Schulman's Urban Lesbian: A HoboSexual Pedestrian Rhetoric

The following article reads the protagonist in Sarah Schulman's Girls, Visions and Everything as not only lesbian, but as hobosexual—a concept representative of anti-capitalist practices in both sex and labor. The hobosexual is developed as an extension of the lesbian flâneur, as a concept that requires reading Schulman's urban lesbian at the intersection of class and sexuality. Lila Futuransky's sexual identity is suspended and complicated through an emphasis on her desire for queer mobility; her urban movements connect her to hobo history, but also expose the effects of capitalism that thwart her urban movement.     

“The Scum of the Scum of the Scum”: Rose Romano's Search for Sisterhood

This article explores the interplay of ethnicity and sexuality in poet Rose Romano's work, especially as she engages in a complex, and, at times, highly debatable identity politics. In her poetry, Romano denounces the oppression she experiences as a lesbian, a Sicilian American, and even as an “olive” ethnic in the lesbian publishing community. Particularly interesting is her strained relationship with the multicultural lesbian community due to disagreements around the concept of race, and, consequently, of racial hierarchies. With her poetry, Rose Romano questioned all kinds of categorizations that do not take into account the complexities of her multi-faceted identity.     

My New Zealand lesbian studies through time and times

In this article Alison J. Laurie reflects on her political activism and how it informs her academic scholarship and research interests relating to lesbian studies in New Zealand. She concludes that her desire for social change and commitment to lesbian community development inspired her early activism and has continued to inform her activism as well as her academic research and writing. She discusses her involvement in lesbian and gay organizations and campaigns, in New Zealand, Scandinavia, the United States and the United Kingdom, and the ideas that have informed and influenced her work. She pioneered the first lesbian studies courses in New Zealand, initially through community education, and from 1990 for university credit, and considers the contribution these courses can make. Finally, she reflects on several of her articles, book chapters and books considering how her work has developed during the past 50 years.     

Professor Petcock, or How the Academy Turns on Queer Studies

As an intellectually out lesbian faculty member, the author is keenly aware of her ornamental function vis-a-vis lesbian/gay and straight colleagues alike. Academically cast as a kind of regulating valve, she, through her work in gay and lesbian literature, ostensibly opens up the possibilities for diesel research throughout the university. Yet, her status as Professor Petcock—the dyke with intellectual and other equipment—belies institutional willingness to allow queer research, together with opportunities for political and social change within the university, to evaporate, evanesce.     

On my own terms

Abstract

Carol Conaway prepared this excerpt from her political memoir-in-progress. She examines her experiences as an African American lesbian living her dream of becoming a Jew. The work focuses on how she navigated her initial naïveté about the prejudices she encountered in response to her combination of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and mental illness. Conaway’s work to co-found a community of lesbian and gay Jews in Boston marked a defining moment in her history.     

Lesbians in China's mainland: a brief introduction

This paper describes and introduces lesbians' lives and the relevant research in China's Mainland. The first part shows the slow development of lesbian culture in the form of literature, films and documentaries. Although lesbians' lives were reflected more or less in modern literature, the "true" lesbian novel was published only recently. Relevant films and documentaries were never shown to the public in China. Lesbian culture is still unevenly developed and remains negligible. The first part also describes lesbian research in the field of literature, psychiatry and sociology. The relevant research in literature is relatively systematic and rich, while that in psychiatry is fraught with discrimination and that in sociology is relatively weak. The second part presents the observation and analysis of lesbian Internet communities. It deals with lesbians' self-identity, role differentiation, sentiments and sexuality. Among them, role differentiation plays an important part in lesbians' lives though few researchers have studied it. Most lesbian organizations founded on the strength of Internet communication lack experience and resources and have little influence on the masses. Some lesbians are accepted by the public, but in return, they compromise to some popular values. This is extremely disadvantageous to those who are unwilling to give in. At the end of the paper, the first author expresses her future plan that she will continue her study on lesbian culture under the help of Internet observation and various activities. doi:10.1300/J155v10n03_08.     

Therapy with Lesbian Couples

Speaking as a therapist and a heterosexual, the author discusses her work with lesbian couples. She suggests that necessary components of good therapy are the therapist's awareness of his or her own views, fears and assumptions about homosexuality, and an understanding of the ways that society, including the world of therapy, still subjugates same sex relationships. Working with lesbian couples raises challenges that are pertinent to the wider issue of the redefinition of couple therapy in a society where the couple relationship itself is being redefined.     

