Lesbian

This article briefly reviews literature on responses towards same-sex (lesbian and gay) sexualities from psychoanalytic and ‘lesbian and gay affirmative’ psychotherapeutic perspectives. An analysis is presented of reports of countertransferential reactions to lesbian and gay clients, obtained from interviews with 14 psychotherapists who work in a lesbian and gay affirmative manner and 18 clients who had received affirmative psychotherapy. Data were subjected to grounded analysis. Participants consistently attended to the thoughts, feelings and values that therapists held in relation to lesbian and gay clients and how these affected the meanings and practices available to them. These were linked with the therapist’s sexual identity among other factors. Negative countertransferential reactions were regarded as potentially occurring among heterosexual and lesbian and gay therapists and were seen as arising from therapists’ conscious and unconscious fears about same-sex sexualities. These findings indicate a need to continue debating these issues more widely in the professional arena.

""L’objectif est de mettre au jour la construction de l’événement dans sa rhétorique et sa performance, sa diffusion médiatique et sa reconnaissance sociale. Comment la production discursive autour de la Marche des Fiertés 2011 interroge-t-elle les enjeux
de représentations – et donc l’identité LGBT et l’action du mouvement ?

L’étude du cas de 2011 permet d’interroger les potentialités médiatiques et communicationnelles du discours polémique. Pourquoi y a-t-il eu polémique ? Quels enjeux cristallise l’affiche ? Y a-t-il réellement eu polémique ? En quoi les discussions
suscitées par l’affiche de l’édition 2011 de la Marche des Fiertés révèlent les enjeux de l’événement qu’elle est censée promouvoir ? Finalement, en quoi « l’affaire de l’affiche » marque-t-elle une rupture et témoigne-t-elle (déjà) des transformations
du « répertoire d’action collective » [Tilly, 1986] ?

La polémique autour de l’affiche implique différents acteurs : l’Inter-LGBT, les associations LGBT, l’agence créative, les journalistes et, dans un second temps, le grand public. J’ai analysé le conflit interprétatif à travers le prisme du temps (la
durée) et celui des médias (la capacité à diffuser). J’ai étudié ce cas de manière diachronique, en tenant compte des trois dimensions de « l’affaire de la Marche des Fiertés 2011 » : en amont, en nous intéressant aux raisons et conditions de
conception de l’affiche (entretiens avec des membres de l’Inter-LGBT et l’agence créative chargée de la conception de l’affiche) ; en suivant le déroulé de l’affaire, en considérant les acteurs et les espaces médiatiques mobilisés ; et en aval, en
analysant la reconnaissance de l’affiche (test de l’affiche).

Si à ses débuts la Gay Pride était subversive – au sens strict puisqu’illégale –, elle fait aujourd’hui partie du calendrier festif parisien. La montée en généralité opérée dans le discours d’accompagnement, et notamment le passage de l’homosexualisation de l’espace public à sa sexualisation tout court, réinterrogent cette subversion dans le cadre du mouvement LGBT.

Le discours d’escorte participe à la représentation du groupe cible en ce qu’il le raconte : un système complexe de discours polyphoniques s’articule selon une double logique identitaire et médiacentrique. La polémique autour de l’affiche de la Marche 2011 participe de ce discours et voit dans le médiatique sa modalité privilégiée. Avec la polémique – médiatique – comme cadre, l’affiche 2011 devient prétexte à des discours identitaires qui la dépassent : l’objet de la dispute s’éloigne du visuel-affiche pour venir se placer au niveau plus global de la représentation
du mouvement LGBT, représentation mise en tension entre l’idéologie d’une organisation militante et les réactions-commentaires polémiques du public à travers
les médias – sociaux. Il s’agit alors de distinguer l’objectif des médias de « faire polémique », les effets involontaires d’une communication inappropriée et les objectifs stratégiques que pourrait avoir une organisation militante à exploiter les
potentialités communicationnelles d’une polémique médiatique.

