Journal of Lesbian Studies

Women of the early baby boom years in the U.S. came out into an environment in which same-sex desire was stigmatized and criminalized. For working-class lesbians, the bar scene provided an environment in which women could find companionship and a way to live a life decoupled from traditional heterosexual roles. For middle class women, bar life was fraught with legal and social risk, and some-mostly white-women worked to establish a more "socially acceptable" communal life through organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis...

The contemporary preoccupation with lesbian's potential obsolescence relies on implicit assumptions about the (ir)relevance of lesbian feminism to younger generations. In this article, we use the metaphor of "generation loss" to conceptualize the Gordian knot of affective and ideological ties that lie beneath this preoccupation. Contrary to the narrative of generation loss, we show how young people have begun to take up and share lesbian feminist concepts on social media platforms like TikTok. They do so in the name of resituating lesbian as a political project rather than an exclusionary demographic category...

The fearless ancient Amazons have been seen as forebears and prototypes by lesbians, feminists, and transgender men. In this introduction, I will explore why the Greek legends of the Amazons lend themselves to such interpretation. Ancient Greek literature details how the Amazons challenged patriarchy, lived without men, and defeated their male enemies, thus setting a precedent that would later be emulated by feminists and lesbians. Though the Amazons are clearly designated as women they are also identified with men in ancient Greek lore; in ancient Greek vase painting, they wear masculine outfits and engage in masculine habits, including fighting and hunting...

In Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1984), Wolf retells the Trojan War story from the perspective of the seer Cassandra, taking the Trojan War as a parallel to issues of her day. She uses the Amazons as important secondary characters, representing them as both woman-loving women and warriors. Wolf believes their valor in battle is only a version of men's militarism and thus provides no solution to the problem of war, her primary concern.

This article describes my recent carved wood sculptures of warrior women as a response to and reimagination of historical and mythological accounts of Amazons. I emphasize aspects of queerness and gender non-conformity in the figurative sculptures through iconographical details. This body of work is grounded in readings of classical mythology and popular culture, as well as reference to historical Amazons and women warriors in African and Indian cultures.

This article offers a critical reflection on my creative engagement with the figure of the Amazon in the quilted artworks for my exhibition Archives and Amazons: quilting the lesbian archive which took place at HOME, Manchester in 2021. This exhibition was created in response to archival research at the only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to women, Glasgow Women's Library (GWL), which holds the remnants of the now disbanded Lesbian Archive and Information Centre (LAIC) (1984-1995). I engage specifically with two representations of Amazons, from two very disparate and politically opposed lesbian publications: firstly the illustrated cover of the LAIC newsletter, and a photographic series by the artist Tessa Boffin (1960-1993)...

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...

In 2011, Jair Bolsonaro initiated a fight against the federal program proposal School without Homophobia (2009), which aimed to educate children, school staff, and parents on the respect to sexual diversity and prevention of violence against LGBTQIA + students. Bolsonaro's Gay Kit unleashed an anti-gender campaign in Brazil. The fight against "gender ideology" that follows Jair Bolsonaro initial campaign indicates a turn in the articulation and the discourse of conservative and right-wing actors...

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.

In this article, Amazon imagery serves as a case study for the complicated relationship of lesbian separatist movements of the 1970s and the classical Greek tradition. I consider how the use of mythological figures allowed lesbian feminists to rewrite and subvert dominant patriarchal narratives in ways that furthered their revolutionary projects. I argue that the nature of mythology is fundamentally fluid, collaborative, and open to queer reinterpretations and appropriations in ways that are rich with symbolic potential...

This article analyzes the various activities, problem frameworks, and identity strategies around which feminist, lesbian, and trans-solidarity in the Polish-German collective Girlz Get United (GGU) were built. Focusing on oral history interviews with Suzi Andreis, a member and co-organizer of the GGU meetings, this study examined the transnational and intersectional collectivity of the group as a form of lesbian solidarity. Following Emma Goldman and bell hooks, it attempted to consider how the collective, active in the early 2000s, constructed solidarity by being together during integration meetings, various workshops, and sports encounters...

Drawing on queer of color critique, this paper uses mixed methods including participant observation, interviews, visual and textual analysis, and photovoice to interrogate sex workers' queer creative practices. Building upon the larger oeuvre of sex working artists, contemporary sex working artists in Los Angeles utilizes queer creativity to thwart hegemonic readings of sex work. Performances at two activist fundraisers drew on the themes and esthetics of sex work to counter mainstream narratives about sex work and workers, and to interrupt their objectification...

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...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

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...

In 1853, Rosa Bonheur first exhibited what would become her most widely celebrated work: The Horse Fair . Although the work's modern setting and animal-focused subject matter do not obviously characterize it as an instance of classical reception, the artist claimed that it was inspired by the Parthenon frieze. A significant amount of feminist and queer scholarship has been dedicated to Rosa Bonheur's life, career, and art practices, all of which reveal the complex ways in which the artist negotiated the gender norms of 19th-century France...

Chicana Lesbians The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About ushered in the fulfillment of editor Carla Trujillo's vision for an anthology that would recognize and demystify the existence of Chicana lesbians. Our deep and critical affection for Trujillo's anthology prompts us to acknowledge the expansive potentiality of Chicana Lesbians yet also recognize the historical specificity of its relevance and legibility. While our deep affection urges us to reflect on the myriad ways to love on an object like Chicana Lesbians including how this text has been read, engaged, and critiqued, we also acknowledge-just as Trujillo opined in the anthology's introduction-that we, too, want and need more...

Ana Castillo is a prolific and celebrated author of novels, poetry, short stories, and essays on gender and sexuality, feminism, and Chicanx experiences. Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo's works include The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), So Far from God (1993 ) , Massacre of the Dreamers, Loverboys (1996), and black dove: mamá, mi'jo, and me (2016) among others. Castillo is the recipient of several awards including the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the International Latino Book Award, and the Lambda Award...

By elucidating the average everydayness of prostitution, this essay shows-contrary to contemporary conceptions of sex work as either horror or utopia-that whoring is boring. Boredom is a stubborn aspect of modern Western existence. Yet in its philosophical portrayals, it is only described based on masculine parameters, and modeled on male figures such as the flaneur . As his feminine equivalent, the flaneuse shows that boredom is a pervasive yet under-explored feature of feminine life. Like the flaneur , the flaneuse turns to writing to process her impressions of the boring public sphere, but unlike him, the flaneuse is a literal streetwalker...

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...