Lesbian Literature

Ali Smith is an anomaly in the contemporary publishing scene: an experimental writer
popular enough to be interviewed by the prime minister of Scotland; a lesbian writer lauded as
a universal genius and “Nobel laureate-in-waiting”; a political writer whose ruminations on art,
aesthetics, belonging, and memory transcend the current political moment while speaking
directly to it. Currently, Ali Smith is enjoying a critical moment with the success of her Brexit tetralogy; Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture dedicated a volume to her writing in 2019, and in May 2022, post45 published a cluster of essays on Ali Smith.
Nevertheless, with the attention to Ali Smith, a strange, sometimes explicit, de-queering
of Ali Smith’s life and art occurs. In this special issue we aim to analyze Ali Smith investments in queer genealogies, queer aesthetics, and lesbian and queer lives.

In The Gilda Stories (1991), Jewelle Gomez recasts the vampire as a black lesbian to reclaim the myth from its white, masculine stereotype. Through this, Gomez explores race and sexuality and how they can be interlinked, as well as interrogating heteronormative notions of family. In her quest for identity and a sense of belonging, Gilda gathers and forms her own family units that are bound by blood in a sense separate from kinship and founded on non-patrilineal lines. This paper will therefore explore these family relationships, as well as race and sexuality, within The Gilda Stories.

This paper was delivered at the Rural Gothic: Queer Horror online conference in February of 2021.

Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue is undoubtedly one of the
most renowned contemporary writers that conjugate gender and historical fiction. Her prolific production encompasses works of fiction and short story collections, plays and radio dramas and several editions of lesbian literary history, such as Passions Between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship, and Desire (1997) and We are Michael Field (1998). The essay at hand aims at investigating the different strategies adopted by Donoghue in her representation of gender within the genre of historical fiction. The object of our analysis is The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), a collection of seventeen stories set in Great Britain and Ireland between the seventeenth and the twentieth century. Each story is centred on women of the past – they are both historical figures and invented characters – and presents the reader with trivial incidents, funny dialogues, dreamlike events, magic adventures or tragic misadventures, with a perfect combination of historical truth and fiction. The first section of the essay illustrates the
importance of historical fiction as a way of rereading women’s literary tradition; the second one delineates how both the use of historical fiction and the representation of gender are central themes of the collection. In the final section, a critical analysis of two stories extracted from The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits is provided in order to detect some of the strategies adopted by the narrator in her reconstruction of the genre of historical fiction from a gender perspective.

The aim of this paper is to examine how exactly female mental illness in
the Victorian era is represented in Waters’ novel. While the “madness” for which Sue (as Maud) is confined to the asylum is merely a sham, what I am going to focus on is the Victorian phenomenon of female hysteria and how Maud in Fingersmith actually exhibits disordered symptoms which at the time may have been considered a sign of hysteria.
Tammy Kaye
Drawing on the findings of Susan Bordo – who, in her book, Unbearable Weight, Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, explores to what extent predominantly female nervous disorders (just like the very construct of the female body) can be seen as “constituted by culture” (Foucault qtd. in Bordo 142) - I am going to argue, that hysteria – contrary to Victorian psychiatrist beliefs – can be considered the result, not of women’s physical and mental “fragility”, but rather of the era’s problematic conception of femininity.1 As I will demonstrate, the example of Maud (who was brought up within the rules and restrictions common to Victorian upper-class femininity) illustrates how women, in a culture that sought to control and censure the female body, might have internalized these anxieties about their own bodies that then manifested themselves in the physical symptoms of hysteria.
Furthermore, I will discuss how Waters portrayal of Maud shows her hysteric symptoms to be not only caused by, but actually compliant with, Victorian social norms, and thus can be said to refute that notion in feminist discourse which glorifies hysteria as a form of proto-feminist protest. Rather than descend into futile madness, Waters’ protagonists by the end of the novel can be said to have found a much more effective way of resisting social control of their bodies. For, to accept their lesbian sexuality allows them, not only to embrace their own as well as the other’s body, but also to defy Victorian society’s narrow definition of femininity in the style of what feminist writers such as Monique Wittig have championed by proclaiming that a lesbian is not a woman (Wittig 2020).