Finalement, dans le discours d’escorte de la Marche des Fiertés LGBT, la représentation des sexualités alternatives – et de la sexualité en général – n’est plus un signe subversif mais un signe de reconnaissance et un mécanisme de captation,
elle correspond à un horizon d’attente, à une demande sociale.

Mots clés : polémique, médias, représentation, sexualité, mouvement LGBT, militantisme""

Lesbians have limited visibility or representation in educational research, and there has been even less consideration of the ways that lesbians’ experiences are racialized. Using a methodological approach that entwines Karen Barad’s concept of queer temporalities with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s discussion of single-axis intersectionality, this paper uses critical autoethnography to offer narrative examinations of the author’s queerness as constantly enmeshed with her Whiteness. The author considers the degrees to which being situated in the socio-politically conservative U.S. South have influenced her experiences as a queer lesbian academic, even as White privilege has, intentionally and unintentionally, shaped her scholarship.

Today, identity politics seems almost quaint. Faded into memory are NEA funding battles and culture wars over representations of identities, dismantling of identity-based social programs such as college admissions and affirmative action, and the spawning of an all-purpose, anti-progressive code phrase, “politically incorrect.” Moreover, scholars, particularly those working in critical/cultural areas, have theorized identity away in a multitude of ways: combining categories into hybrids and cyborgs, challenging its liberal humanist assumptions, critiquing its biases, tracing its processes of discursive constitution, queering its dualisms, and envisioning its aftermath in a post-identity world. Identity—at least insofar as an authentic expression of some aspect of inner self from which to build coalitions—seems to have had its moment in the sun, now safely tucked into a thematic week or two on syllabi or a chapter in a textbook: a familiar, but not terribly new or exciting topic.

Over the least decade, the hopes of fighting oppression and discrimination against gay people in Africa by means of introducing and strengthening laws which defend equal rights and
cultural and personal diversity has become increasingly difficult. This applies in many ways also to South Africa, in spite of the exemplary words on the subject in the South African constitution
More than 50% of African governments have taken action and steps to formally criminalize same-sex unions. There is an increased awareness of homophobia in the continent with
many African media adding to the furore. Nonetheless, anti-gay laws in Uganda are now weakened due to human rights opposition and Malawi witnessed the presidential pardon of a
gay couple. In March 2011, at the second recall at the United Nations Assembly in Geneva on the Joint declaration to decriminalize homosexuality, the number of African countries who
signed rose from six to eleven including Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, Mauritius, Central Africa Republic, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Angola, South Africa, Seychelles, Rwanda and Sierra
Leone, thirteen countries abstained and twenty-eight opposed Joint Statement on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI).
The popularity of gay rights and advocacy for the social status of same-sex relationships have provoked politicians and governments in Africa to react. Recent cases of criminalization of
same-sex relationships have worsened a situation already characterized by harassment, humiliation, extortion, arbitrary arrests, judicial violence, imprisonment, torture, hate crimes
and honour killings on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity all over Africa. These abuses are happening whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not. Every
year, there are numerous cases of hate crimes towards sexual minorities and gay and lesbian advocates working to deliver more justice. The abuse is escalating.

Nell’Atene della fine degli anni Venti due giovani donne, la studentessa Dora e l’emancipata Lisa, si conoscono e si innamorano. Dora, più introversa e riflessiva, scrive la cronaca, in forma diaristica, di questo amore due volte tormentato; innanzitutto per la differenze sociali e caratteriali tra le due ragazze e in secondo luogo in quanto amore omosessuale in una società rigidamente eterosessuale. Nel corso del suo diario Dora Rosetti, autrice e nel contempo protagonista del libro, non si astiene dal ricorso a uno stile disinibito e continui sono i riferimenti alla promiscuità sessuale e al consumo di stupefacenti. Nondimeno vi è denunciata la condizione sociale della donna in rapporto al mondo del lavoro e della famiglia. Il romanzo, apparso nel 1929, fu celebrato per la sua originalità dal celebre critico dell’epoca Grigorios Xenòpoulos, ma cadde ben presto nell’oblio probabilmente per evitare uno scandalo. Nei primi anni Duemila il ritrovamento, da parte della storica della letteratura Christina Dunià, di due copie delle Due amanti, la prima a Lesbo nella biblioteca personale del pittore Takis Eleftheriadis e la seconda nella biblioteca personale di Konstantinos Kavafis, ha risvegliato l’interesse dei lettori per questo romanzo, il primo a tematica lesbica della letteratura greca contemporanea e uno degli esempi più importanti di letteratura dei “devianti” anni Venti.

