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Glossaries of Sexuality

Coleman Julie

in A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries: Volume IV: 1937-1984

The earliest glossaries of gay slang were produced by psychiatrists trying to improve communication with their patients or to develop a diagnostic tool. Later glossaries offer keys to the secret ... More

The earliest glossaries of gay slang were produced by psychiatrists trying to improve communication with their patients or to develop a diagnostic tool. Later glossaries offer keys to the secret world of homosexuality and defy convention in celebrating gay love. Demonized by Cold War associations with communism, users of gay slang are also depicted as agents of the anti-Christ by right-wing Christian fundamentalists.Less

Elizabeth Bishop's Art

Peter Robinson

in Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations

This chapter explores loss in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and asks how her art may have helped her manage loss. The poet's orphaned childhood, her lesbianism, alcoholism, and her life in Brazil are ... More

This chapter explores loss in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and asks how her art may have helped her manage loss. The poet's orphaned childhood, her lesbianism, alcoholism, and her life in Brazil are considered as they impact on her poetry, her memoirs, and letters. The chapter's key section is a reading of the villanelle One Art, in which she jokingly considered the chapter's theme by announcing that ‘The art of losing isn't hard to master’. The conclusion is that in this poem she is able to transform loss into art precisely by accepting the lost as gone.Less

Sex Radical Challenges to Marriage

Christina Simmons

in Making Marriage Modern: Women's Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II

White and African American sex radicals in the 1910s, mostly leftists, feminists, and bohemians, rejected Victorian mores, proclaimed the goodness of sex, and labeled sexual repression damaging. They ... More

White and African American sex radicals in the 1910s, mostly leftists, feminists, and bohemians, rejected Victorian mores, proclaimed the goodness of sex, and labeled sexual repression damaging. They reconceived women's sexuality as more similar to men's and demanded greater freedom for both men and women from social surveillance and control. They promoted birth control, free love, nonmonogamy, interracial relations, and lesbianism, but men and women, whites and African Americans, differentially favored these practices. White men supported free love and nonmonogamy and black men supported interracial sex more than their female peers. Both white and African American women supported women's claim to a sexual life and to birth control. By the 1930s a few lesbians articulated their desire. But many women resisted the individualistic practices of interracial sex, free unions, and nonmonogamy.Less

Knowledge as Revolution and Revelation

Nicola Luckhurst

in Science and Structure in Proust's: A la recherche du temps perdu

This chapter begins by considering the asymmetry of knowledge which characterizes the opposition between Sodom and Gomorrah. This analysis of the Proustian discourses on male and female sexuality in ... More

This chapter begins by considering the asymmetry of knowledge which characterizes the opposition between Sodom and Gomorrah. This analysis of the Proustian discourses on male and female sexuality in terms of both the rhetoric and cultural context is then developed by a consideration of their hermeneutic unraveling in an attempt to answer what kind of story is being told and the role of knowledge in it. This chapter describes the most spectacular modes of knowing in A la recherche: knowledge as revolution and revelation. Nobody's sexuality is straightforward in A la recherche. The text alternately speculates about ‘who will come out next’ and shocks by revelations of homosexuality.Less

Pass as a Woman, Act like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography of the French Revolution

Elizabeth Colwill

in Homosexuality in Modern France

This chapter examines the representation of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, as tribade in pornography during the French Revolution. Pornographic pamphlets depicted the queen with an unusual range ... More

This chapter examines the representation of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, as tribade in pornography during the French Revolution. Pornographic pamphlets depicted the queen with an unusual range of sexual partners and in an imaginative array of sexual postures. This chapter analyses the political significance of the queen's alleged taste for women and the shifting meanings of the tribade during the 18th century in the context of the history of lesbianism.Less

Orientations: Female-Female and Male-Male Eros in Dialogue

Todd W. Reeser

in Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance

This chapter historicizes queer theory’s insight that lesbianism is often linked to a problem of representation by focusing on links between questions of reading and Platonic-inflected female-female ... More

