Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the intersections of migration and queerness by investigating how queer Muslim women from Pakistan negotiate with religion, queer desire, and belonging in transnational spaces. Two memoirs by queer Muslim women-We Have Always Been Here (2019) by Samra Habib and Hijab Butch Blues (2023) by Lamya H.-not only map their authors' journeys across geographical borders but also trace the realization, exploration, and assertion of their queer identities. By engaging with these two texts, this paper analyzes Samra and Lamya's journeys, as they try to exercise and make sense of their agency (or lack thereof) with respect to their cultural and geographical displacement. This analysis highlights how the position of queer Muslim women in the diaspora both enables and challenges queerness. In addition, this analysis underscores subjective approaches to reconciling religion with queerness and emphasizes the significance of such life narratives for fostering intersectional polylogues on sexuality, religion, and migration. Consequently, this paper contributes to the project of Queer Worldmaking by showing how queer Muslim women create communities, support networks, and exhibit resilience by challenging conventional hierarchies to develop viable life possibilities for themselves in Canada and the United States.

This essay explores lesbian pedagogy as a "labor of love" in a "lesbian histories and cultures" class I regularly teach at CSU Long Beach. Using bell hooks's concept of the "love ethic" as the root of "radical transformation" and "ending domination," I examine the stakes of teaching this "lesbian class" as an adjunct instructor and butch lesbian of color in back-to-back semesters in 2024, a year marked by an unprecedented convergence of national and world events that formed the backdrop of our teaching that year: an historic statewide faculty strike in January; the student-led Palestine-solidarity protest encampments against the US-sponsored Israeli war on Gaza in Spring; and the November election of convicted felon Donald J. Trump again to the US presidency. These three moments informed my pedagogical approach to teaching the lesbian class in ways that illuminate this butch "labor of love" as central to the critical and necessary interventions made possible by a course like Lesbian Histories and Cultures in the first place.

This article examines the dual signification of food a as tool of both intersectional oppression and queer resistance in Neeraj Ghaywan's short film "Geeli Pucchi," anthologized in the Netflix web series Ajeeb Dastaans (2021). The politics of food is central to the film, which shows how it can constitute a powerful axis for the marginalization of the Dalit, queer protagonist. "Geeli Pucchi" works as a critique of the Savarna discourse on caste purity and its use of food to reinforce the subaltern position of the Dalit subject. At the same time, the film foregrounds how food can work as a materialization of queer desire that can make caste boundaries fluid. My analysis of the subversive role of food in the film demonstrates how food can become a language that can queer the heterosexual spaces and imagine alternative modes of being and connecting. Caste taboos around food, however, undermine its transgressive potential, and continue to reify Dalit alterity. In the article, I also examine the film's place in the genealogy of Dalit and queer cinema in India and consider how the film's avoidance of the word "lesbian" speaks to alternative homosocial frameworks that foster both same-gender desire and culinary intimacies in the South Asian context.

This paper queries an anxiety that marks the nexus of queerness and transness in Sri Lanka, concerning the slippage between the butch lesbian and the trans man. Taking this anxiety seriously, I explore the phenomenon of butch women and trans men who seek employment at the garment factories in the Katunayake Economic Processing Zone to explore a range of gendered desires of masculinity, inspiring category confusions between lesbianism and trans masculinity in the process. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2022-2024 to ask: what is it about the factory that allows for such complex negotiations of gender and sexuality amidst the paranoid disciplining of bodies into productivity? How does centering labor shift our understandings of butchness, trans masculinity, and the performance of gender? This essay stages a conversation with lesbian studies and trans studies, specifically the scholarship on the butch-FTM border wars, by positing labor as a crucial analytic that reflects and refracts both field formations. I suggest that situating the butch and trans male figures within critical political economy foregrounds how labor conditions inflect, incentivize, and demand specific gender performances, which propels the laboring gender variant figure to negotiate their gender across a butch-trans masc continuum in ways that are plural, recursive, and erratic. I argue that, rather than grounds for war, the relationship between butchness and trans masculinity denotes the imbrications of labor and gender, and capitalist exploitation and gender (un)freedom.

