Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

Arantxa Echevarría's film Carmen y Lola (2018) takes a groundbreaking new approach to intersectionality and lesbian identity contextualizing a lesbian coming-of-age-story and its multicultural background and context. Owing to the colonial gaze and the outsider's perspective in the story telling, the film makes some major missteps in its representation of the Romani community in Spain. But nonetheless, the intersectional presentation is groundbreaking in terms of representation of lesbian diversity and experiences, since it portrays the lesbian subject as a triple minority: woman, lesbian, and Roma - a minority ethnic group still discriminated against in Spain. The story of two female Roma adolescents coming to terms with their mutual homoerotic desire intertwines with the marginality of their community and a conservative and homophobic environment in which lesbianism does not find a space. I argue that Echevarría's film explores the topics of minorities both in terms of ethnicity and sexual orientation. The director aims to represent this otherness as a marginalized and decentered subjectivity that intersects with other axes of discrimination. It is from this marginal position that the film explores the forms of resistance against the control of the lesbian body that women directors are carrying out in Spanish cinema.

This is my personal experience of being a lesbian living on the land. What is unusual in my story is that I've been doing this for fifty-four years and that I had the good fortune of settling on the north coast of California in a community of gay friendly, progressive back-to-the-landers. Those early years of the 70's were times of exploration. We learned how to live in harmony with each other and with the natural world around us. We learned about our oppression as women, as lesbians, and tried to convey these lessons to others through our national magazine "Country Women". Decades have passed and I write about what has happened to those early settlers. My personal evolution has been through small farming and art. Both of these endeavors keep me connected to this beloved place and still allow me to reach others and encourage them to cherish the land. What I've seen over the years is that women and especially lesbians have a unique connection with the land. We are more likely to respect and nurture our Mother Earth as we love care for our own female bodies and our children. Of course, many straight women and many men are wonderful caretakers of the land so, as in most things, it is not a black and white situation. Our community has stayed strong and continues to battle the forces bent on destruction of the redwoods and the ocean. As my generation passes on, I wonder if there will be a new batch of settlers to carry on what we started or if the inevitable march of tourism and expensive homes will be the end of our legacy of protection.

The present article takes the recurrent motif of trees in Ali Smith's oeuvre as a point of departure to analyze how Smith forges an alliance between environmental concerns and queerness. It argues that her short stories present their own version of queer ecology on both a conceptual and aesthetic level. Smith queers ecological relations and brings ecological concerns to bear on the queer on multiple scales, continuously disrupting linear narratives, anthropocentric thinking and capitalist imperatives of (re)production and productivity for the benefit of interdepenence, resistance and inter-species care. By means of non-linear storytelling, ambiguous pronouns and shifting narrative perspective she aesthetically and conceptually opens space for queer desires, interspecies care and a cyclical, distinctly ecological view of queer futurity that ultimately extends not just to environmental and social but also cultural relations.

The subfield of rural queer studies and the concept of lesbian earth encourage scholars to explore the significance of rural place, nature, and climate change in queer texts. Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family TragicComic, presents nature as a source of familial conflict, creativity, and mutual support and as under threat due to strip mining. The climate change novel, 2 Degrees, focuses intensely on the realities of climate change and lesbian relations with the earth. These two texts are drastically different, yet they both convey a lesbian earth sensibility, featuring main characters who practice an open, vulnerable, interdependent stance with themselves and the more-than-human world.

The present review explored the prevalence and factors of mental health conditions among lesbian, bisexual, and other sexual minority women (LBSW) in Southeast Asia. It found that the rates of significant depression and depressive symptoms range from 10% to 93.2%, with a median of 27.7%. This wide range can be due to a study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which found elevated depression, stress, and anxiety rates. Studies also highlight high levels of sadness, hopelessness, sleep and eating problems, fatigue, and suicidal thoughts among LBSW. Suicide rates indicate that LBSW have higher odds of suicidal ideations and attempts than their heterosexual peers in the region. Additionally, bisexual and polysexual women report higher rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal behaviors than lesbian women, necessitating tailored mental health interventions. Substance use among LBSW is also notable, including smoking and heavy drinking, though some rates are below the global average. Factors influencing mental health include openness about sexuality, coping styles, and discrimination. Discrimination is linked to various mental health issues, supporting the minority stress model's applicability in the region. Aging-related factors also affect mental health among LBSW, with older age being possibly protective against depression. Overall, this review highlights the urgent need for more inclusive mental health research and interventions in the region. Recommendations include training healthcare providers, developing tailored mental health programs, adopting suicide prevention initiatives, enacting anti-discrimination laws, and addressing substance use. Future research should focus on underrepresented regions and older LBSW.

