Focusing on British and European women, this is an accessible study of lesbian history since the 17th century. Each chapter documents and examines a woman's life and work, or the nature of a particular partnership. Some of the women featured are famous, such as Greta Garbo, Ethel Smyth, Eve Balfour and Queen Anne, while others have been forgotten or undocumented. Collis's study raises many profound and seminal issues including the visibility of lesbians in different social contexts, the influence of social status and background on their ability to be open about their sexuality, the importance of sexuality to contemporary women, and the existence and creation of role models.

"This assortment of touching, hilarious, and very smart essays moves lesbian and gay history to a new place, geographically and analytically. Ranging widely from deep South to upper South, from rural areas to urban centers, across differences of race class and gender, the authors explore the intersecting meanings of southernness and sexuality with attention to the widest angles of vision, and to the telling details of daily experience."
--Lisa Duggan
coauthor with Nan D. Hunter of "Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture"

To date, lesbian and gay history has focused largely on the East and West coasts, and on urban settings such as New York and San Francisco. The American South, on the other hand, identified with religion, traditional gender roles, and cultural conservatism, has escaped attention. Southerners celebrate their past; lesbians and gays celebrate their new-found visibility; historians celebrate the South--yet rarely have the three crossed paths.

John Howard's groundbreaking anthology casts its net widely, examining lesbian and gay experiences in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee. James Schnur, by virtue of a Freedom of Information Act query, sheds light on the sinister machinations of the Johns Committee, whose clandestine duty it was to ferret out suspected homosexuals during the McCarthy years. In his essay on the great Southern writer William Alexander Percy, William Armstrong Percy provides tangible evidence that Southern citizens, historians, and archivists have long sought to repress or obscure certain individuals within what C. Vann Woodward described as the perverse section. Moving chronologically throughAmerica's past, from the antebellum and postbellum periods, through the Jim Crow era and the Cold War, to the present, this volume introduces an important new framework to the field of lesbian and gay history--that of regional history.

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

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.

This thoroughly updated edition provides readers with the background and resources needed to understand one of the greatest civil rights issues of our time. When it was first published in 1994, Gay and Lesbian Rights: A Reference Handbook was acclaimed in School Library Journal for taking "a sober and balanced approach in addressing this emotionally charged and complex topic." The new edition shows just how far the nation has come in securing legal protections regardless of sexual orientation-and how far we still have to go. Gay and Lesbian Rights: A Reference Handbook, Second Edition provides a history of the gay liberation and gay rights movements in the United States and other parts of the world. Maintaining the careful approach of the first edition, it addresses a range of current issues from housing and employment discrimination to military service to same-sex marriage and adoption laws. Wholly rewritten, with almost 80 percent new material, it is the ideal introduction to one of the most important civil rights issues in the world today. Includes selections from laws and court cases relating to various aspects of the gay/lesbian civil rights movement Chronicles an exhaustive list of important events in the gay and lesbian civil rights movement in the United States and Europe

From Chastity Bono, daughter of Sonny and Cher, heroine of the gay community, comes the first comprehensive guide to the coming-out process, written from the perspective of both gays and lesbians and their parents.

"Heroic Desire" performs its title--bold, challenging, seductive, and compelling--a vital and exciting addition to the discourse on lesbian identities, their dissolves and perpetual becomings. Sure to incite and inspire."
--Lynda Hart, Author of "Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression"

"Right on the edge of exciting and daring new writing on lesbian representation. Moving beyond post- modernism's rejection of identity politics, Munt draws on a wealth of scholarship and personal reflection to refigure the heroic narrative in the service of lesbian liberation strategies. A thoughtful and thought- provoking book."
--Esther Newton, State University of New York, Purchase

"In "Heroic Desire" Sally Munt revisits identity politics through the figure of the lesbian hero. The result is one of the most exciting works of lesbian theory to appear in years. Written in a strong and engaging personal voice, "Heroic Desire" will excite, provoke, enlighten, and entertain the reader with this original insights into questions of lesbian identity, culture, and community."
--Bonnie Zimmerman, San Diego State University