The essay aims to analyze an artwork devoted to lesbian love created in 1988 by Polish feminist and intermedia artist Izabella Gustowska, who started her career in the 1970s. The artwork Victim I (1988/1989), which is the subject of an intertextual interpretation, is one of the few unique portraitures of female same-sex couples and eroticism in art from behind the Iron Curtain (1945-1989), created from the feminine perspective. Hence, it took a very prominent role in the major exhibition Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2009), curated by Bojana Pejić. The exploration of female figuration and various dimensions of femininity is a recurrent theme in Izabella Gustowska's art of photographic and filmic portraiture and self-portraiture. In her search for multiple and complex images of femininity, she is one of the precursors of representations of female intimate relationships, togetherness, and homosociality in the Eastern bloc. The text intends to elucidate the political, religious, amorous, and artistic context of the Victim series in Poland and Central Eastern Europe, locating it in the cultural framework of the region and the nascent queer movement in Poland in the 1980s.

Based on oral history narratives and original archival research, this article discusses how the Soviet medicalization of homosexuality has affected the self-identification of queer women and how it currently features in the narratives that lesbians tell about themselves in post-Soviet Lithuania. The article shows that the medicalization of homosexuality in Soviet Lithuania was inseparable from the broader pressures of Communist morality, which aimed to guide the private lives of individuals, and that the pathologizing of female homosexuality was tightly interrelated with the social pressure on women to fit into their gender role and adapt to the frameworks of femininity. The article also reflects on how the medicalization of homosexuality, as imposed by Soviet modernity, continues to be felt in the region and how it affects the current state of the LGBTQ community.

Anatomical body models possess a seemingly contradictory set of attributes. They can be concrete and pedagogical at the same time that they are gruesome and fantastical; they claim objectivity while rhetorically embracing specific theories of human value. Nowhere is this more evident than in Monique Wittig's 1973 novel The Lesbian Body. Reading the novel alongside Wittig's materialist feminist theory, this article highlights how Wittig's conviction in the political and material agency of cultural signs comes forward most dramatically in her treatment of anatomical representations. In particular, it looks to Wittig's canny manipulation of the unique properties of instrumental and technical images, a class of signs which simultaneously invites and disavows libidinal engagement. The novel provocatively engages the question of whether the visual strategies of hegemonic discourse can ever be successfully deployed against or outside their disciplines. Accordingly, this article argues, The Lesbian Body is a crucial text for contemporary feminist scholars of the visual culture of science, medicine, and pornography.

This essay explores how Audre Lorde's work as a professor can help contemporary educators teach students about difference and power. Drawing from my new book Open Admissions, it focuses on two particular facets of her teaching: first, the ways Lorde centered students' ideas to generate collective investment in courses and allow them to learn from one another, and second, how she combined both a public and private pedagogy to help them address the injustice they were studying. I conclude with a brief discussion of how Lorde's work has shaped my own approach to classrooms.

In 1974, women inspired by the back-to-the-land commune movement and women's liberation politics began forming lesbian intentional communities in rural Oregon. Living outside the mainstream allowed them to relinquish gender norms and experience their bodies differently in nature-their lesbian identity was not just a sexual orientation, it was gender non-conforming engaged ecofeminist praxis. The different lands they purchased fifty years ago are situated in the middle of logging country-huge swaths of land around them have been clear-cut over the years, while the lands they continue to care for today serve as conservation sites for old growth forests and all of their more-than-human inhabitants. This essay merges research gathered ten years ago for my master's thesis about the southern Oregon lesbian land community with ongoing written and photographic reflections of my time in the community over many years. This essay is a collection of vignettes and excerpts from interviews that speak to the interspecies and intergenerational intimacies of life on lesbian land and the possible implications for queer and feminist ecological futures more broadly.

This essay looks at, and compares, Hotel World by Ali Smith and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and attempts to understand the differences within both the formal and philosophical/political outlook of the two works. Presuming stream-of-consciousness as both a set of formal prosaic styles and a genre, the essay argues that the way the novels utilize formal style is indicative of their individual politics in counterintuitive ways. Furthermore, it argues that by looking at these two novels we can begin to map a lineage of queer stream-of-consciousness works and explore how those perspectives have changed over time.