This chapter historicizes queer theory’s insight that lesbianism is often linked to a problem of representation by focusing on links between questions of reading and Platonic-inflected female-female erotic love. It first establishes the complicated discursive context of this larger hermeneutic question through the reception of Sapphic sexuality and, especially, of the female-female being who makes a brief appearance in Aristophanes’s myth of the origin of love from the Symposium. The chapter then turns to one of the very few Neoplatonic representations of female-female eros in the Renaissance, a series of poems by male poets written in the voice of a woman in love with another woman. Embedded within the poems by Jodelle, Tyard, and Ronsard are Neoplatonic commonplaces as well as references to male-male love. The poems are not so much inscribing same-sex female sexuality in the Neoplatonic tradition as much as they are writing it out by decorporealizing love between women. But also, the poets who write about female-female love are also inherently evoking male-male homoeroticism as a way to experience it vicariously, and for this reason, the “lesbian” poems can be taken as a newly-developed and rather sophisticated way to set Plato straight by detour.Less

Lesbianism among Indonesian Women Migrants in Hong Kong1

Amy Sim

in As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong

This chapter deals with lesbianism among Indonesian migrant women in Hong Kong. It explores the nexus of sexuality shaped through practices and ideologies embedded in nationalistic and patriarchal ... More

This chapter deals with lesbianism among Indonesian migrant women in Hong Kong. It explores the nexus of sexuality shaped through practices and ideologies embedded in nationalistic and patriarchal constructions of women, and the opportunities and constraints presented by labour migration within which migrant women move. It then reports the issues and conditions in migrant women's lives, linking the micro-politics of individual lives to the impact of existing powers on individuals' social lives, and explores the repercussions of the cultural regime in Indonesia that affect women migrant workers, with regard to their sexuality, in terms of materiality, processes, strategies, and embedded ideologies. Next, it looks beyond the fragmented differences among individual women to examine the sources of power that pervade their lives in and beyond labour migration. Despite massive efforts by the State, religion, and cultural mores, there are still cracks in heteronormativity that allow the light through and it is interesting that it is in the processes of labour migration that young Indonesian women are able to lift the lid on the gendered exploitation of women through cultural and political ideologies, and better still, to give voice to it and act on it.Less

Via crucis, via lucis: Cambridge, France, and London 1916–1928

Annabel Robinson

in The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison

This chapter recounts the last twelve years of Harrison's life: the demoralizing return to Cambridge at the end of the war; the Cambridge campaign to confer degrees on women (and the resulting ... More

This chapter recounts the last twelve years of Harrison's life: the demoralizing return to Cambridge at the end of the war; the Cambridge campaign to confer degrees on women (and the resulting compromise); and her decision to leave Newnham. It covers her life in Paris with Hope Mirrlees, a visit to Spain, participation in two of Desjardins' décades at Pontigny, a visit from Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and return to London. Her relationship with Mirrlees is discussed and the rumour of lesbianism refuted. It touches on her Epilegomena, in which she gathers together her final thoughts on Greek religion and other short books she wrote during this period. The book closes where it began, with the memorial lecture at Newnham, and the link between Harrison and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.Less

Utopian Gaiety: French Lesbian Activism and the Politics of Pleasure (1974–2016)

Tamara Chaplin

in Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies 1975-2015

Humour and radical politics are often seen as antithetical. When it comes to lesbian radicalism, this perception is even more extreme. Utopias, on the other hand, are most often places of, if not ... More

Humour and radical politics are often seen as antithetical. When it comes to lesbian radicalism, this perception is even more extreme. Utopias, on the other hand, are most often places of, if not necessarily humour and pleasure, than at least harmony and contentment. Utopian politics in which the comedic is key have figured as an integral part of the most successful strains of French lesbian radicalism since the early 1970s. This chapter brings three “moments” in the history of French lesbian radicalism into dialogue: 1974, via a utopian manifesto written by a member of the Gouines Rouges (one of the first French lesbian radical groups); 1980, via the Lesbian Radical Front; and 1989, via a socio-cultural initiative now known as BagdamEspaceLesbien. These moments show not only the importance of “utopian gaiety” as “a political value for progressive social activism,” but also demonstrate that without attention to the pleasure, French lesbian radicalism, whether as a political agenda or as a social movement, has—thus far—simply not been sustainable. This chapter suggests that paying attention to lesbian humour and pleasure can help us better understand the complicated relationship between radicalism and queer utopias, writ large.Less