Originally published in 1987 and revised in 2004, Companeras speaks with the voices of Latina lesbians who are puertorriquenas, chicanas, cubanas, chilenas, hondurenas, brasilenas, colombianas, argentinas, peruanas, costarricenses, mexicanas, ecuatorianas, bolivianas, dominicanas, and nicaraguenses; women who met to speak about what it implies to be both Latina and lesbian in our communities, whether we live in Latin America or the US. Each time a woman begins to speak, a liberating process begins, one that is unavoidable and has powerful political implications. In these pages we see repeated the process of self-discovery, of affirmation in coming out of the closet, the search for a definition of our identity within the family and our community, the search for answers, for meaning in our personal struggle, and the commitment to a political struggle to end all forms of oppression. The stages of increasing awareness become clear when we begin to recount the story of our lives to someone else, someone who has experienced the same changes. When we write or speak about these changes, we establish our experience as valid and real, we begin to analyze, and that analysis gives us the necessary perspective to place our lives in a context where we know what to do next. Companeras becomes an instrument of unity, a political tool. Companeras habla a traves de la voz de lesbianas latinoamericanas, chicanas, puertorriquenas, cubanas, chilenas, hondurenas, brasilenas, colombianas, argentinas, peruanas, costarricense, mexicanas, ecuatorianas, bolivianas, dominicanas, y nicaraguenses; mujeresque se encontraron para hablar sobre lo que significa en nuestra comunidad ser ambas cosas, latinoamericanas y lesbianas, sea que vivamos en America Latina o en los Estados Unidos. Cada vez que una mujer comienza a hablar, comienza el proceso de liberacion; es algo inevitable que tiene implicaciones politicas ponderosas. En estas paginas vemos repetido nuestro propio proceso de descubrimiento, la afirmacion al asumirnos ante los demas, la busqueda de una definicion de identidad dentro de la familia y de nuestra comunidad, la busqueda de repuestas significativas a las muchas personales y el compromise en la lucha politica para acabar con toda forma de opresion. Las etapas de crecimiento o de desarrollo de nuestra conciencia se hacen claras cuando comenzamos a reecontar la historia de nuestras vidas en alguien mas, alguien que ha experimentado los mismos cambios. Cuando hablamos sobre estos cambios afirmamos nuestra experienca como valida y real, y ese analisis nos da la perspectiva necesaria para colocar neustras vidas dentro de un context que nos permita saber cual es el proximo paso que temenos que dar. Companeras viene a ser un instrument de unidad, una herramienta politica.

This book intertwines academic and activist voices to engage with more than three decades of lesbian activism in the Yugoslav space. The empirically rich contributions uncover a range of lesbian initiatives and the fundamental, but rarely acknowledged, role that lesbian alliances have played in articulating a feminist response to the upsurge of nationalism, widespread violence against women, and high levels of lesbophobia and homophobia in all of the post-Yugoslav states. By offering a distinctly intergenerational and transnational perspective, this collection does not only shed new light on a severely marginalised group of people, but constitutes a pioneering effort in accounting for the intricacies - solidarities, joys, and tensions - of lesbian activist organising in a post-conflict and post-socialist environment. With a plethora of authorial standpoints and innovative methodological approaches, the volume challenges the systematic absence of (post-)Yugoslav lesbian activist enterprises from recent social science scholarship. Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, history, politics, anthropology, and sociology.

Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction offers an original and much-needed study of Irish Lesbian fiction. Evaluating a wide body of Irish lesbian fiction ranging from the Victorian era to the contemporary age, this book advocates for women writers who have been largely ignored in Irish literary history and criticism. This volume examines the use and applications of space in Irish lesbian fiction. In recent years, it can be argued that Irish society has created a new 'space' for LGBT or queer people. The concept of space is, thus, important both symbolically and physically for lesbian literature. In asking, if Irish women writers have moved 'out of the shadows' so to speak, what space is open to the Irish lesbian author? How is spatiality reflected in lesbian representation throughout Irish literary history? Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction examines a diverse range of writers from the nineteenth century to the contemporary age, evaluating the contributions of largely unknown authors who have been overlooked alongside more established voices within Irish literature. The concept of liminality that this volume takes as its theme and focus engage with notions of intersectionality, thresholds, crossings and transitions. In suggesting the overlap between the indeterminate threshold of the liminal space and its ambiguously queer potentiality to examine the dynamics of space and its relationship to lesbianism, this ground-breaking project both locates and charts spaces of queer liminality in Irish lesbian fiction.

