Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

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.

This qualitative research examines how sapphic people (i.e., umbrella term inclusive of lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual trans femmes, mascs, nonbinary people, and ciswomen) in South Carolina navigate informational barriers within healthcare systems. An information practices lens that examines how sapphic people create, seek, use, and share information to achieve desired healthcare outcomes describes such navigation. The research focuses on how intersectional identities, with a particular emphasis on age and considerations of race/ethnicity, geography, and gender, mediate these practices and their outcomes. The research uses participant data from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 34 sapphic people about their health information practices. Participants varied in age and generational representation from 18 through 64. Data analysis utilized qualitative coding to compare how participants experience and circumnavigate health information barriers across age and generation. Data analysis highlighted age-related and generational barriers and facilitators in health information practices within SC sapphic communities. These barriers, shaped by cultural and community dynamics, affected how participants sought and shared health information. Older participants faced barriers rooted in historical experiences, leading to mistrust of healthcare systems, while younger ones encountered challenges imposed by adults. Despite differences, both groups sought sources aligned with their identities and shared frustrations with changing LGBTQIA + language. Across generations, there was a consistent effort to support younger members through protective and defensive health information practices. Implications of these findings identify strategies for healthcare providers and information professionals to dismantle health and healthcare information barriers experienced by those under the LGBTQIA + umbrella who experience less visibility than white gay men from urban areas-additional implications center on strategies for sapphic communities to engender communal care spanning generations.

This article provides a case study of The Lesbians and Policing Project [LesPop], a police monitoring organisation that existed in London between 1984 and 1990. Drawing on archives held at Glasgow Women's Library, the article reviews the activities of LesPop and outlines its aims and objectives. We consider both its origins and its demise in the political context of Britain in the 1980s. In doing so, we argue that LesPop offers an important, and hitherto unexamined, contribution to lesbian history in Britain. Centralising the experiences of lesbians in London in an era of state-sanctioned homophobia, LesPop provides a case study in lesbian political and community organising and engagement with, or resistance to, the carceral state. Understanding how LesPop sought to monitor and research the police and in turn, educate and organise lesbians, reveals much about the regulation of sexuality in the pursuit of social order and illustrates the importance then, and now, of grassroots efforts to challenge homophobia and hold the police to account.

Female homoeroticism in early imperial China has received minimal scholarly attention. This article purposes to investigate lesbianism in the Western Han dynasty, taking into consideration both the literary and archaeological material. I first offer a succinct rundown of the ancient terminology of male homosexuality, principally in an effort to underline the classical Chinese language's absence of a precise vocabulary to describe lesbian attachments. Next, I turn to the transmitted textual sources, analysing the two extant records of love between women in order to gauge something of the nature and permissibility of female homoerotic relationships. The final section of this essay is dedicated to mortuary objects, namely the moulded bronze phalli and other sexual training tools disentombed from Western Han gravesites. When properly contextualised, the excavated dildos can be interpreted as having been used by concubines, both within same-sex partnerships and in the course of pornographic displays staged for their master's enjoyment.

The purpose of this scoping review was to explore the lesbian adult attachment literature. Eight databases were searched yielding 4,827 total articles which were subsequently distilled to 37 articles for full review. Thematic analysis was used to develop themes related to attachment theory and lesbian relationships. Themes included the unique aspects of lesbian attachment relationships, the nuance of avoidant attachment in lesbian relationships, the impact of lesbian identity development on attachment, and the comparison of lesbian attachment relationships to other populations. Methodological nuances and significant gaps in the literature are noted. Directions for future research are discussed.

This article examines how The Lesbian Body, Monique Wittig's 1973 literary "reverie," reconfigures the spatial logic of language. As its lovers come together and undo one another through words, the text dismantles the projective regime in which interlocution fixes and delimits subjects in space. In its place, Wittig develops a haptic poetics in which meaning emerges à mesure-word by word-through tactile and communal relation. Central to this reorientation is the j/e pronoun, whose typographic slash interrupts the capture of representation and opens language to ongoing transformation. Reading The Lesbian Body as a material practice in which subjectivity and world co-emerge, I argue that Wittig's spatial experiments unsettle the heterosexual body schema and imagine forms of becoming unbound by inherited coordinates of identity. Her work ultimately advances a lesbian universalism grounded not in projection or identification, but in a shared, haptic geometry of touch.

This article considers Minnie Bruce Pratt and her southern identity. Through an analysis of her personal writings, poetry, and reflections on her own life, I explore the formation of lesbian activism in concert with southern feminine identity. My goal is to expose the risk of a continued reliance on southern tropes that work to silence variations in southern womanhood. What is striking in the political moment of 2025 is understanding that Pratt's work emanated from a southern upbringing and southern identity that she never abandoned.

This article explores Minnie Bruce Pratt's work, life, and legacy through an autoethnographic lens, using two encounters with Minnie Bruce as anchors to build on and circle around; to open into musings, visions, echoes. I argue that Minnie Bruce's poetry and writing contends with her intersecting marginalization, queer desire, and loss: In my reading of her work, I see a firm belief in materialism, communal solidarity, unique visions pushing against dominant expectations. I interweave analyses of Pratt's work with stories from my own life, rivering into my experiences of chronic illness, loss, and transformation as a non-binary trans butch poet. At the heart of this piece are questions of writing with, and beyond, the body amidst the in-between, and I hope to highlight Minnie Bruce Pratt's continuous impact on the queer community, even after the loss of her physical form.

This historiographical essay presents different approaches in the realm of gender and sexuality studies that have been and can be used by historians of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to female same-sex relationships, especially focusing on the long nineteenth century before the widespread understanding of sexuality as medicalized and politicized categories of individual and collective identity emerged. It also explores the distinct challenges of writing such histories in the region, and ways those challenges might be overcome. Scholarship on the history of women's sexuality in CEE is brought into dialogue with interdisciplinary studies from elsewhere in Europe and North America in an effort to exchange ideas about ways of writing such histories, including addressing common definitional and conceptual questions related to historicizing women's relationships with each other that take into account erotic possibilities that have often been ignored or dismissed. The study takes as a starting point the problem faced by many historians who work on sexuality in CEE: the invisibility of female same-sex sexuality in historical records. This problem stems from phallocentric legal, cultural, and confessional definitions of sex which rendered a fuller public discussion of female-female sex (outside pornographic material) almost impossible until the first sexologists appear in the early twentieth century. Even then, such conversations remained highly specialized and confined to the elite. This essay explores scholarly approaches to female same-sex sexuality, how it appeared (or didn't) in nineteenth--century discourses in CEE, and the sexual politics underlying the framing of female same-sex sexuality then and now.