Dora Rosetti è una delle autrici più enigmatiche della letteratura greca contemporanea. In base agli indizi che è possibile trarre dalla lettura delle Due amanti, l’unico romanzo giuntoci con il suo nome e pubblicato in Grecia nel 1929, si deduce che fosse originaria della cosmopolita comunità greca di Alessandria d’Egitto. Il presunto cognome dell’autrice, Rosetti, è la forma grecizzata di Rosetta (Rashid), la località nei pressi di Alessandria dove nel 1799 fu rinvenuta la celebre stele. Altri indizi la mettono in relazione con Konstantinos Kavafis, nella cui biblioteca personale è stato ritrovata una delle due copie superstiti delle Due amanti con la seguente dedica: “Con stima straordinaria per il nostro grande poeta alessandrino sig. K. Kavafis. Dora Rosetti”.

Many Native women embrace the term two-spirit to capture their sexuality and gender expression. By analyzing the narratives of five two-spirit women who are Native activists, we explored contemporary understandings of the concept and what it means for Native communities. The incorporation of the identity within indigenous worldviews, its manifestation in terms of (be)coming out, and the triple stressors of heterosexism, racism, and sexism emerged as key themes.

HUFFINGTON POST BEST FILM BOOK OF 2016, FINALIST FOR RICHARD WALL MEMORIAL AWARD, LONGLISTED FOR KRASZNA-KRAUSA BEST MOVING IMAGE BOOK OF 2016. Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men.

Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.

- Chosen by Huffington Post as one of the Best Film Books of 2016
- 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
- Longlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book of 2016
- Finalist for 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award by the Theatre Library Association
- Reviewed by: Times Higher Education, Times Literary Supplement, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Women’s Studies, Journal of American History, Feminist Media Studies, The Women’s Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal (Starred review)

O lesbianismo foi tema central nos estudos, teorias e escritos de Monique Wittig (1935-2003). O lesbianismo é, para autora, o único conceito além das categorias homem e mulher; é um conceito revolucionário. La Contrainte à l’hétérosexualitéet la existence lesbienne’, de Adrienne Rich, escrito em 1981, é um texto com teor semelhante aos escritos de Wittig. Sua discussão parte do pressuposto de que dentro da heterossexualidade compulsória cria-se uma percepção da existência lesbiana. Enquanto as precursoras do movimento feminista dos anos 1960-1970 preocupam-se com a análise dos mecanismos de dominação, as feministas dos anos 1970-1980, a exemplo de Monique Wittig irão questionar a naturalização da maternidade e a heterossexualidade obrigatória. A lesbiandade é elevada ao estatuto de conceito revolucionário nos seus escritos.

The authors conducted a content analysis of articles listed in
PubMed on bisexual health (N = 348). Methodological approaches
favored cross-sectional surveys. Fewer than 20% of the articles analyzed
data for bisexuals separately; most combined their data with
homosexual participants. Most articles used convenience samples
with poor representation of women, socioeconomic status and minorities.
One fifth of the articles framed bisexuals as an infection
bridge, whereas about one sixth framed bisexuality as a legitimate
identity. More than 90% of the bisexuality medical research was
atheoretical. To address health inequities, further study is required
on the needs of this forgotten minority group.