The present article questions the common label assigned to Nightwood’s character Dr. Matthew O’Connor, widely analysed as a homosexual transvestite in spite of the various narrative implications that would reconfigure the ambiguities inherent to their gender identity. As a character in a novel considered to be as discriminatory as it is emancipatory, O’Connor is a main character treated as secondary and punished for their exclusion from standards of normativity. I employ the arguments brought forth by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910 in order to consolidate the understanding of O’Connor as a transgender woman, as well as the views of Esther Newton on drag and camp discourses, in order to retrace the reasons for O’Connor’s critical interpretation as a mere male cross-dresser, a theatrical vision whose femaleness is assigned a performative rather than an identitarian value. Apart from the importance of demarcating transvestism from transsexuality, O’Connor’s wretched treatment and the impossibility of their transitioning is equally relevant. Their transition is envisioned as a matter of embodiment, and their expressed wishes of patriarchal female ideals point to an essentialist transgender narrative that consolidates matters of ‘passing’ that follow mimetic gender ideologies. The path to recognition requires the displacement of hegemonic standards of normativity, in favour of the recreation of the masculine/feminine dichotomy and the fragmentation of expectations for a sexed transitioned product. O’Connor’s pessimistic narrative arc could be seen within the context of an indirect and subverted call for political change coming from the author, whereby transphobia is both reinforced and negotiated.

The article argues that emerging African lesbian fiction in English is radically redefining African feminism, femininity, and society, imagining a social change toward respect for otherness and the recognition of individual human rights. by proposing the African woman's right to self-determination outside of traditional identities, it distances itself from 20th-century Afrocentric feminist theory and chronicles a radical epistemic shift in the formation of African women's subjectivity. Its move toward feminist individualism signifies a disappointment with the African postcolonial nation that has not served its citizens and especially women, whose gendered bodies have been used to prop up oppressive traditions. Women's experience of sexual pleasure in woman-to-woman sexual acts is figured as an expression of freedom, power, and agency that heterosexual relationships, corrupted by patriarchy, do not provide.

In Argentina, between the 1960s and 1970s, several stories appeared which dealt with feminine homoerotism and were written by men. The present article proposes an analysis of these representations of lesbian desires and loves, centered on the narrative particularities of the texts—who speaks and what perspective assumes, how the story is told—and the ideological implications that are derived. This work tries to explore the restrictions that can be imposed and the blind spots that sometimes produce a masculinist/heterosexist view at the moment of examining identities and experiences related to women who are sexually and affectively related to other women. RESUMEN Entre los años sesenta y setenta del siglo XX, aparecieron en Argentina varios relatos escritos por varones que tematizaban el homoerotismo femenino. El presente artículo propone un análisis de estas representaciones de deseos y afectividades lesbianas, centrado en las particularidades narratológicas de los textos—quién habla y qué perspectiva asume, qué y cómo lo cuenta—y las implicaciones ideológicas que se derivan. Se trata de indagar, entonces, las restricciones que puede imponer—y los puntos ciegos que a veces habilita— una mirada masculinista/heterosexista a la hora de explorar identidades y experiencias relativas a mujeres que se relacionan sexual y afectivamente con otras mujeres. PALABRAS CLAVE: lesbianismo, representación, heterosexismo, literatura argentina del siglo XX.

Rose Romano's 2016 volume of collected poems, Neither Seen Nor Heard, was the first volume she had released in over two decades. Its publication calls for the reassessment of her work, which has defined a post-modern approach to both Italian American poetry and Italian American consciousness.

Iako se queer književnost može usustaviti unutar ustaljenih okvira povijesti književnosti, ovaj se esej bavi načinima na koje hrvatska lezbijska proza propituje i sabotira takve pokušaje. On kombinira interpretacije rane lezbijske proze (romana "Udovica" Josipa Eugena Tomića i "Strast" Davida Pijade), tekstova objavljenih na prijelazu iz 19. u 20. stoljeće, i suvremenih tekstova. Od nedavno objavljene proze, tekst uključuje zbirku kratkih priča "Posudi mi smajl" i roman "Do isteka zaliha" Nore Verde, priču "Vrata pakla" Ružice Gašperov i postmodernističku zbirku priča "Moja ti" Jasne Jasne Žmak. Tim se tekstovima bavim kako bih pokazala da strani modeli gej i lezbijske povijesti ne smiju biti nekritički primijenjeni na hrvatsku lezbijsku književnost: oni su objavljeni gotovo istovremeno, što onemogućava razumijevanje hrvatske lezbijske proze kao prijelaza od tematizacije patnje i tajnovitosti prema afirmaciji i otvorenom iskazivanju identiteta. Također, autorice preuzimaju i reinterpretiraju starije žanrovske modele-u eseju pokazujem da je vrijeme hrvatske lezbijske proze queer (nenormativno) vrijeme. Kao i jasna kronologija, i jasan identitet postaje upitan: Žmak ga destabilizira postmodernističkim stilom, a autorice hrvatske ženske proze lezbijske veze tretiraju kao dio zapleta o ženskom samoostvarenju, što pokazuje da hrvatska lezbijska (i, šire, queer) književnost ne može biti svedena na ispovijesti gejeva i lezbijki namijenjene sličnoj publici.

