go-to method for trauma recovery. There is great power in the written word, and even more so when those words are our own. Journaling provides a cathartic release of emotions because it allows us to not only process past experiences but also reflect on how we're feeling in the present moment. In this way, writing is one of the most easily accessible self-care practices. Give voice to what has been silenced. Healing from trauma can be a slow and painful process, especially for sexual trauma survivors, who are often shamed into keeping their experience to themselves. Write to Restore, a companion journal to Jen Cross's book Writing Ourselves Whole, is a space to put the pain on a page, and in doing so, release the hold it has on us and restore our bodies and minds. In this self-help journal find: A 60-day guided journey to healing from your experience Sixteen writing exercises that gently prompt writers deeper into their experiences and into renewal Follow-up readings, additional exercises, and suggested uses for your writing If you've worked through books such as The Body Keeps the Score; The Complex PTSD Workbook; Start Where You Are; Healing the Wounded Heart; or Present, Not Perfect then Write to Restore will provide further support and restoration for your healing process.

This book represents the first comprehensive collection of essays in English dedicated entirely to the study of lesbian inscriptions in francophone society and culture. Spanning the period from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the volume offers a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on ways in which lesbianism has been represented and represented itself, with essays on poetry and the novel, contemporary film and television, photography and architecture. These essays will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies and French literature and culture. -- .

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.

Once, lesbian feminists transformed lesbianism from a stigmatized sexual practice into a political practice that posed a challenge to male supremacy and its basic institution of heterosexuality. Lesbian feminism sought to overturn the sexual system of male dominance and female submission. Lesbian sex and loving was to be the egalitarian alternative. They were heretics. Now a lesbian sex industry is making a profit from women's oppression, teaching lesbians to turn the pain of abuse and subordination into pleasure, and calling this liberation. Sadomasochism, sex toys, porn are said to be authentic lesbian sexuality and backed up by sex therapists and poststructuralist theory. A lesbian sexual revolution is fitting lesbians back into the sado-society. This book challenges the male supremacist and racist assumptions of the sex industry. It advocates the continued creation of a separate lesbian culture, community, friendship and ethics based on principles of equality and resistance. And once again, lesbian feminists are deemed heretics. Other work by the author includes "Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution" and "The Spinster and Her Enemies".

This volume explores the realities and representations of same-sex sexuality in France in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the period that witnessed the emergence of "homosexuality" in the modern sense of the word. Based on archival research and textual analysis, the articles examine the development of homosexual subcultures and illustrate the ways in which philosophes, pamphleteers, police, novelists, scientists, and politicians conceptualized same-sex relations and connected them with more general concerns about order and disorder. The contributors--Elizabeth Colwill, Michael David Sibalis, Victoria Thompson, William Peniston, Vernon Rosario II, Francesca Canad-Sautman, Martha Hanna, Robert A. Nye, and the editors Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. and Jeffrey Merrick--use the methods of intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, literary studies, legal and social history, and microhistory. This collection shows how the subject of homosexuality is related to important topics in French history: the Enlightenment, the revolutionary tradition, social discipline, positivism, elite and popular culture, nationalism, feminism, and the construction of identity.

Given the role of gays and lesbians in modern French culture and the work of French scholars on the history of sexuality, this collection fills an important gap in the literature and represents the first attempt in any language to explore this subject over three centuries from a variety of perspectives.

Two women are reunited twenty years after the love affair that changed both their worlds. Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for Her is a novel about love, memory and what it is to be a woman, a wife, and a mother. 'A complex portrait of two women's sexuality . . . an absolute pleasure' - Alice Sebold Flannery, a writer with one well-known rather racy book to her name, is, by her own admission, in a situation she never thought she'd be: married to a man who overshadows her and defined by her primary relationships as wife and mother. When Flannery is invited to a writers' conference she sees a chance to return to a world she knew well. And then she recognizes the name of the chair of the event: Anne Arden. Suddenly Flannery is thrown back twenty years to her eighteen-year-old self and the most intense love affair of her entire life. On the other side of the world Anne is travelling for work. Recently out of a decades-long partnership, she feels adrift, unsettled. When a friend asks her to chair an event at a writers' conference she says yes and a couple of months later, on the same campus where they met and fell in love, Anne and Flannery are reunited. Though their lives have taken them in different and unexpected directions, the pull between them proves irresistible.

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.

"Defiant Desire" records the lives of lesbian and gay South Africans of all races, lived in the face of censure, denial and oppression, from a drag salon in Woodstock to a gay "shebeen" in kwaThema; from a church in a Pretoria nightclub to Johannesburg's lesbian and gay pride march; and from Afrikaans love poetry to the new activism. "Defiant Desire" brings together South Africa's most prominent gay and lesbian writers, activists and academics. The contributors set out to refute beliefs that homosexuality is a white, male or middle-class phenomenon. Their writing makes clear and vibrant the relationship between a growing lesbian and gay rights movement and the broader anti-apartheid struggle in a time of transition and upheaval South Africa, and challenges its people to build a new society that respects and cherishes all of its citizens. "Defiant Desire" is an articulate testimony to the range of gay and lesbian experiences in South Africa. It is both a document of lesbian and gay struggle, and an indispensable book for those interested in the sexual politics coursing beneath the country's troubled passage to democracy.

A powerful and moving anthology of essays on butch and femme identities, inspired by Joan Nestle's The Persistent Desire.

How has feminism failed lesbianism? What issues belong at the top of a lesbian and gay political agenda? This book answers both questions by examining what lesbian and gay subordination really amounts to. Calhoun argues that lesbians and gays aren't just socially and politically disadvantaged. The closet displaces lesbians and gays from visible citizenship, and both law and cultural norms deny lesbians and gay men a private sphere of romance, marriage, and the family.