This link [http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2363_reg.html] leads to my Introduction to the edited collection Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World (Temple UP, 2015). The collection discusses the emergence of modern sexual science in Europe, Asia, Peru and the Middle East. The introduction locates the book in relation to critical debates about sexology and translation. It argues that the research gathered here complicates the idea that modern sexuality is a 'Western' construct that was transmitted around the world.

Lesbians are said to have no culture. But the lesbian movement has searched and found cultural artefacts. They are poems and sculptures, myths and stories, music, art and archaeology. Lesbian culture can be found in how words are used. So put away the idea that we have no culture. It's there and just like other colonised peoples, it's apparent when you take off the distorting lenses of patriarchal ideology.

In two studies, this thesis depicts the relationship between minority group status in the United States, perceived discrimination, and coping with stress. Past literature on coping and its types – problem-focused versus emotion-focused – is inconsistent in terms of differences between minority status groups and majority groups. It remains unknown whether or why Black Americans and lesbian or gay Americans may demonstrate coping patterns that differ from White Americans and heterosexual Americans, respectively. What is altogether absent from the literature is the possible mediating factor of perceived discrimination experienced by these minority groups. That is, differences in internal, stable coping processes that manage stress may have been molded by one’s experience with discrimination. Study 1 examines the relationship between race (Black versus White) and coping, mediated by perceived discrimination. Study 2 examines the relationship between sexual orientation (lesbian or gay versus heterosexual) and coping, mediated by perceived discrimination. Both studies confirm the thesis that minority group members exhibit maladaptive, emotion-focused coping more than majority group
vi
members – but that this difference is explained by the minority group members’ perceived discrimination. Historical and political relevance, social implications, and possible limitations in design and interpretation are discussed.

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color is coming out from Nightboat Books on May 1, 2018, though I originally began editing this project about four years ago with Lambda Literary, as an online journal. The anthology covers 100 years of queer of color history, since the Harlem Renaissance. To celebrate the launch of this historic project, VIDA has provided the space for several of the queer women of color in the anthology to write odes for the other queer women of color who also appear in the anthology but are deceased. Below is an intergenerational literary dialogue, from one generation to the next, from the living poets to those who have passed. I hope you enjoy these conversations, these love letters, letters of appreciation, across time and space. — Christopher Soto

Dr. Marie Cartier’s Baby You Are My Religion:  Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall provides an accessible and thought provoking analysis of mid-20th Century American butch-femme bar culture and how it should be interpreted as a sacred space for its community and the various movements it spawned as a result.  Set in a time when homosexuality was still deemed as a mental illness, bars were the only place where gay and lesbian individuals could not only find community but also discover and shape their individual and sexual identities that the outside world was defining as sinful.

Il saggio di Raffaella Perna documenta la ricerca fotografica del barone tedesco Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931) attraverso una rilettura delle fonti d'epoca, documenti inediti e scritti autografi, per mettere in luce gli aspetti innovativi di una delle personalità più interessanti e originali tra la fine del XIX e l'inizio del XX secolo.

In the second half of the 19th century, two Spanish primary school teachers were married despite the fact that their legal status as women rendered this union not only illegal but also publicly scandalous. In 2008 their story was resurrected in the form of a book based on an extensive review of educational, legal, and media archives. The Spanish press responded to the book’s publication by embedding the events within a more recent historical narrative around the struggle for gay marriage rights. In this article, we analyze the events in light of the understandings of sex, gender and sexuality that were available at the time, and then explore both the continuities and discontinuities with the modern interpretive framework that affords these women a lesbian identity, drawing upon Bennett’s notion of “lesbian-like” practices in eras where such identities were not yet conceptualized.

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

This book examines how sexological ideas about desire and the body made their way from German science into British literary culture at the turn of the last century. It shows that fiction not only influenced the vocabulary of European sexology, but that it allowed lay women and men to shape modern ideas about sex, gender and the body.

Main authors discussed include Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand, Edith Ellis, and Radclyffe Hall.