A Generation X transgender woman, Sherilyn Connelly came out of the closet in 1999. Her own identity still emerging, she had stumbled into a difficult, stifling relationship. Also, her employment at a tech company ceased when the dot-com bubble burst. It was a goth boy from Bolinas that first took her shopping for make-up, and the San Francisco goth scene became her respite. This wickedly eye-opening memoir reveals how Connelly dealt with a toxic partner and found her voice as a woman. A longtime cinephile, it tells how she became a writer, rekindled a love for cult films and horror conventions, and learned "the secret to becoming a star." Her remembrances are also a tale of a bygone era of sex, music and San Francisco and its darkened underworld of goth strays-her literate vampires and beautiful ghosts.

This groundbreaking study, among the earliest syntheses on female homosexuality throughout Antiquity, explores the topic with careful reference to ancient concepts and views, drawing fully on the existing visual and written record including literary, philosophical, and scientific documents. Even today, ancient female homosexuals are still too often seen in terms of a mythical, ethereal Sapphic love, or stereotyped as "Amazons" or courtesans. Boehringer's scholarly book replaces these cliches with rigorous, precise analysis of iconography and texts by Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Juvenal, and many other lyric poets, satirists, and astrological writers, in search of the prevailing norms, constraints, and possibilities for erotic desire. The portrait emerges of an ancient society to which today's sexual categories do not apply-a society "before sexuality"-where female homosexuality looks very different, but is nonetheless very real. Now available in English for the first time, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome includes a preface by David Halperin. This book will be of value to students and scholars of ancient sexuality and gender, and to anyone interested in histories and theories of sexuality.

When has using the term "lesbian" "not" been considered an anachronistic gesture? This question lies at the heart of this important new collection of essays. "The Lesbian Premodern" engages key scholars in lesbian studies and queer theory in an innovative conversation in print. Transgressing traditional period boundaries, "The Lesbian Premodern" scholars to pay full attention to significant and often overlooked theoretical, empirical, and textual work on female same-sex desire and identity in premodern cultures. This provocative book offers a radical new methodology for writing theories and histories of sexuality.

This innovative study claims camp as a critical, yet pleasurable strategy for women's engagement with contemporary popular culture as exemplified by 30 Rock or Lady Gaga. In detailed analyses of lesbian cinema, postfeminist TV, and popular music, the book offers a novel take on its subject. It defines camp as a unique mode of detached attachment, which builds on affective intensity and emotional investment, while strongly encouraging a critical edge.

In Violence and Desire in Brazilian Lesbian Relationships, Allen examines the lives of Brazilian women in same-sex relationships. This examination contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of female same-sex sexuality, violence, race, and citizenship. Using fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, primarily with Afro-Brazilian women in the city of Salvador da Bahia, Allen argues that Brazilian lesbian women reject Brazilian cultural norms that encourage male domination and female submission through their engagement in romantic relationships with each other. At the same time Allen claims lesbian women also reproduce Brazilian cultural ideals that associate passion, intensity, and power with physical dominance through their engagement in infidelity and intimate partner violence. The book demonstrates that lesbian women are nonetheless marginalized as Brazilian citizens through widespread social and political invisibility despite these apparent displays of masculinized power.

This groundbreaking book provides a challenging exploration of psychoanalytic ideas about lesbians and lesbianism. Based on the authors' clinical experience as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, it offers a new and thoughtful framework that does not inevitably pathologise or universalise all lesbianism. A wide range of psychoanalytic ideas are sur

This book, first published in 2000, explores the intersections of race, gender and gay identities in writings by contemporary American lesbians of colour in order to show how this subject is sometimes ignored, sometimes brutalised and is very rarely able to survive on her own terms by constructing her own identity acts of cultural revision. The author places the lesbian of colour in the context of current identity theories showing the ever-present blind spots within current theoretical paradigms, she then reads a variety of writings by lesbians of colour describing the possibilities that exist for these subjects in textual and social realities. The author shows the varied communities that threaten the existence of this subject, as well as the limits that dictate the subject's ability to create her self. By bridging Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and Gloria Anzaldua's New Mestiza she describes how lesbians of colour can survive numerous sites of hostility by constructing a positive identity within her home community through revising cultural traditions and history. After considering the power of these acts of revision, the author calls for the empowered performance of the mestiza state - the state of contradiction wherein the lesbian of colour finds herself. This book is the first to analyse creative and theoretical works by African American, Asian American, Latina and Native American communities and writers through the lens of lesbian studies. Authors include recognised figures such as Audre Lorde, Ana Castillo and Paula Gunn Allen, as well as lesser known authors like Best Brant, Natashia Lopez and Willyce Kim. It provides a corrective to Butler's empowering but essentially white vision of performing identity, so that lesbians of colour can claim their identities and remain tied to their own cultural traditions. Ultimately, the author asks for a reconsideration of the value of identity studies that articulate monolithic identities and whose analyses perpetuate what they seek to disrupt.