“A and B”: A Productive Partnership

Anya Jabour

in Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women's Activism in Modern America

Chapter 10 focuses on Breckinridge’s relationship with Edith Abbott. Breckinridge and Abbott’s long-term relationship was a remarkable partnership, advancing both women’s careers and activism as well ... More

Chapter 10 focuses on Breckinridge’s relationship with Edith Abbott. Breckinridge and Abbott’s long-term relationship was a remarkable partnership, advancing both women’s careers and activism as well as providing them with emotional sustenance and practical support. Acknowledging the shifting definitions of female sexuality that make it difficult to categorize this same-sex relationship as lesbianism, this chapter explores the dynamics and the significance of this lengthy relationship from the women’s first meeting in 1903 to Breckinridge’s death in 1948, demonstrating that Breckinridge and Abbott’s personal relationship fostered their professional success and their political effectiveness.Less

‘My Blundering Way of Learning’: Murry's Still Life

Sydney Janet Kaplan

in Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence

This chapter situates Murry's first novel, Still Life, within the frameworks of his friendship with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and his intimate relationship with Katherine Mansfield. It discusses the ... More

This chapter situates Murry's first novel, Still Life, within the frameworks of his friendship with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and his intimate relationship with Katherine Mansfield. It discusses the impact of Lawrence's ideas about sexuality on Murry's treatment of sex in Still Life, and also takes up the issues of repressed homosexuality and homosocial desire in his friendships with Lawrence, Gordon Campbell, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Mansfield's bisexuality is discussed in relation to Murry's treatment of lesbianism in his novel. The chapter analyses Murry's writing process and his difficulty in following nineteenth-century narrative conventions to write a modernist novel.Less

Lesbian Identities: Concepts and Issues

Laura S. Brown

in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identities over the Lifespan: Psychological Perspectives

Over the years, various concepts of lesbianism have been studied, documented, and critiqued across cultures. However, the appointment of a universal definition is continually being contemplated by ... More

Over the years, various concepts of lesbianism have been studied, documented, and critiqued across cultures. However, the appointment of a universal definition is continually being contemplated by many scholars. This chapter provides an overview on how the definition of lesbian identity emerged given the issues and controversies it brings about and how it established a link between sexual orientation and sexual identity among human beings. Biological models are used to differentiate the lesbian identity from other sexual identities while traditional psychodynamic models attempt to delineate the development of lesbian identities among women. The dynamics of feminist psychodynamic models address identity development using a less subtle framework for sexual identity of women whereas stage models describe and expound the development of sexual self among lesbians.Less

The Making of Lesbian Sexuality

Carolyn J. Dean

in The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France

This chapter argues that although the paradoxical—indeed paranoid—structure of fantasies about pornography and male homosexuality also applied to interwar female homosexuality, it is necessary to ... More

This chapter argues that although the paradoxical—indeed paranoid—structure of fantasies about pornography and male homosexuality also applied to interwar female homosexuality, it is necessary to make an important distinction between men and women. Fantasies about the omnipresence of both male and female homosexuals surfaced for closely related reasons, including natalist anxieties, fears about national “emasculation,” and feminist questions about gender roles. Those fantasies accented gay men's visibility, and although critics also perceived lesbians everywhere, they were, it seems, never visible enough. Of course, both right-wing nationalists and Republicans in France denounced “mannish” women and often implicitly conflated feminism and lesbianism, using the latter “aberration” to discredit feminist ideas as well. The chapter contends that the important critical focus on self-identified lesbians, and on increasingly visible lesbian subcultures, bars, and clubs does not address the significant investment which interwar critics made in rendering lesbians literally or metaphorically invisible.Less

Sexual Pre-Texts

in Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts

People in Somalia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and other parts of Africa believe that an oversized or an unexcised clitoris is an obstruction to coitus, while masturbation is an avoidance ... More