Voices from the margin: a case study of a rural lesbian's experience with woman-to-woman sexual violence

The purpose of this case study is to understand how a lesbian survivor coped with traumatic stress resulting from woman-to-woman sexual violence in a rural context. This research was grounded on the feminist paradigm, and the case study approach was used for data collection and analysis. The results indicate that the lesbian survivor encountered numerous obstacles to admitting the rape and seeking help. A number of these perceived challenges were associated with the rural sociocultural context (e.g., conservative culture, religious fundamentalism, low levels of anonymity, small gay/lesbian communities, and geographical isolation), myths of lesbian utopia, a heterosexist legal system, and a lack of lesbian-friendly helping resources. Despite being confronted with numerous challenges, the survivor demonstrated her resilience through the use of a variety of strategies to cope with the rape aftermath and detrimental social reactions. Positive social support from her gay and lesbian friends also facilitated her recovery. The findings highlight the importance of considering the intersection of trauma and cultural oppression in understanding lesbian survivors' experiences with same-sex sexual assault.     

Lesbian Stepfamilies

ABSTRACT

Cherlin's (1978) model of remarriage as an incomplete institution is used to show how lesbian families' experiences are similar to and different from those in heterosexual stepfamilies. We examine how heterosexism and homophobia enhance the marginalization of lesbian stepfamilies. Despite the importance of the partner's role in the family, much of the lesbian stepfamily research neglects her. Ways to involve the partner's perspective in practice and research and to broaden research perspectives on lesbian stepfamilies are suggested.     

Chilling out in ‘cosmopolitan country’: Urban/rural hybridity and the construction of Daylesford as a ‘lesbian and gay rural idyll’

This paper advances scholarship on ‘lesbian and gay rural idylls’. A growing literature examines how ‘lesbian and gay rural idylls’ are not only produced in opposition to the urban, but are themselves urban constructs. We extend these contentions by exploring the processes of idyllisation suffusing lesbian and gay festival tourism in Daylesford, a town in non-metropolitan Victoria, Australia. We find that Daylesford’s idyllisation by the lesbian and gay tourism industry blurs the urban/rural binary, and instead hybridises rurality and urbanity in the tourism images and practices of ‘cosmopolitan country’ associated with the town. Research findings from Daylesford are analysed to examine how the dynamics of tourism marketing and festival attendance help produce and articulate this hybrid variant of the ‘lesbian and gay rural idyll’. We utilise two sets of mostly qualitative data for this inquiry: travel commentaries in the news media, and a survey conducted in Daylesford at the 2006 ChillOut Festival, Australia’s largest lesbian and gay rural festival.     

Detecting Two-Spirit erotics: The fiction of Carole laFavor

ABSTRACT

This article examines the life and novels of Carole laFavor, arguing for her importance to and influence in Two-Spirit studies. Along with being a writer, laFavor was a powerful voice for social justice and Indigenous health sovereignty in Minnesota and the nation. Her two novels, Along the Journey River and Evil Dead Center, which both focus on Anishinaabe lesbian detective protagonist Renee LaRoche, are the first lesbian detective fiction published by a Native author. Renee's embrace of a specifically Two-Spirit erotics anchors her to family and brings her tribal community a powerful healing when she employs her skills to protect her people from instances of racism, abuse, and injustice. This article, then, reads these novels as the first of an emerging genre of texts that claim an overtly Two-Spirit erotic as well as vital precursors to the present embrace of sovereign erotics in Indigenous studies.     

“Lizzie Do You Mind”: Gertrude Stein's Laws of Genre in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

Against previous critics’ readings of Stein's Blood on the Dining-Room Floor as a failed attempt at the hard-boiled genre, this article argues for the many ways in which the novel re-writes the gothic/domestic detective story in a brilliant tour de force that frames all that is un-natural about heteronormative Victorian family life while offering a lesbian alternative. In Stein's subversive and serious play with the forms and conventions of popular fiction, her positive invocations of Lizzie Borden as textual witness, her wide-reaching references to lesbian relationships in other of her works, and, finally, her virtuosic use of silence, Stein writes a profound critique of the patriarchal family through a radical unmaking of a thoroughly domestic literary form.     

Lesbian Therapists and Lesbian Clients

Abstract

The authors, on the basis of their own experience, explore issues specific to therapists working openly as lesbians with lesbian clients. Their discussion covers the structure of a private practice, the therapeutic relationship between lesbian therapist and lesbian client, and personal challenges for the lesbian therapist. Questions are raised and direction given with the aim of facilitating congruence among the therapist's personal capacities, the therapeutic setting, and the psychological intention of the therapeutic work. The authors note the therapist's need to tolerate the exposure of her personal life and the pressure toward fusion that are both entailed in work with lesbian clients, and they suggest that these special challenges, when the lesbian therapist's engagement with them is conscious, offer rich material that can deepen the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic work.     

