Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

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.

This essay situates Kathy Acker's work in the feminist sex wars debate of the 1980s. I suggest that the critique of Acker's work as a "nihilist version of the personal is political" is not ungrounded but might more usefully be understood as a "sex negativity" that emerges from specific feminist avant-garde literary devices. I discuss Acker's early texts, "Politics" (1972) and "Stripper Disintegration" (1973) to show how sexuality defines Acker's esthetic and political project. I consider the (negative) feminist reception of Acker's work, lay out how Acker was involved in the pornography debate, and I bring Acker's work into conversation with Andrea Dworkin's thought. The essay argues that Acker's pseudo-autobiographical strategies and montage techniques pose a problem for the feminist politicizing of self-knowledge and the genre of autobiography as a privileged site of identity formation and emancipation. In the reordering of materials, by way of replacing, exchanging, and negating, transformation is made possible by the act of rewriting's capacity to reveal substitutability. Acker's "nihilist" feminist politics challenge the self-determination and authenticity often assumed in the politicizing of lived experience. I also suggest that "the lesbian" functions as a phantasmatic figure in Acker's early work to circumvent the subject-object logic of the pornographic imagination. In short, Acker's early work illuminates the complex relation between sexuality, self-objectification, and the act of writing itself. With Acker's pseudo-autobiographical texts we can conceive of a sex negativity that is not anti-sex but challenges what Michel Foucault calls the "monarchy of sex" through non-positive affirmation.

Using an autobiographical lens through 40 years of teaching, this brief reflection affirms an explicitly lesbian pedagogy as radical and transgressive. This is because it is woman-centered and woman-loving in a dominant culture that is pervasively male-centered and misogynist. This pedagogical practice is also antiracist, using a feminist intersectional model. While centering women it is a pedagogy that excludes no one from its intellectual and emotional embrace.

Despite the modern association of ancient Amazons and Diana's huntresses with lesbianism, scholarly accounts of these groups as they appear in ancient Greek and Roman literature have rarely adverted to any hints of homoeroticism. This article re-examines several narratives concerning Amazons and huntresses in Latin literature (including Camilla in Vergil's Aeneid and Phaedra in Seneca's eponymous tragedy) from the perspective of queer kinship and female homosociality, demonstrating the ways in which these characters subvert traditional norms of kinship and femininity, replacing patriarchal control with female sodality, often imaged as a "sister" relationship. It suggests that, even if we do not interpret these intense homosocial bonds as erotic, we can nonetheless perceive a more radical rejection of social norms that transcends genital sexuality and merits the label of "queerness", insofar as queerness can be defined as a resistance to normativity.

Anti-feminist, anti-Queer politics, and Christianity have long been allies in South Korea fervently against any progressive movement involving women and sexual minorities. Since the 2010s, the societal context has shifted to include the long recession and neoliberal structural reforms after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. As a result, far-right religious groups never cease attempts to divide society based on gender, sexuality, and the Anti-Discrimination Law" To prevent "sexual orientation" from being protected under the Anti-Discrimination Act, these groups accused sexual minorities and members of advocacy groups of being pro-North Korea and pro-communist. The anti- LGBTQ groups furthered their discourse in the name of "protecting national security;" simultaneously, sexual minorities and family members of the shipwreck victims, migrant workers, and even disabled persons were treated as "non-nationals" and "pro-North Korea." Against this backdrop, Queer feminist assemblage provides creative ways to articulate the controversies, with the alliance and lived experiences of minorities.

A Fairytale for Everyone (Meseország mindenkié), a collection of 17 fairy tales, featuring LGBTQ + and gender-nonconforming characters and heroes from various disadvantaged racial/ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds was published in 2020 by the Hungarian NGO Labrisz Lesbian Association. The stories address gender relations, disability, discrimination, social justice, poverty, domestic violence, child adoption, gender transition and same-sex love. After its release, the book became the target of anti-gender attacks. It was immediately labelled as "LGBT propaganda" and demonised as a tool for "spreading gender ideology" by the far right, leading to the implementation of legislation to restrict young LGBTQ + people's rights, in the name of "protecting children". In turn, these political acts triggered unprecedented national and international support for the book and the Hungarian LGBTQ + community. Meseország became a symbol of resistance against oppression, stigmatisation, discrimination and the increasingly autocratic regime. In this activist essay, the author tells the story of this book and reflects on lesbian resistance against anti-gender ideology, coalition-building and cultural production in present-day Hungary. She discusses the impacts of ideologically based intrusions of state control and the ongoing global media attention on Labrisz, and thinks about what ways of resistance can be imagined and effective against an authoritarian post-fascist regime.

This paper explores reproductive justice themes in different works of Black literature and juxtaposes that literature with modern scholarship to consider a reproductive justice agenda for public health researchers. Incorporating multiple disciplines including public health, critical geography, and anthropology, this paper goes on to suggest that public health researchers would benefit from engagement with works from beyond academia. Specifically looking into Black fiction, nonfiction, and autobiographical writing, this paper traces reproductive justice themes and suggests that attention to these themes will bolster academic public health scholarship aligned with the reproductive justice movement.

This article argues that the concept of "gender ideology" produces and reproduces reactionary subjectivities using different media (videos, texts, memes, images, etc.), diverse platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, TikTok, etc.), and performative actions that form a decentralized propaganda machine that propagates, mobilizes, agitates, and organizes reactionary bases. Using close reading as method of inquiry, I analyze a vast archive of images, videos, and documents from the Spanish organization Hazte Oír/CitizenGo, focusing on the #FreeSpeechBus campaign in which buses with transphobic (2017) and antifeminist (2019) slogans toured different cities across Spain and around the world.

The article unfolds in four parts. In the first part, I describe gender ideology and the bus campaign as the product of a decentralized propaganda machine that produces, agitates, and organizes reactionary subjectivities through media and incarnated discourses. In the second section, I situate my perspective in relation to existing literature about gender ideology. In the third section, I will illustrate how "gender ideology" relies on the appropriation of the vocabulary and mobilization strategies traditionally associated with liberation movements as well as a fascist and right-wing repertoire of performative and media strategies. In the final part, I show the importance of fostering a transfeminist antifascism to fight "gender ideology," an approach that supports the work of activists who are fighting in the trenches, builds on efforts to decenter white cis women as the subject of feminism, supports sex workers, and reclaims media and performance as indispensable weapons in the political battle.