"Allen's work is virtually unique among American writers. Itillustrates a deep knowledge of the issues raised by the postmodernists, yet shedoes not succumb to the playing field, constructing instead her own philosophicaldirection and aesthetic." -- Sarah Hoagland

Jeffner Allenshapes a poetic politics that transforms textual and everyday realities. Thesurprising, resilient, and transformative windings of lesbian writing and lesbianlives -- a poetics of sinuous movement, the turning of women to women -- informsthese reflections.

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 Canade-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.

The decade of the 1970s is commonly remembered for its kitschy contributions to popular culture -- bean-bag chairs, platform shoes, bell-bottoms, disaster movies, disco, hot tubs, and hot pants. In The House That Jill Built, Becki Ross offers a rare view of this decade -- one that shows community-based activism challenging the prevailing tenets of individualism and conspicuous consumerism. Ross explores the dedicated struggle of a largely white, middle-class group of lesbian feminists to subvert the history of lesbian invisibility and persecution by claiming a collective, empowering, public presence in Toronto during the mid- to late 1970s. Gathering information from archival sources and numerous interviews with lesbians who were active in the feminist, left, and gay-liberation movements in the 1970s, Ross provides a window onto complex developments in community, identity, and visionary politics. She uses the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT, 1976-80) as a centrepiece, tracing the route that LOOT members took in enacting their desire to politicize the personal, in order to be lesbian in all aspects of their lives. Ross investigates the properties intrinsic to 'lesbian nationalism': fashion, sexuality, relationships, living arrangements, group membership, service provision, cultural production, and political strategy-making. The House That Jill Built convincingly analyses the significant achievements of lesbian feminism in the 1970s as well as the limitations of identity-based organizing. The book is especially useful for those interested in the fields of women's studies, cultural studies, queer theory, and social movements.

"Adventures in Lesbian Philosophy" explores diverse positive understandings of "lesbian philosophy." Tangren Alexander and Joyce Trebilcot critique the dualisms and methods of traditional Euro-American philosophy and offer creative experiments in wisdom-seeking; Bat-Ami Bar On and Lorena Leigh Saxe examine areas of contested sexual behaviors, such as pornography and sadomasochism; Elizabeth Deumer and Jacquelyn Zita take up the issue of constructing the meaning of "lesbian"; and Chris Cuomo, Barbara Houston, Ruthann Robson, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, and Kathleen Martindale and Martha Saunders discuss facets of lesbian community and responsibility. Special features include: Jacquelyn Zita's portrait of Jeffner Allen's creative lesbian philosophy, Mar'a Lugones' study of Gloria Anzald a's "Borderlands/La Frontera", Naomi Scheman's reflections on Jewish lesbian writing, and Ruth Ginzberg's interpretation of Audre Lorde's conception of eros. Editor Claudia Card has also included an up-to-date bibliography of lesbian philosophy and related works.

With "the bracingly rational passion of a writer who can think and feel at the same time" (The Wall Street Journal), Bruce Bawer exposes the heated controversy over gay rights and presents a passionate plea for the recognition of common values, "a place at the table" for everyone.

"Lively and topical. Firmly anchored in contemporary theory, Hoogland's analyses are witty and original, stylishly written and convincing. She confirms what one always suspected about adolescence, agency and identity in Bowen's heroines, and places Elizabeth Bowen in a startling context which is bound to bring her a whole new generation of attentive readers."
--Jane Marcus, CUNY Graduate Center

Immensely popular during her lifetime, the Ango-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has since been treated as a peripheral figure on the literary map. If only in view of her prolific outputten novels, nearly eighty short stories, and a substantial body of non- fictionBowen is a noteworthy novelist. The radical quality of her work, however, renders her an exceptional one.

Surfacing in both subject matter and style, her fictions harbor a subversive potential which has hitherto gone unnoticed. Using a wide range of critical theories-from semiotics to psychoanalysis, from narratology to deconstruction-this book presents a radical re-reading of a selection of Bowen's novels from a lesbian feminist perspective.

Taking into account both cultural contexts and the author's non-fictional writings, the book's main focus is on configurations of gender and sexuality. Bowen's fiction constitutes an exploration of the unstable and destabilizing effects of sexuality in the interdependent processes of subjectivity and what she herself referred to as so-called reality.

Lesbian life in America continues to evolve. As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women.

In this book, Faderman reclaims the story of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to today's diverse lifestyles. Faderman samples from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and rich firsthand testimony with lesbians of all races, ages, and classes, uncovering a surprising narrative of unparalleled depth and originality.