Selma "Selli" Engler (1899 – 1972) was a leading activist in Berlins lesbian movement from about 1926 to 1931. In 1926 she published the shortlived lesbian magazine Die BIF, later she was a major contributor to lesbian magazines like Die Freundin and Frauenliebe. She continued working as a writer and activist until 1931, when she withdrew from the movement. This paper revises known biographical data and extensively adds previously unknown information on her life and work.

The paper examines selected texts of Anna Livia and Shani Mootoo, whose diasporic experiences allowed them to discuss lesbian desire from a non-stigmatised point of view. It also portrays how writing from white, western countries towards the end of the twentieth century, privileged the Irish lesbian narrative to represent a more globalised approach towards lesbian desire. Firstly, the paper will illustrate how distance from Ireland allowed authors to discuss issues affecting and disturbing Lesbian Nation and lesbian community of the 1980s, and secondly, it will discuss how queer diaspora and hy-bridity shaped lesbian diasporic writing in non-western societies at the turn of the century.

Queer Jewish American texts study and express perspectives related to alternative experiences of sex, gender, and sexuality among Jews in the Americas. By the late 1960s to the 1980s, a body of creative writing, exegesis, and criticism from gay, lesbian, and bisexual Jewish viewpoints began to appear more broadly and explicitly, gaining new cultural power in the wake of social liberation movements and the emergence of gay and lesbian Jewish congregations. By the 1990s, these voices more consistently featured in edited collections on gender and sexuality across religious denominations, cultural contexts, and scholarly disciplines; such volumes include Miriam Peskowitz’s and Laura Levitt’s Judaism Since Gender, Danya Ruttenberg’s Yentl’s Revenge and The Passionate Torah, Nathan Abrams’s Jews and Sex, and (more recently) Rivka Cohen’s Monologues from the Makom. The last decades of the 20th century saw entire anthologies devoted to queer Jewish concerns, including more transgender voices, as well. Transgender Jewish writers like Leslie Feinberg also pioneered empathetic portrayals of trans Jewish characters by the 1990s. A tension runs throughout the history of LGBTQI+ literature between assimilationism and the cultivation of pride in social difference, in some ways paralleling Jewish American literature more broadly. The term “queer” is an evolving placeholder that applies unevenly across historical and social contexts. For example, while for most of the 20th century gay and lesbian white people were considered queer (i.e. stigmatized on the basis of sexuality and denied legal protections), recent social progress has changed this reality in a number of contexts—with federal protections of same-sex marriage and positive mainstream media representations of cisgender same-sex marriages and parenting, a new “homonormativity” exists in which some sexual minority identities are assimilated into social norms at the expense of others who remain disenfranchised. “Queer,” by this logic, is now more the domain of trans, nonbinary, non-monogamous, disabled, neurodiverse, and other currently stigmatized iterations of gender and sexuality, including those experienced by many LGBTQI+ people of color. Accordingly, a significant amount of recent queer Jewish texts in the Americas avoid “homonormative” depictions and prioritize a focus on those LGBTQI+ Jews who continue to lack social safety or cultural legibility. Approaches and subject matter vary widely across this body of texts. While some authors reinterpret Jewish theology or scripture through queer lenses, others posit the queerness of Jewish experiences in diaspora, or the queerness of being a non-normative Jewish subject in normative Jewish contexts. Some texts focus on a singular queer Jewish American perspective, while others chart collective histories or advocate for new ways of thinking about queerness and Jewishness as they inform each other in creative, scholarly, or political realms. Generally speaking, this article charts a shift among creatives and intellectuals from envisioning American Jewishness and queerness as conflictual elements to appreciating their various points of overlap and synergy. As a final note, the author thanks Ori Tsameret for assistance with gathering and organizing sources in preparation for this article.

