Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

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.

The process of seeking help for violence in lesbian couples is complex due to the variety of factors and actors that can be involved. It is a process in which the women may or may not take action to ask for some kind of support, depending on the stage at which they find themselves. However, even though women may realise that they are in a situation of mistreatment or abuse in their relationship with their partner or ex-partner, there may be barriers that hinder them from seeking help. This paper presents a systematic review of the barriers that lesbian women encounter in seeking help or accessing support systems when they are victims of intimate partner violence. Out of 139 studies reviewed, 120 were selected for further review, and 8 studies meeting the methodological inclusion criteria were finally selected. The results of this research show that psycho-social and legal barriers exist, which, within a system of oppression - heterosexist society - do not occur in isolation, but are inter-related, making it difficult for lesbian women victims of intimate partner violence to seek help or access support services. This review finds limitations in the literature reviewed and makes recommendations for future research.

Few events evoke a divisive response amongst lesbians like the mentioning of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Autoethnographies, interviews, podcasts, and books - just to name a few - continue to be crafted even after the forty-year festival's end. Unlike previous publications, this article approaches the festival using archival materials housed at Michigan State University donated by producer, Lisa Vogel, to unpack the signaling rhetoric of womyn-born-womyn (WBW). I center the experience Nancy Burkholder, a transsexual woman expelled from the festival, to navigate, as Nancy tried to navigate, the WBW "policy." I then take readers on a journey into the archive and articulate my research through calculated steps of tracing language through years of the festival. This article demonstrates how documents, created by festival producers, incited confusion for Nancy Burkholder during the festival and how these same documents now sustain an archival ambiguity.

In this short piece I think about the ocean as queer and its liberating sensualities as a practice of writing into the surf. What are the dissolutions that emerge from the wetness of the sea? This piece is based on forthcoming work where I expand upon the themes of queer and trans ecologies at the sea's edge.

My paper analyses Ali Smith's innovative use of queering as a narrative strategy in Girl Meets Boy (2007) and The First Person and Other Stories (2008), focusing on her transformation of narrative structures, epistemic realities, and identity through intertextual engagement. Smith's fiction queers temporality and narrative agency by reimagining classical and literary texts, including Ovid's Metamorphoses, John Lyly's Gallathea, Shakespeare's plays, and Jane Eyre. I suggest that in Girl Meets Boy, Smith reinterprets Ovid's myth of Iphis and Ianthe to celebrate fluid and transformative identities, intertwining this with feminist activism and queer desire. By employing techniques such as prolepsis and analepsis, she destabilizes binary categories of gender and narrative form. My paper also examines The First Person and Other Stories, where Smith uses the short story form to experiment with self-reflexive and elliptical structures, disrupting traditional notions of linearity. I will examine how stories such as "third person," "second person," and "fidelio and bess" illustrate her capacity to reframe historical and cultural narratives, transforming them into spaces for queer textual exploration. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler, Marina Warner, and Linda Hutcheon, my analysis positions Smith's work within a lineage of literary metamorphosis that resists static notions of identity and storytelling. Ultimately, I argue that Smith queers the boundaries of knowledge, time, and narrative itself, creating fiction that is endlessly dynamic and self-referential.

This study documented between-group differences in factors associated with sexual revictimization histories in a sample of young sexual minority women. Diverse samples of lesbian (N = 204, age_M = 23.55 years) and bisexual (N = 249, age_M = 23.35 years) women from the United States were recruited using the CloudResearch platform to assess factors associated with recent experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). Participants were categorized into four groups based on self-reports of sexual victimization (a) during childhood and (b) during adulthood in intimate relationships. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was used to model between-group differences in three variable domains: Past-year substance use involvement, minority stress, and violence in relationship and community settings. Lesbian women reporting sexual revictimization in adulthood reported significantly higher scores for measures of past-year substance use involvement and negative consequences, daily discrimination experiences, relational victimization, and criminal victimization, compared to their counterparts with no history of sexual victimization. Among bisexual women, sexual revictimization was associated with a similar pattern of between-group differences. The sexual revictimization experiences of sexual minority women appear to occur in the context of multivariate patterns of harmful substance use, minority stress, and violence in both relationship and community settings. Our findings have implications for how intervention services are provided to emerging adult sexual minority women who experience multiple episodes of sexual abuse during their lifespans. Recommendations include specialized training for counseling or intervention service providers, integrated trauma-informed services that address both substance use and sexual assault issues, and affirmative services for sexual minority women.

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.