"A vivid analysis of how many Latin Americans have crafted alternative modes of understanding sexuality."
--"Hispanic American Historical Review"

From its sweaty beats to the pulsating music on the streets, Latin/o America is perceived in the United States as the land of heat, the toy store for Western sex. It is the territory of magical fantasy and of revolutionary threat, where topography is the travel guide of desire, directing imperial voyeurs to the exhibition of the flesh.

Jose Quiroga flips the stereotype upside down: he shows how Latin/o American lesbians and gay men have consistently eschewed notions of sexual identity for a politics of intervention. In Tropics of Desire, Quiroga reads hesitant Mexican poets as sex-positive voices, he questions how outing and identity politics can fall prey to the manipulations of the state, and explores how invisibility has been used as a tactical tool in opposition to the universal imperative to come out.

Drawing on diverse cultural examples such as the performance of bolero and salsa, film, literature, and correspondence, and influenced by masters like Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and a rich tradition of Latin American stylists, Quiroga argues for a politics that denies biological determinism and cannibalizes cultural stereotypes for the sake of political action.

"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.

Roof's ambitious, wide-ranging book links narrative theory, theories of sexuality, and gay and lesbian theory to explore the place of homosexuality, and specifically the lesbian, in the tradition of western narrative. According to Freud, perversions are the necessary obstacles in a heroic plot of normal heterosexual development; and homosexuality is the nineteenth century's classic case of perversion. Roof builds on Freud to illustrate that a structural understanding of narrative enforces a heterosexual paradigm, a sense of meaning that provides psychological stability for the reader. Looking at film, television, and lesbian novels, Roof explores how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform, determine, and reproduce one another. She identifies the paradigmatic lesbian story, its unvarying repetition, and how it might be recast. Understanding identification as a narrative practice, and narrative as typically heterosexual and reproductive, Roof shows how sexuality and narrative must be disentangled to alter oppressive social practices. "Come As You Are" marks a significant contribution to lesbian and gay studies, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism.

This collection of classic titles by Beauvoir her most well know writings, The Second Sex and The Ethics Of Ambiguity as well as a biography of her life and a rare interview on her book The Second Sex. French writer and feminist, and Existentialist. She is known primarily for her treatise The Second Sex (1949), a scholarly and passionate plea for the abolition of what she called the myth of the "eternal feminine." It became a classic of feminist literature during the 1960s. Her novels expounded the major Existential themes, demonstrating her conception of the writer's commitment to the times. She Came To Stay (1943) treats the difficult problem of the relationship of a conscience to "the other." Of her other works of fiction, perhaps the best known is The Mandarins (1954), a chronicle of the attempts of post-World War II intellectuals to leave their "mandarin" (educated elite) status and engage in political activism. She also wrote four books of philosophy, including The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Several volumes of her work are devoted to autobiography which constitute a telling portrait of French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1970s. In addition to treating feminist issues, de Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of aging, which she addressed in A Very Easy Death (1964), on her mother's death in a hospital. In 1981 she wrote A Farewell to Sartre, a painful account of Sartre's last years. Simone de Beauvoir revealed herself as a woman of formidable courage and integrity, whose life supported her thesis: the basic options of an individual must be made on the premises of an equal vocation for man and woman founded on a common structure of their being, independent of their sexuality. Table of Contents: The Second Sex, On the publication of The Second Sex, interview The Ethics of Ambiguity, Biography

When Virginia Woolf first met Vita Sackville-West at Clive Bell's home in 1922, she wrote that Vita made her feel 'virgin, shy, & schoolgirlish'. But over the next three years Vita charmed away her shyness, and at the end of 1925 made Virginia her lover. Vita and Virginia examines the creative intimacy between the two women, interpreting both their relationship and their work in the light of their experience as married lesbians. The contradictions and conflicts of their situation are worked out through the construction of different narratives of femininity, in letters, novels, diaries, and other texts. The book discusses the two women's continual renegotiation of what it means to be female, and suggests that the mutual exchange of different versions of womanhood is crucial to the development of their friendship. Vita and Virginia offers innovative readings of both women's fiction, their autobiographical texts, and a long-overdue study of Sackville-West's work as a biographer and novelist. Emphasizing wider contexts, Suzanne Raitt assesses the links between homosexual desire and literary innovation, public politics and private lives. Her work provides an invaluable new perspective on the relations between sexuality and feminism in modernism.

Increasingly in mainstream discourse and rhetoric, there only seems to be one very serious and conservative face to Islam, Muslim communities, and their governments. Mainstream modern Islamic hermeneutics condemn homosexual orientations, sometimes with punishments as severe as death. Nevertheless, there were also instances in Muslim history, culture, and society where religiosity was playful not punitive, where the sexual body was inscribed with markers of pleasure not those of perdition. Exploring instances within the Arabian Islamic Empire that negate impressions about Muslim cultures as eternally monolithic, conservative, and orthodox, we can come to a better and more nuanced understanding of the complexities of former and contemporary Muslim civilizations. The question of gay and lesbian human rights in the Muslim world is a topical and pressing one, and the need now for alternative ways of approaching Islam in the modern world is more important than ever. The answers to today's modern crisis in human rights for LGBTIQ people lies in looking at the past and highlighting elements that can assist in the creation of a more equitable future. This publication discovers and brings to the English reader an array of surviving texts penned by Muslim scholars discussing female samesex desire. From the tolerant days of the Abbasid caliphate to the celebratory text of Yusuf Tifashi in the thirteenth century and onwards toward growing strictures and greater intolerance, Arabo-Islamic Texts reveals a dynamic and lively discourse on sexuality in the Arabo-Islamic empire. The English translation of a lecture delivered in Arabic in Haifa by Samar Habib is also included in this book.