Esta ponencia fue presentada en el XXI Congreso de Colombianistas. En ella analizo la escritura lésbica monstruosa-inapropiada/ble, queer, bastarda y grotesca-en cuatro poemas de Píntame una mujer peligrosa de tatiana de la tierra:  "Píntame una mujer peligrosa", "Soy sirena de la nieve", "Oda a las lesbianas desagradables" y "Las mujeres con barba". Siguiendo la línea de Donna Haraway trazada en "Las promesas de los monstruos: Una política regeneradora para otros inapropiados/bles", caracterizo estos poemas como cartografías de ficción especulativa, uno de los conceptos que esta crítica utiliza para figurar "otros lugares" como "unos no-lugares".

Hope Mirrlees' 1926 novel 'Lud-in-the-Mist' was largely forgotten until republished in 1970 in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, along with the works of other rediscovered fin-de-siecle fantasy authors. The novel's popularity on republication owed something to 1970s psychedelic drug culture, as the novel's narrative revolves around the effects of a 'mysterious drug'. 'Lud-in-the-Mist' was conceived while Mirrlees was resident in Paris and she and her life partner, Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, were mixing with the lesbian literary circles of the Left Bank. This study reveals a sapphic subtext to Lud-in-the-Mist, related to Harrison's interest in initiatory practices of Greek mystery cults.

The paper examines selected texts of Anna Livia and Shani Mootoo, whose diasporic experiences allowed them to discuss lesbian desire from a non-stigmatised point of view. It also portrays how writing from white, western countries towards the end of the twentieth century, privileged the Irish lesbian narrative to represent a more globalised approach towards lesbian desire. Firstly, the paper will illustrate how distance from Ireland allowed authors to discuss issues affecting and disturbing Lesbian Nation and lesbian community of the 1980s, and secondly, it will discuss how queer diaspora and hybridity shaped lesbian diasporic writing in non-western societies at the turn of the century.

This chapter examines the work of the Israeli cartoonist Ilana Zeffren who publishes a weekly column in the entertainment magazine Achbar Hair. Entitled Rishumon – or “little sketch” – it is autobiographically inspired, featuring Zeffren, her girlfriend and their two speaking cats, Rafi and Spageti.  My way into the work is led by the fact that Zeffren is an out lesbian  who takes the lesbian everyday as the starting point for exploring other issues such as, in her own words, “life in the city [Tel Aviv], current affairs, cat stuff and the process of making the column”.  I argue that Zeffren's work is both evidence of and a contribution to what I call the “graphic lesbian continuum”, a concept that describes how lesbian lines of orientation are drawn across space and time, and across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Selli Engler's "Die BIF" was the first known lesbian magazine published, edited and written solely by women. Published from about 1926-1927 in Berlin, it was quite shortlived. Little is known about it up to now, this paper examines the three known issues based on the originals for the first time.

Prispevek se osredotoča na reprezentacijo erotične intime in lezbičnega odnosa v poeziji
Ljudmile Poljanec (1874–1948), ki je izdala samo eno zbirko Poezije (1906). Uveljavila se
je v obdobju moderne v okviru slovenske kulture na periferiji Avstro-Ogrske. Izhajala je iz
generacije mladih svetovljanskih pisateljic, zbranih okrog časopisa Slovenka. V ciklu Ob
Adriji in predvsem delu tega Baronesi Sonji (1906) je prešla iz realizma v impresionizem
in v moderno poetiko. V avtobiografskih pesmih ljubezenski objekt stereotipno idealizira
in ga postavlja v kontekst mediteranskega prostora, pozneje doživlja ljubezen kot izvor
trpljenja in krščanske krivde.
Ljudmila Poljanec, slovenska poezija, lezbična tematika v literaturi, slovenska moderna
The article focuses on erotic intimacy and the postromantic representation of love in the
poetry of Ljudmila Poljanec (1874–1948), the first Slovene lesbian poet, who published her
only collection of poetry Poezije (Poems) in 1906. The article analyses the representation
of homoerotic desire and the thematisation of love in the autobiographic cycles Ob Adriji
(By the Adriatic) and Baronesi Sonji (To the Baroness Sonja), in which she switched from
realism to impressionism. I will focus on the idealised picture of a woman in her poems.
Later, love became a source of suffering and a reason for Christian guilt.
Ljudmila Poljanec, Slovene poetry, representation of lesbian love in literature, Slovene
Moderna

El siguiente artículo parte de dos hipótesis: 1) en la década de 1970 emergieron, en la Argentina, una serie de narrativas que presentaron “nuevas” formas de la subjetividad y nuevas expresiones de lo político; 2) los estudios literarios y culturales sobre las construcciones
homosexuales han mantenido al análisis de las figuraciones lesbianas cercano al lugar de lo impensable/impensado. Este artículo propone leer Monte de Venus (1976), olvidada novela de Reina Roffé, como pieza fundacional de una tradición literaria queer argentina y se ocupa,
específicamente, de los modos en que el texto construye a la voz (de la) lesbiana. Sugerirá que Monte de Venus no sólo (in)augura una posibilidad de futuro para la voz (de la) lesbiana sino que sería texto clave al momento de tender lazos hacia otros relatos contemporáneos con el objetivo de trazar una incipiente cartografía pasional lesbiana.

