Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> LGBTQ+ Studies - Lesbian Studies

From its sweaty beats to the pulsating music on the streets, Latin/o America is perceived in the United States as the land of heat, the toy store for Western sex. It is the territory of magical fantasy and of revolutionary threat, where topography is the travel guide of desire, directing imperial voyeurs to the exhibition of the flesh.

Jose Quiroga flips the stereotype upside down: he shows how Latin/o American lesbians and gay men have consistently eschewed notions of sexual identity for a politics of intervention. In Tropics of Desire, Quiroga reads hesitant Mexican poets...

The subject of bisexuality continues to divide the lesbian and gay community. At pride marches, in films such as Go Fish, at academic conferences, the role and status of bisexuals is hotly contested.

Within lesbian communities, formed to support lesbians in a patriarchal and heterosexist society, bisexual women are often perceived as a threat or as a political weakness. Bisexual women feel that they are regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not openly scorned. Drawing on her research with over 400 bisexual and lesbian women, surveying the treatment of bisexuality in the lesbian...

The subject of bisexuality continues to divide the lesbian and gay community. At pride marches, in films such as Go Fish, at academic conferences, the role and status of bisexuals is hotly contested.

Within lesbian communities, formed to support lesbians in a patriarchal and heterosexist society, bisexual women are often perceived as a threat or as a political weakness. Bisexual women feel that they are regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not openly scorned. Drawing on her research with over 400 bisexual and lesbian women, surveying the treatment of bisexuality in the lesbian...

Friends as lovers; lovers as friends; ex-lovers as friends; ex-lovers as family; friends as family; communities of friends; lesbian community. These are just a few of the phrases heard often in the daily discourse of lesbian life. What significance do they have for lesbians? Do lesbians view friends as family and what does this analogy mean? What sorts of friendships exist between lesbians? What sorts of friendships do lesbians form with non-lesbian women, or with men?

These and other questions regarding the kinds of friendships lesbians imagine and experience have rarely been...

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of -writing and reading lesbian- that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture and of political and sexual subcultures.

From her earliest novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), Rule's fiction has provided a challenge to the concept of a fixed identity and to the identity politics founded on such a concept. Incorporating all of Jane Rule's early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and...

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of -writing and reading lesbian- that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture and of political and sexual subcultures.

From her earliest novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), Rule's fiction has provided a challenge to the concept of a fixed identity and to the identity politics founded on such a concept. Incorporating all of Jane Rule's early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and...

Looks can be deceiving, and in a society where one's status and access to opportunity are largely attendant on physical appearance, the issue of how difference is constructed and interpreted, embraced or effaced, is of tremendous import.

Lisa Walker examines this issue with a focus on the questions of what it means to look like a lesbian, and what it means to be a lesbian but not to look like one. She analyzes the historical production of the lesbian body as marked, and studies how lesbians have used the frequent analogy between racial difference and sexual orientation to craft,...

Looks can be deceiving, and in a society where one's status and access to opportunity are largely attendant on physical appearance, the issue of how difference is constructed and interpreted, embraced or effaced, is of tremendous import.

Lisa Walker examines this issue with a focus on the questions of what it means to look like a lesbian, and what it means to be a lesbian but not to look like one. She analyzes the historical production of the lesbian body as marked, and studies how lesbians have used the frequent analogy between racial difference and sexual orientation to craft,...

Volume one of this two volume set focuses on lesbian history and culture. Beginning in 1869, when the study of homosexuality was said to have begun with the establishment of sexology, this encyclopedia offers accounts of international developments in an area that now occupies a critical place in many fields of academic endeavours. Intended as a reference for students and scholars in many fields, as well as the general public, the encyclopedia is written in user-friendly language. At the same time it seeks to maintain a level of scholarship that incorporates passion and objectivity.

Focusing on feminist theory, this book proposes a new approach, based on specificity, which recognizes the specifics of human experience, yet accounts for alliances and communities.

There is more to identity than identifying with one's culture or standing solidly against it. Jose Esteban Munoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture--not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Munoz calls this process "disidentification," and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a...

Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.
Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for...

In "Don't" Janet E. Halley explains how the military's new anti-gay policy is fundamentally misdescribed by its common nickname, "Don't Ask/Don't Tell." This ubiquitous phrase, she points out, implies that it discharges servicemembers not for who they are, but for what they do. It insinuates that, as long as military personnel keep quiet about their homosexual orientation and desist from "homosexual conduct," no one will try to pry them out of their closets and all will be well.
Not so, reveals Halley. In order to work through the steps by which the new law was ultimately drafted, she...

In "Don't" Janet E. Halley explains how the military's new anti-gay policy is fundamentally misdescribed by its common nickname, "Don't Ask/Don't Tell." This ubiquitous phrase, she points out, implies that it discharges servicemembers not for who they are, but for what they do. It insinuates that, as long as military personnel keep quiet about their homosexual orientation and desist from "homosexual conduct," no one will try to pry them out of their closets and all will be well.
Not so, reveals Halley. In order to work through the steps by which the new law was ultimately drafted, she...

This collection brings together the work of both film scholars and queer theorists to advance a more sophisticated notion of queer film criticism. While the politics of representation has been the focus of much previous gay and lesbian film criticism, the contributors to Out Takes employ the approaches of queer theory to move beyond conventional readings and to reexamine aspects of the cinematic gaze in relation to queer desire and spectatorship.

The essays examine a wide array of films, including Calamity Jane, Rear Window, The Hunger, Heavenly...

In "Queer in Russia" Laurie Essig examines the formation of gay identity and community in the former Soviet Union. As a sociological fieldworker, she began her research during the late 1980s, before any kind of a public queer identity existed in that country. After a decade of conducting interviews, as well as observing and analyzing plays, books, pop music, and graffiti, Essig presents the first sustained study of how and why there was no Soviet gay community or even gay identity before "perestroika" and the degree to which this situation has--or has not--changed.
While male...

Amber L. Hollibaugh is a lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, feminist, Left political organizer, public speaker, and journalist. "My Dangerous Desires "presents over twenty years of Hollibaugh s writing, an introduction written especially for this book, and five new essays including A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, My Dangerous Desires, and Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism.
In looking at themes such as the relationship between activism and desire or how sexuality can be...

Amber L. Hollibaugh is a lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, feminist, Left political organizer, public speaker, and journalist. "My Dangerous Desires "presents over twenty years of Hollibaugh s writing, an introduction written especially for this book, and five new essays including A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, My Dangerous Desires, and Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism.
In looking at themes such as the relationship between activism and desire or how sexuality can be...

An examination of the concept of orphandom in gay and lesbian experience, and how it has been instrumental in defining and mobilizing queer subcultures.