In her 1978 essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde avers, "The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information" (1984, p. 54). Part of our maligning of the erotic, according to Lorde, is our separation of the spiritual from the erotic, a holdover of enlightenment thinking that insists on parsing apart that which is thought from that which is felt and sensed. This paper examines 1970s lesbian-feminist esthetics, specifically the works of American avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), to delineate an environmental eros, in which more-than-human nature is a source of erotic inspiration and interspecies connection. Just as Lorde theorizes the erotic as a "reminder of [one's] capacity for feeling and joy" (1984, p. 56), environmental eros understands the erotic as expansively sensual and sensory instead of solely sexual. My close readings of Hammer's films Dyketactics (1974), Women I Love (1976), and Multiple Orgasm (1976) challenge critiques of these materials as escapist relics of an essentializing past. Instead, I use feminist and film phenomenological theory to argue that the natural environment was an actor in radical re-imaginings of subjecthood and relationality that constitute an eco-erotic ethics with clear implications for contemporary environmental politics and ecological feminisms.

This study is a retrospective examination of how sexual minority women have experienced their sexuality. The analysis examined a national archival dataset that was collected online in the US and Canada to examine the relationship between gender and sexuality in 1084 sexual minority women in 2003, with a focus on butch and femme identities. It provided an understanding of how gender and sexuality interacted at the turn of the last century when the gender identity landscape differed from that of today. While this study collected data from butch and femme women approximately 20-years ago, the results have implications for how we develop situated understandings of the relationship between gender and sexuality. Findings indicated gendered patterns in sexual preferences and attraction that can shed light on how gender and sexuality have evolved in connection. At the same time, there were no differences in sexual satisfaction, which suggests that the enactment of gendered sexuality (in which attraction is structured by a gender dynamic) was experienced as empowering rather than oppressive. We examine our findings in relation to current scholarship on gendered sexuality to consider how sexuality is constructed and reconstructed across time. The findings support a view of gendered sexuality as a source of pleasure, affirmation, and positive embodiment. We theorize gendered sexuality as functioning to enhance experiences of authenticity and resist heteronormativity. The study holds implications for research on the interaction of gender and sexuality.

Through recovered biographies and unpublished archival papers, I examine the connection of two Black clubwomen, Frances Reynolds Keyser and Mary McLeod Bethune, who shared a modest ceremony that bonded them for life. I argue that their private relationship was deeper than they could credibly portray through their public image at the time, bound as they were by the strictures of respectability politics. Their cultivation of respectability was an irreplaceable asset in, and indeed a necessity of their work, but it also demanded the presentation of normative heterosexuality. In addition, I conducted a creative investigation of the archives to draw attention to their everyday lives and experiences in Daytona. Many Black women activists' experiences do not conform to the white male-centric narrative ethos present and the assumption of heterosexuality is a dominant yet wholly inaccurate narrative on Black club women's legacies and activism. Biographical recoveries can change, complicate, and enhance our understanding of these women's relationships regarding their well-curated public personas as clubwomen. This study aims to provide an intellectual history of Black women through the club movement by putting biographical data front and center, especially by examining their own words.

Lesbian voices and experiences have received little attention in Czech historiography: recent research has concentrated on the modern era from the 1950s. This article deepens our understanding of lesbian lives in interwar Prague. It focuses on two forgotten lesbian novels, Exiles of Love and The Third Sex, which were deliberately suppressed after 1948 by the Communist regime as examples of inferior bourgeois literature. The two authors, Lída Merlínová and Gill Sedláčková, both hailed from Prague's cultural world (theatre and film) and were active too in the 1930s Czech movement for homosexual reform. Spanning the late twenties to the late thirties, the novels reveal tantalising glimpses of the evolving sub-culture of interwar Prague. Merlínová's naïve novel of 1929, Exiles of Love, was the first Czech lesbian novel, and it betrayed the 1920s optimism of the 'Czech New Woman' who was prepared to challenge gender stereotypes. Sedláčková's novel, The Third Sex, is a more explicit study from 1937, reflecting the more mature sub-culture but also a cynicism about the chances of homosexual reform. Yet it manages, even more than Exiles, to convey an uplifting and moral message. Indeed, both novels are about lesbian self-knowledge, exploring the scope for same-sex survival in a world where the best solution may be abroad, not in 'provincial Prague'. In restoring these texts to lesbian literature we recover a range of voices, expressing the hopes and frustrations of some queer Czech women in an unusually liberal era.

This study is a retrospective examination of how sexual minority women have experienced their sexuality. The analysis examined a national archival dataset that was collected online in the US and Canada to examine the relationship between gender and sexuality in 1084 sexual minority women in 2003, with a focus on butch and femme identities. It provided an understanding of how gender and sexuality interacted at the turn of the last century when the gender identity landscape differed from that of today. While this study collected data from butch and femme women approximately 20-years ago, the results have implications for how we develop situated understandings of the relationship between gender and sexuality. Findings indicated gendered patterns in sexual preferences and attraction that can shed light on how gender and sexuality have evolved in connection. At the same time, there were no differences in sexual satisfaction, which suggests that the enactment of gendered sexuality (in which attraction is structured by a gender dynamic) was experienced as empowering rather than oppressive. We examine our findings in relation to current scholarship on gendered sexuality to consider how sexuality is constructed and reconstructed across time. The findings support a view of gendered sexuality as a source of pleasure, affirmation, and positive embodiment. We theorize gendered sexuality as functioning to enhance experiences of authenticity and resist heteronormativity. The study holds implications for research on the interaction of gender and sexuality.