No one is brought up to be gay. Lacking the formal support systems --families, schools, churches -- gay men rely on their folklore in interacting withone another and to relieve the pressures of belonging to a stigmatized group. Jokesand other forms of humor, language, and personal experience narratives help gay mento identify and communicate with one another -- even in straight settings.

More Man than You'll Ever Be explores the uses of gay men'sfolklore. Wheter funny or sad, poignant or shocking, each story and joke containsmessages, sometimes surprising ones. Goodwin decodes some of these messages to helpus understand not only the gay subculture but also ourselves.

Psychovenereology investigates the psychological factors in human disease (i.e. personality and lifestyle) and their effect on the rate of contraction of sexually transmitted diseases. It also describes the associated illnesses among people who contract sexually related disease and how social mores affect the individual's perception of the disease and how that perception, in turn, affects compliance with treatment. The book also addresses the whole chain of events ranging from high-risk behavior and its psychological determinants to the direct causes of infections and their psychological implications. Concentrating on the homosexual male, this book describes the growing field of psychovenereology and suggests educational and preventative techniques which can help break the psychological patterns of infection related behavior.

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.

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.

In this one-of-a-kind anthology, lesbian sisters from several countries explore their relationships with one another. Through their words and photographs, both well-known and less-famous siblings reveal the many faces of lesbian sisterhood. Eighteen sets of lesbian sisters from Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany and Sweden share their insights and struggles in this fascinating chronicle of what it is like to grow up, come out, laugh, cry, work and live together, as sisters in a family and as lesbians in a world.

Originally developed to help heterosexual couples, fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization and sperm donation have provided lesbians with new methods for achieving pregnancy during the past two decades. Queering Reproduction is an important sociological analysis of lesbians' use of these medical fertility treatments. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbians who have been or are seeking to become pregnant, Laura Mamo describes how reproduction has become an intensely medicalized process for lesbians, who are transformed into fertility patients not (or not only) because of their physical conditions but because of their sexual identities. Mamo argues that this medicalization of reproduction has begun to shape queer subjectivities in both productive and troubling ways, destabilizing the assumed link between heterosexuality and parenthood while also reinforcing traditional, heteronormative ideals about motherhood and the imperative to reproduce. Mamo provides an overview of a shift within some lesbian communities from low-tech methods of self-insemination to a reliance on outside medical intervention and fertility treatments. Reflecting on the issues facing lesbians who become parents through assisted reproductive technologies, Mamo explores questions about the legal rights of co-parents, concerns about the genetic risks of choosing an anonymous sperm donor, and the ways decisions to become parents affect sexual and political identities. In doing so, she investigates how lesbians navigate the medical system with its requisite range of fertility treatments, diagnostic categories, and treatment trajectories. Combining moving narratives and insightful analysis, Queering Reproduction reveals how medical technology reconfigures social formations, individual subjectivity, and notions of kinship.

Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets - the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time. Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including 'new' Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers. Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.

In Queer Timing, Susan Potter offers a counter-history that reorients accepted views of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema. Potter sees the emergence of lesbian figures as only the most visible but belated outcome of multiple sexuality effects. Early cinema reconfigured older erotic modalities, articulated new--though incoherent--sexual categories, and generated novel forms of queer feeling and affiliation. Potter draws on queer theory, silent film historiography, feminist film analysis, and archival research to provide an original and innovative analysis. Taking a conceptually oriented approach, she articulates the processes of filmic representation and spectatorship that reshaped, marginalized, or suppressed women's same-sex desires and identities. As she pursues a sense of "timing," Potter stages scenes of the erotic and intellectual encounters shared by historical spectators, on-screen figures, and present-day scholars. The result is a daring revision of feminist and queer perspectives that foregrounds the centrality of women's same-sex desire to cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality.

The act of "coming out" has the power to transform every aspect of a woman's life: family, friendships, career, sexuality, spirituality. An essential element of self-realization, it is the unabashed acceptance of one's "outlaw" standing in a predominantly heterosexual world.

These accounts -- sometimes heart-wrenching, often exhilarating -- encompass a wide breadth of backgrounds and experiences. From a teenager institutionalized for her passion for women to the mother who must come out to her young sons at the risk of losing them -- from the cautious academic to the raucous liberated femme -- each woman represented here tells of forging a unique path toward the difficult but emancipating recognition of herself. Extending from the 1940s to the present day, these intensely personal stories in turn reflect a unique history of the changing social mores that affected each woman's ability to determine the shape of her own life. Together they form an ornate tapestry of lesbian and bisexual experience in the United States over the past half-century..

