Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

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.

While the concept of "coming out" is relatively well-critiqued, few of these critiques trouble the way a near exclusive focus on disclosure positions sexuality as an essential identity. Based on life history interviews with 18 lesbian, pansexual, and queer women elders (ages 65+), I find coming out did not describe disclosing or even acknowledging same-gender desire, but, rather, choosing to act on it. For participants, coming out is the process of forming desire into a coherent identity (lesbian woman), a process that required continued interactions with lesbian existence; contrary to essentialist understandings, desire alone did not enable participants to become lesbians. In this article, I describe the two paths participants followed while becoming lesbians and consider how the historical context in which participants came out, specifically the second wave feminist movement, uniquely facilitated coming out for white women. Ultimately, I argue lesbian sexuality is a richly constructed social identity formed in community and defined by resistance to compulsory heterosexuality. By viewing sexual identity as based on shared political commitments formed in community, this article both corrects an essentializing tendency in the coming out literature and offers a potential point of repair between older and younger generations of lesbians.

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.

Ali Smith's allusive relationship to the literary and cultural canon is a prominent feature of her writing life. Smith's works offer a rich and diverse perspective on the magpie-like appreciation of cultural mo(ve)ments as accretive and cumulative sites of creative re/construction. But they also provide a sense of the writer as reader, thinker and re-visioner of personalised literary and cultural canons including not only books but paintings, films and music. In this essay, I explore Smith's work through what I term the "autobiocritical" - that is literary texts which serve to play with notions of identity, authorial positioning and critical approaches via an allusive, metafictional and theoretically informed exploration of fiction, form and self-representation. The essay focuses on Smith's Artful (2012) in which I suggest she engages in a complex process of homage and adaptation that is invested in the queering of the acts of reading, re-reading and critical perspective. Smith's subversive approach to the nature of critical analysis when divested of personality, character and readerly interaction presents a degree of cynicism and scepticism about the role of the aesthetic when anaesthetised from the quirks and individualities of character and of reading - that are central to Smith's aesthetic.

Lesbians have long turned to digital media and technologies for information, support, and to self-represent sexual identity in ways that have the capacity for building communities and gathering publics and counterpublics. TikTok is a short video platform popular with young people, which has increasingly seen the participation of comparatively older users. This paper investigates the self-representation of lesbians over age 30 on TikTok to understand the themes in their content and how the platform shapes their communication with others. Through sampling tailored to TikTok's algorithmic curation, ten lesbians' accounts are examined alongside qualitative coding and analysis of 50 of these creators' videos. Findings reveal key themes regarding the expression of identity and age, lived experience over time, and bids for connection and community. TikTokers expressed lesbian identity in continuity with longstanding stereotypes to enhance visibility but also incorporated humor and youthful trends to give rise to novel identity expressions. Videos showcasing the passage of time and sociopolitical change demonstrated the resilience of lesbian lives and conveyed hope while advice and statements of solidarity expressed support for young people's present struggles with homophobia and transphobia. Contrasting with studies of TikTok's generational wars, this article shows how older lesbians are building generational bridges through their uptake of youth-driven platform practices, sharing of past challenges to support youth in overcoming present hurdles, and by modeling lesbian futures.

This paper employs Audre Lorde's theoretical paradigm of anti-binarism and ecofeminism to explore her creation of a distinctive queer space which is achieved through the successful incorporation of ecological elements in her narrative of lesbianism. The central premise of this research lies in the intersection of lesbian concerns and the environmental sensibility in Lorde's novel, Zami. The detailed analysis of instances of lesbian lovemaking interspersed with ecological references in Zami reveals a close connection between environment and queer sexuality, realised in the phrase "queer ecology". This study investigates how the erotic contours of Lorde's lesbian identity are shaped by her sustained engagement with the environmental metaphor derived from her immediate surroundings as well as the geography of her ancestral Grenadian island where the Zami myth originates. The cartographies of the physical landscape of Grenada and Black lesbian bodies intersect to form a combined ethos of lesbian eroticism driven by a strong rootedness in ecological affiliation. Through close examination of Afrekete's role in Zami's lesbian erotics, this paper activates a distinctive queer-ecological reading of lesbian relationships derived from a combination of aquatic, green, and edible metaphors. This article is an endeavour to bring about a sustained engagement of queer and environmental concerns by unravelling a symbiotic relationship between the two.

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.

This work investigates the experiences of African American lesbians who came into adulthood in the mid-twentieth century and were at or approaching retirement age at the time of study. It draws from sociological frameworks of aging, analyzing oral histories, group interviews, and archival materials to consider how the socio-historical contexts of inequalities based in race, gender, and sexual orientation have impacted Black lesbian women in older age. First, African Americans were subjected to labor market discrimination on several fronts and were varied in their ability to access stable employment and advanced education as young adults. Now there is a bifurcation, with some experiencing economic security and others experiencing precarity in their later years. Second, many who lived their young adulthood as lesbians did not become parents or experienced long periods of absence in child rearing. As they advance in age, they lack a crucial source of support that others with adult children can rely on. Finally, while initially fraught relationships with kin became less strained over time, lesbian sexuality was still an "open secret" for many of these women and a measure of vulnerability persists in their familial attachments. When care needs call for aid from or to extended family members, Black lesbians in older age may not receive sufficient support to mitigate experiences of social isolation or health crises, the likelihood of both increasing over the life course.

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.