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.

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.

"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.

In "Lesbian Utopics," Annamarie Jagose surveys the construction of the lesbian and finds her in a cultural space that is both everywhere and, of all places, nowhere. The "lesbian," in other words, is symbolically central, yet culturally marginal.
Challenging the often unquestioned hegemony of gay studies over lesbian studies, Jagose provides a truly evocative and compelling theory of the lesbian. In drawing upon the work of such theorists as Eve Kosofky Sedgwick and Luce Irigaray, she suggestively articulates a theory of "lesbian" spacew which symbolically exceeds the boundaries of understanding and comprehension. Jagose argues that the culturally constructed category of the "lesbian"--the symbolic logic of which goes beyond traditional cultural limits and regulations--is also simultaneously and, quite provocatively, also the product of those regimes of power. It is this explosive tension that Jagose emphasizes in her reading of various conceptions of the "lesbian." In examining this construction, Jagose surveys a diverse range of texts (sonnets, essays, and novels) spanning the cultural terrain of Mexico and Australia, the US and France. She concludes with a reading of Cindy Crawford as signifying the emergence of lesbian utopics within pop culture. common: they both represent the category "lesbian" as a utopic space, one which exceeds structures of regulation. "Lesbian Utopics" argues that the ways in which "lesbian" is used assumes the characteristics of a utopic site: one outside, and other than the norm, and has placed on it an excess of cultural legislation.
Reading a broad variety of works by five women (Irigaray, Nicole Brossard, Marilyn Hacker, Mary Fallon andGloria Anzaldua, Annamarie Jagose makes the argument for "lesbian" as not just an exterior and alterior category, but one which is produced by the very cultural laws whose mandate the category seems to defy and transcend. Using Foucault as a means of examining the texts, the author producesa reading which contends that "lesbian" is emphatically "interior" to culture, produced by the mechanisms of proscripted heterosexuality.
"Lesbian Utopics" concludes that the illusion of "outside"-ness promised by the appelation of lesbian is in literal terms a utopic space: ("ou-topos," no place.) This is an important, valuable and controversial addition to lesbian and gay studies, and should interest those in feminist theory and literary criticism.

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and pundits were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In "The Sexuality of History," Susan S. Lanser demonstrates how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, and order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading, whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in "closeted" texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. "The Sexuality of History" shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

"The L Word" captured international attention when it first appeared on American screens in January 2004. The groundbreaking primetime drama from Showtime is about a group of lesbian and bisexual friends living and loving in Los Angeles, and challenges traditional notions of relationships, queer life styles, gender identities, race and ethnicity and sex and sexuality. "Reading the L Word" is the first book about this television phenomenon. With an introduction by Sarah Warn, the founder of premier lesbian entertainment website, AfterEllen.com, and a foreword by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the collection brings together leading academics, feminist critics, scholars and award-winning journalists to discuss "The L Word". There is also a complete episode guide, as well as a series of interviews with the actors Erin Daniels, Katherine Moennig, and the writer, Guinevere Turner. Analytical, often humorous and sometimes provocative, "Reading the L Word" uncovers what makes this show both so compelling and groundbreaking.

In an inventive and controversial collection of essays, sociologist Susan Krieger considers the many forms of wealth, both material and emotional, that women pass on to each other. This domestic heritage - the 'family silver' - is the keystone for a discussion of mother-daughter relationships, intimate relationships between lesbians, ties between students and feminist teachers, the dilemmas of women in academia as well as in the broader work world, and the importance of female separatism. Drawing on her experiences as a lesbian, a feminist, and a teacher, Krieger presents a stunning critique of higher education. She argues for acknowledging gender in all areas of women's lives and for valuing women's inner realities and outer forms of expression. Krieger has developed a distinctly feminist approach to understanding and scholarship. Her style is self-revelatory, emotional, and at the same time deeply analytical. Her essays pioneer a new method of locating, defining, and honoring female values. "The Family Silver" includes a thought-provoking discussion of gender roles among women, including the author's experience of being mistaken for a man; an exploration of teaching in a feminist classroom; and, a description of the controversy that resulted when the author refused to allow a hostile male student to take one of her courses. Beautifully written, "The Family Silver" addresses issues of central concern to feminists, postmodernists, and queer theorists and encourages new insights into how gender profoundly affects us all.

What experiences do women have when they come to identify themselves as lesbian? What happens when they consider telling family and friends about their sexual identity? This book examines these questions on the basis of interviews with individuals and other source materials. Coming out can only be understood, the author stresses, against the backdrop of a firmly heterosexist society. The dominant heterosexual culture tends to freeze gender divisions in such a way as to polarize sexual identities.

The author focuses more upon the isolated lesbian, rather than upon political lesbianism. Coming out is seen to be a complex and emotional process, but one that is potentially highly rewarding. Lesbians, Markowe shows, have to struggle with both their 'invisibility' in the predominantly heterosexual culture, but also with perceptions of threat and abnormality. Coming out to family and heterosexual friends involves risks and benefits. Case studies of lesbian women are discussed in the context of the threat to, and reconstruction of, identity which the coming-out process presumes.

This book will be of interest to second year undergraduates and above working in the fields of women's studies, social psychology and the psychology or sociology of gender.

All original to this volume, these evocative essays by such scholars as Robyn Wiegman, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Roof examine a realm as yet untouched in literary and cultural criticism and gender theory, a specifically lesbian postmodern.

The essays trace, on the one hand, how some lesbian cultural theory and production foreground a politics of difference and marginality and thereby critique patriarchal and heterosexual hegemony. On the other hand, some essays note how a postmodern aesthetic, with its valorization of difference, sexual plurality, and gender blurring, assists lesbian cultural production.

Among the topics discussed are the shifting definitions of "lesbian" and "postmodern"; the potential "and" danger of this new conceptual territory in theory, literary and visual representation, and popular culture; the lesbian in Hollywood film; actors Jodie Foster and Sandra Bernhard; and works by Jeanette Winterson, Michelle Cliff, and Gloria Anzaldua.

Throughout, contributors address the interrelated questions and issues of class, race, ethnicity, postcolonialism, and commodification.

A taboo subject in many cultures, homosexuality has been traditionally repressed in Latin America, both as a way of life and as a subject for literature. Yet numerous writers have attempted to break the cultural silence surrounding homosexuality, using various strategies to overtly or covertly discuss lesbian and gay themes. In this study, David William Foster examines more than two dozen texts that deal with gay and lesbian topics, drawing from them significant insights into the relationship between homosexuality and society in different Latin American countries and time periods.

Foster's study includes works both sympathetic and antagonistic to homosexuality, showing the range of opinion on this topic. The preponderance of his examples come from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, countries with historically active gay communities, although he also includes material on other countries. Noteworthy among the authors covered are Reinaldo Arenas, Adolfo Caminha, Isaac Chocron, Jose Donoso, Sylvia Molloy, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Luis Zapata.

David William Foster is Regents' Professor of Spanish at Arizona State University.

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.