She Called Me Woman is a collection of first-hand accounts by a community telling their stories on their own terms. This engaging and groundbreaking collection of queer women's narratives includes stories of first time love and curiosity, navigating same-sex feelings and spirituality, growing up gender non-conforming and overcoming family and society's expectations. What does it means to be a queer Nigerian? How does one embrace the label of `woman'? While some tell of self-acceptance, others talk of friendship and building a home in the midst of the anti-same sex marriage law. The narrators range from those who knew they were gay from a very early age to those who discovered their attraction to the same sex later in life. The stories challenge the stereotypes of what we assume is lesbian, bisexual, gay, and *trans in Nigeria and they offer us a raw, first-hand look into the lives and realities of our family, friends, neighbours and co-workers who are queer.

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.

E. Patrick Johnson's Honeypot opens with the fictional trickster character Miss B. barging into the home of Dr. EPJ, informing him that he has been chosen to collect and share the stories of her people. With little explanation, she whisks the reluctant Dr. EPJ away to the women-only world of Hymen, where she serves as his tour guide as he bears witness to the real-life stories of queer Black women throughout the American South. The women he meets come from all walks of life and recount their experiences on topics ranging from coming out and falling in love to mother/daughter relationships, religion, and political activism. As Dr. EPJ hears these stories, he must grapple with his privilege as a man and as an academic, and in the process he gains insights into patriarchy, class, sex, gender, and the challenges these women face. Combining oral history with magical realism and poetry, Honeypot is an engaging and moving book that reveals the complexity of identity while offering a creative method for scholarship to represent the lives of other people in a rich and dynamic way.

On a winter day in 1892, in the broad daylight of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, a middle class woman named Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of her lover, Freda Ward, killing her instantly. Local, national, and international newspapers, medical and scientific publications, and popular fiction writers all clamored to cover the ensuing "girl lovers" murder trial. Lisa Duggan locates in this sensationalized event the emergence of the lesbian in U.S. mass culture and shows how newly "modern" notions of normality and morality that arose from such cases still haunt and distort lesbian and gay politics to the present day.
Situating this story alongside simultaneously circulating lynching narratives (and its resistant versions, such as those of Memphis antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how stories of sex and violence were crucial to the development of American modernity. While careful to point out the differences between the public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer instances of the murder of one woman by another privately motivated woman, Duggan asserts that dominant versions of both sets of stories contributed to the marginalization of African Americans and women while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual form of American citizenship. Having explored the role of turn-of-the-century print media--and in particular their tendency toward sensationalism--Duggan moves next to a review of sexology literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness." "Sapphic Slashers" concludes with two appendices, one of which presents a detailed summary of Ward's murder, the trial, and Mitchell's eventual institutionalization. The other presents transcriptions of letters exchanged between the two women prior to the crime.
Combining cultural history, feminist and queer theory, narrative analysis, and compelling storytelling, "Sapphic Slashers" provides the first history of the emergence of the lesbian in twentieth-century mass culture.

In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II-era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms. Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life.

Popular wisdom might suggest that jealousy is an inevitable outcome of non-monogamous relationships. In Love's Refraction, Jillian Deri explores the distinctive question of how and why polyamorists - people who practice consensual non-monogamy - manage jealousy. Her focus is on the polyamorist concept of "compersion" - taking pleasure in a lover's other romantic and sexual encounters. By discussing the experiences of queer, lesbian, and bisexual polyamorous women, Deri highlights the social and structural context that surrounds jealousy. Her analysis, making use of the sociology of emotion and feminist intersectionality theory, shows how polyamory challenges traditional emotional and sexual norms. Clear and concise, Love's Refraction speaks to both the academic and the polyamorous community. Deri lets her interviewees speak for themselves, linking academic theory and personal experiences in a sophisticated, engaging, and accessible way.

In "Sappho in Early Modern England, " Harriette Andreadis examines public and private expressions of female same-sex sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Before the language of modern sexual identities developed, a variety of discourses in both literary and extraliterary texts began to form a lexicon of female intimacy. Looking at accounts of non-normative female sexualities in travel narratives, anatomies, and even marital advice books, Andreadis outlines the vernacular through which a female same-sex erotics first entered verbal consciousness. She finds that "respectable" women of the middle classes and aristocracy who did not wish to identify themselves as sexually transgressive developed new vocabularies to describe their desires; women that we might call bisexual or lesbian, referred to in their day as tribades, fricatrices, or "rubsters," emerged in erotic discourses that allowed them to acknowledge their sexuality and still evade disapproval.