People in Somalia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and other parts of Africa believe that an oversized or an unexcised clitoris is an obstruction to coitus, while masturbation is an avoidance of coitus. Both are thus considered inimical to fertility. This chapter provides two “sexual pre-texts,” one African and the other European, the latter of which relies on African genital practices. To a certain degree, one or the other or both, directly or subliminally, informed women's contemporary self-writing on excision. The chapter considers a tribade (from the Greek tribein which means “to rub”), which refers to a woman who finds sexual pleasure with other women, often by rubbing an enlarged clitoris, a practice that is similar to lesbianism. It shows that women's experiential texts show the clitoris as instrumental in shaping female gender identity. Thus, the clitoris is a core element of African women's writings.Less

Lesbian Desire in Film: Coming to Terms

Lucille Cairns

in Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema

This book investigates the traces and spaces of lesbian desire in a large corpus of films directed by both male and female directors, mainly from France. Spanning the period 1936–2002, the corpus ... More

This book investigates the traces and spaces of lesbian desire in a large corpus of films directed by both male and female directors, mainly from France. Spanning the period 1936–2002, the corpus numbers eighty-nine texts. A fair number of these are mainstream films that have achieved high critical acclaim and/or high viewing figures. As such, they have contributed to hegemonic constructions of (female) homosexuality in an episteme wherein sexed and gendered identity, including sexual orientation, has become a pre-eminent factor in the constitution of subjectivity. First, the book explores what is meant by ‘lesbian spectatorship’. Second, it considers why visual pleasure should be based on voyeurism or fetishism. Third, the book examines the two most predominant lesbian paradigms immanent in the corpus: criminality and pathology. Fourth, it considers borderline inscriptions of lesbianism: lesbian liminality. Fifth, the book discusses more apparently lesbo-affirmative mises en scènes of lesbian desire, but not without problematising them where necessary. Finally, it looks at shifts in French-language cinematic mediations of lesbianism over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Less

Mad Girls: Pathology

Lucille Cairns

in Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema

This chapter examines pathology, or lesbianism, as sickness. The discursive shift from condemning lesbians as sinful to certifying them as ill was largely prompted by the birth of sexology in the ... More

This chapter examines pathology, or lesbianism, as sickness. The discursive shift from condemning lesbians as sinful to certifying them as ill was largely prompted by the birth of sexology in the second half of the nineteenth century, then of psychoanalysis at the start of the twentieth. In the twenty-first century, psychoanalytic dogma still holds astonishing sway in critical practices, and it is certainly at the origin of most contemporary models – be they clinical or more widely cultural – of lesbianism outside those affirmative models elaborated by lesbians themselves in the post-1968 period. The chief avatar of this pathologising paradigm in French and francophone films is narcissistic fusion. All of these models intersect to some extent with the second most prominent variant of the pathologising paradigm of lesbianism: the mother–daughter model. The chapter also looks at films that have sado-masochism as a common theme, including Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967), Guy Casaril's Le Rempart des Béguines (1972) and Claude Chabrol's Les Biches (1968).Less

Girls on Top: Sapphology

Lucille Cairns

in Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema

This chapter focuses on certain filmic moments that may provide less limiting perspectives on inter-female desire – or may, indeed, herald a new ‘science’ of lesbianism – what is termed sapphology. ... More

This chapter focuses on certain filmic moments that may provide less limiting perspectives on inter-female desire – or may, indeed, herald a new ‘science’ of lesbianism – what is termed sapphology. First, it discusses scenarios that emphasise the problem not of lesbian desire, but of the socio-discursive barriers its subjects face, and usually surmount (including, prominently, the challenge of coming out to family members). Second, the chapter describes scenes of erotic arousal and jouissance (albeit not always problem free) between women. Third, moving from the inveterate, whether homo- or heteroinstantiated, ephemera of desire, it turns to love between women and its possible issue, such as creation and procreation, focusing on art as mediator of (lesboerotic) desire in the first case. Self-evidently, a lesbian couple cannot jointly conceive a child biologically, but one of the two (or indeed, both, following separate medical procedures) may now have recourse to artificial insemination within a joint commitment to lesbian parenting, with the non-biological mother assuming the role of the ‘social parent’.Less