Resumen: Este artículo ofrece una aproximación a las "genealogías sáficas" a través del poemario La otra genealogía (XV Premio Gloria Fuertes de Poesía Joven) de la escritora asturiana Sara Torres. La marginación de un corpus de autoras lesbianas del canon, y, por tanto, su ausencia en el imaginario lector-como resultado de la acción de los Aparatos Literarios de Canonización (ALC)-invisibiliza a una comunidad de mujeres que, desde los orígenes de la escritura occidental con Safo de Lesbos, se sirve de recursos literarios para construir y, en consecuencia, legitimar una subjetividad alternativa dentro del sistema falogocentrista. El objetivo de esta investigación es expresar la necesidad-tanto a nivel estético como sociopolítico-de reconocer a este conjunto diferenciado de autoras. Para ello, se adoptará una metodología comparativa en la que tradición y contemporaneidad dialogarán gracias a los planteamientos temáticos reflexivos y fundacionales, así como a los recursos literarios y de cuestionamiento del lenguaje, que el poemario referido pone a nuestra disposición.

Abstract: This paper offers an approximation to “sapphic genealogies” through the poetry collection La otra genealogía (XV Premio Gloria Fuertes de Poesía Joven) by Asturian writer Sara Torres. The marginalisation of a corpus by lesbian authors from the canon, and therefore, the lack of it in the readership’s imaginary—as a director result of the action of the Literary Apparatus of Canonization (LAC)—leave largely unseen a community of women that, from the origins of Western literature with Sappho of Lesbos, has make use of literary devices to build and, consequently, legitimate an alternate subjectivity inside the phallogocentric system. The aim of this research is to express the aesthetical, as well as socio-political need to acknowledge this distinguishable group of writers. To do so, a comparative methodology will be used in which tradition and contemporaneity will establish a dialogue thanks to the reflective and foundational thematic approaches taken in the article, as well as the literary devices and the reconsideration of the uses of language that this poetry collection with which we work bring us.

The book under review is on sexuality (act-pleasure-desire), or rather on the corporeal - or on the language of a specific counter-hegemonic ''marginal'' sexual behavior, that struggles to show the concerned community's visibility as a (non-) mirror of ''other'', though this marginalized ''other'''s imagination is also a dominant mainstream communal imagiNATION. The book is searching a/many standpoint/s of lesbians in the given spatio-temporal constraints of England, Germany (partly), and the United States. The module of imagined state (of affairs) here is not the religion, neither language, nor so called ''race'', but the woman-woman relationship or the care of imagined collective selves. This book, from the perspective of linguistics, is a plurisecular metadiscourse on the discourse of/on lesbianism.

Este artículo analiza algunas de las 22 prosas poéticas que conforman Para las duras: una fenomenología lesbiana de tatiana de la tierra (Villavicencio, Colombia 1961-Long Beach, California 2012). A la vez que se aproxima a la fenomenología queer que se expresa en los actos performativos del lenguaje y el cuerpo, mi análisis se apoya en los aportes de Sara Ahmen sobre la ética y estética de la desorientación, en los de Judith Butler sobre el falo lesbiano, y en los de Teresa de Lauretis sobre la noción de perversidad.

L'association des ami.es de Wittig a pour but de promouvoir les études sur l'oeuvre de Monique Wittig. Pour la contacter, vous pouvez envoyer un message à ami.eswittig@gmail.com, ou vous rendre sur : http://sites.duke.edu/wittig/
L'association publie une revue électronique : n'hésitez pas à nous proposer des articles, témoignages, documents.
Travaillons collaborativement, sur le fond, et lentement.

The association "ami.es de Wittig" helps promoting researches on Monique Wittig's works. You can contact us by email : ami.eswittig@gmail.com, or visit our website : http://sites.duke.edu/wittig/
We publish an electronic review : don't hesitate to submit articles, testimonies, any documents related to Wittig.
Let's work together, in substance, and at a slow pace.