Beyond the Static Image: Tee Corinne's Roles as a Pioneering Lesbian Artist and Art Historian

While Tee Corinne has been widely recognized as a preeminent lesbian and feminist artist of the last forty years, little has been written about her as an artist or art historian in any substantial way. This article attempts to shed light on Corinne's investment in creating explicitly sexual lesbian visual art and art historical writings that put pressure on the categories of artist and art historian between the 1970s and early 2000s. Corinne's work manages to fulfill feminist ideals while also working outside of the norms set up in both the lesbian and mainstream realms of art and art history.     

Reading “Rights of Desire” and “Rights of Opacity” in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

This article argues that the novel Disgrace points toward a politics of illegiblity and opacity that aligns more readily with anti-identitarian queer theory instead of rights- and recognition-based human rights discourses. Through an extended consideration of the relation between national allegory, history, and legibility, I argue that the novel sustains two interpretations of the category of lesbian—first, the national allegorical reading that erases her rights of lesbian desire in the transmission of racialized and sexual historical debts and second, Lucy's refusal of legibility as a lesbian in the national narrative and legal structures.     

Gertrude Stein,Opium Queen: Notes on a Mistaken Embrace

Gertrude Stein was not only a fairly open lesbian but also Jewish, expatriate, and androgynous—all attributes that often retarded mass-market success. Why then was she so popular? The article offers original research highlighting how Stein was constructed as a kind of “opium queen” in the popular American press, and the ways that this decadent, bohemian celebrity persona allowed her to operate as “broadly queer” rather than “specifically gay” in the American cultural imaginary—a negotiation that accounts for the mass-market success rather than censure of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas despite the unparalleled visibility of its lesbian erotics.     

Imagining a Life

ABSTRACT

Born in Ohio in 1876 to wealthy parents, Natalie Clifford Barney is today better known for the freedom of her lesbian life-style than for her writing. Nevertheless, she was a serious writer, and consciously engaged in writing from a specifically lesbian point of view. With her lover Renée Vivien, she attempted to revive the cult of Sappho, and thus to revitalize a lost lesbian literary tradition. Through her weekly salon, Barney encouraged women writers, serving as a mentor and muse, and often as a lover. She enjoyed enduring friendships with many well-known women and men of letters, such as Gertrude Stein, Remy de Gourmont, Colette, and Dolly Wilde. Fictional characters based on Barney appear in novels by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Liane de Pougy, Djuna Barnes, and Radclyffe Hall. Barney's own writing consists of one novel (The One Who Is Legion, an eccentric meditation on gender and personality); a few collections of plays, poetry, and “portraits” of women; several volumes of memoirs; and two major volumes of “pensées,” or aphorisms, in which she comments on society, politics, and sexuality using a variety of urbane personae. Natalie Barney's work deserves more recognition than it has received, and her life still can serve as a model of self-creation uninhibitied by social strictures.     

Narrating Maternity

ABSTRACT

Storytelling exerts an extraordinarily high degree of agency in establishing and maintaining lesbian-headed families with children, in part because these families do not have access to the social forms that organize and legitimize non-gay families. This article and, to a greater degree, the book project from which it is drawn examine the relationship of storytelling to lesbian mothers' subject constitution and community formation practices and the strategies that they employ to negotiate their marginalized social status. Stories told by members of lesbian families vary widely in content and form but clear patterns emerge in terms of their function-how they participate in shaping lesbian family cultures and lesbian mothers' sense of identity. One of the most widely circulated story types is the confirmation narrative. In general, confirmation narratives verify and announce family membership. They define the place and roles of individual members in relation to others in the family. An important sub-category of the confirmation narrative addresses the position of the so-called other mother, the lesbian co-parent whose relationship with her children is not considered legitimate by heterosexual standards because she lacks legal custody of them and/or because she is not their biological mother. This variant of the confirmation narrative legitimizes the maternal identity, agency, and authority of the “other” mother. The following provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of one such confirmation narrative which recounts the birth of the storytellers' adopted daughter.     

Vital Lines Drawn From Books: Difficult Feelings in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

This article examines the representation of a transnational archive of queer books in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into the role of reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative function in the portrayal of Alison's lesbian identification and its complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped—killed even, in the case of the father—in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualize her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West.     

Disrupting Cultural Selves: Constructing Gay and Lesbian Identities in Rural Locales

Research points to the increasing geographical diversity of gays and lesbians, in contrast to cultural narratives that link gay and lesbian sexualities to urban spaces. Examining the sexual identity constructions of rural gays and lesbians thus provides an opportunity to analyze the connection between cultural and personal levels of narrative identity. Drawing on data from thirty interviews with rural gays and lesbians, I address how this group negotiates cultural narratives about queerness and constructs sexual identities in rural locales. I find that their interpretations of geography make clear distinctions between urban/rural and draw on elements in rural culture. These interpretations provide resources to modify cultural understandings that narrate gay/lesbian identities in rural areas as closeted, hidden, and oppressed.