In this profile, Emma Donoghue tells the story of two eccentric Victorian spinsters: Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913); poets and lovers, who wrote together under the name of Michael Field. They wrote eleven volumes of poetry and thirty historical tragedies, but perhaps their best work - richest in emotional honesty and wit - was the diary that the two women shared for a quarter of a century, and these unpublished journals and letters form the basis for the groundbreaking We are Michael Field. The Michaels lived in a contradictory world of inherited wealth and terrible illness, silly nicknames and religious crises. They preferred men to women, and yet their greatest devotion was saved for their dog. Snobbish, arrogant eccentrics who faced bereavement and death with great courage, the Michaels never lost their appetite for life or their passion for each other.

This book explores lesbians in film from early representations to contemporary ones, spanning sixty years and over twenty films. Concentrating on lesbian desire and subtext, Kabir draws on films such as Queen Christina, The Killing of Sister George, Rebecca, Desperately Seeking Susan and The Color Purple. She details their narratives in conjunction with an examination of different spectating positions and new syntheses of filmic languages. Deploying lesbian history, black subjectivity, feminist film criticism and material from psychoanalysis, Daughters of Desire explores narrative, desire and identifications. From castration and agency to the fetishization of beauty, from mothering, narcissism, and Oedipus to rage and trauma, Kabir crosses frontiers in film studies and feminist theory.

The emergence of lesbian film in the first decade of the twenty-first century symbolizes a breakthrough through the creation of new cinema that opens up a space that was not previously available or accessible in China. These motion pictures present a new breed of characters-namely, lesbians-as well as a new sexual subject on the screen for the first time in the history of Chinese cinema. Blending historicist and comparative approaches, this book begins with a critical genealogy of Chinese homosexual traditions in the first two chapters. This strategy allows the author to examine a number of films individually through contextualizing their historical and cultural articulations and interpretations through the remainder of the book.

The traditional concept of family as being exclusively heterosexual has resulted in myth-generation about lesbian parents as well as fostering limitations in the programs and benefits that support more diverse nontraditional families. Social Work with Lesbian Parent Families: Ecological Perspectives explores the variety of social systems with which lesbian parent families interact, with a focus on implications for improved, diversity-affirming service delivery and policy development. Unlike other literature on lesbian parent families, this revealing resource pulls together work on lesbian parenting from various researchers across a broad range of disciplines and presents this work from the ecosystems perspective so that the reader may view the experiences of lesbian parent families in a holistic way. The research goes beyond simple comparisons between lesbian and straight mothers. This useful text provides more complex research data, including both a more sophisticated view of the diverse communities in which lesbian parents are found, and more innovative ways of studying the issues relevant to social service providers. Developmental and life issues negotiated by lesbian parent families are discussed in detail using a strengths-based approach to intervention with individuals, families, small groups, communities, and larger systems. This unique book has the strong potential to influence the policies that impact lesbian parent families. Social Work with Lesbian Parent Families: Ecological Perspectives is a valuable resource for social workers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, marriage and family therapists, public policy and administration professionals, students, and academics doing research on sexual orientation and family. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services.

Lala (lesbian) and gay communities in mainland China have emerged rapidly in the 21st century. Alongside new freedoms and modernizing reforms, and with mainstream media and society increasingly tolerant, lalas still experience immense family and social pressures to a degree that this book argues is deeply gendered. The first anthropological study to examine everyday lala lives, intimacies, and communities in China, the chapters explore changing articulations of sexual subjectivity, gendered T-P (tomboy-wife) roles, family and kinship, same-sex weddings, lala-gay contract marriages, and community activism. Engebretsen analyzes lala strategies of complicit transgressions to balance surface respectability and undeclared same-sex desires, why "being normal" emerges a deep aspiration and sign of respectability, and why openly lived homosexuality and public activism often are not. Queer Women in Urban China develops a critical ethnographic analysis through the conceptual lens of "different normativities," tracing the paradoxes and intricacies of the desire for normal life alongside aspirations for recognition, equality, and freedom, and argues that dominant paradigms fixed on categories, identities, and the absolute value of public visibility are ill-equipped to fully understand these complexities. This book complements existing perspectives on sexual and gender diversity, contemporary China, and the politics and theories of justice, recognition, and similitude in global times.