Academic literature on the topic 'Lesbian subjectivity'

In January 2004, Showtime, a pay cable network, launched the first-ever lesbian-themed serial drama, The L Word, which boldly showed lesbians’ sex life and brought lesbian discourse into the narrative center of queer-themed series. This essay tries to analyze how The L Word presented lesbian subjectivity through the image as well as body construction, and narrative and also discusses some arguments towards the lesbian body presentation in The L Word.

Abstract: Chen Yingsong created Wildcat Lake not just for telling a story about lesbians but also by describing how Xiang’er, a rural woman, becomes a lesbian in the villages. We can see the “richness” and “metaphorical meaning” of the lesbian symbol. As far as Wildcat Lake is concerned, it is more worthy of discussing how Xiang’er becomes a lesbian, which is not only about sex or gender, but also about political and economic oppression. Therefore, the so-called gender in Utopia will inevitably fail. Furthermore, the loss of rural subjectivity during modernization and transformation, the subsequent new power structure, and the resulting oppression and exploitation are the fundamental reasons for Xiang’er to become a lesbian and eventually “kill her husband”.

Abstract This article investigates the construction of sex advice for queer women as it features on the world’s most popular lesbian website, Autostraddle. Based in the United States, the website is a “progressively feminist” online community for lesbian, bisexual and other queer women. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this article explores how representations of sexual and gender identity facilitate the construction of homonormativity on the website. It argues that these representations involve a tension between exclusivity and inclusivity. On the one hand, Autostraddle wants to construct an exclusive markedly lesbian subjectivity and a subcultural model of lesbian sex, which is lacking in mainstream culture. On the other hand, it aims to be inclusive of transgender and bisexual women, and to deconstruct the idea of sexual homogeneity. Findings show that Autostraddle discursively negotiates these competing goals to construct a distinctly “queer female” normativity centred on young cisgender feminine lesbians.

Resumen: Este artículo es el resultado de unainvestigación en la cual se realizó un análisis sobre cómolas vivencias de las lesbianas frente al uso del cuerpocomo elemento de trasgresión a los ideales de feminidadafectan su subjetividad. Se realizaron entrevistas, quefueron analizadas con base en teorías sobre subjetividad,género, cuerpo y lesbianismo, así como los aportes deotros estudios que se han desarrollado sobre el tema.Los resultados muestran cómo las concepciones socialesde género actúan sobre las construcciones subjetivas deestas mujeres y sobre sus propios cuerpos, pero al mismotiempo, cómo son capaces de trasgredir la normatividadhetero-patriarcal mediante estas mismas construcciones,considerando también las consecuencias de dichatrasgresión.Palabras clave: cuerpos femeninos, cuerpos trasgresores,subjetividad, feminidad, género.Feminine Subjectivity. Experiences andTransgressions of Lesbian BodiesAbstract: This article is the result of research in whichan analysis was made of how lesbians’ experiences ofthe use of the body as an element of transgression to theideals of femininity affect their subjectivity. Interviewswere conducted and analyzed on the basis of theoreticalworks on subjectivity, gender, the body and lesbianism,as well as contributions from other studies on the subject.These results show how social conceptions of gender acton these women’s subjective constructions of their bodies,but also how they are able to transgress patriarchalhetero-normativity, also considering the consequences ofthis transgression.Key words: Female bodies, bodies of transgression,subjectivity, femininity, gender.

By constructing a lineage of mediated discourse in which queer women theorize their spaces and identities, this article argues for the significant place of communication technologies as venues for queer women’s theoretical discussions. Specifically, it analyses content from AfterEllen, a website devoted to popular culture and media for lesbian and bisexual women, connecting the site to two twentieth-century lesbian periodicals, Vice Versa and The Ladder, ultimately arguing for a conception of the discourse produced in these spaces as a type of proto-queer theory. In each space, queer women reject the fictive wholeness proffered by systems of heteronormativity through their critiques of mainstream society and cultivation of representation and community. However, this article also analyses the dangers of theory, as spaces like AfterEllen theorize a lesbian subjectivity that denigrates and dismisses trans lesbians. Utilizing convergence theory, this article additionally argues that heralding the web as the first liberating space of its kind for LGBT individuals obfuscates a rich history of investment in and dependence on communication networks for identity and community formation.

By constructing a lineage of mediated discourse in which queer women theorize their spaces and identities, this article argues for the significant place of communication technologies as venues for queer women’s theoretical discussions. Specifically, it analyses content from AfterEllen, a website devoted to popular culture and media for lesbian and bisexual women, connecting the site to two twentieth-century lesbian periodicals, Vice Versa and The Ladder, ultimately arguing for a conception of the discourse produced in these spaces as a type of proto-queer theory. In each space, queer women reject the fictive wholeness proffered by systems of heteronormativity through their critiques of mainstream society and cultivation of representation and community. However, this article also analyses the dangers of theory, as spaces like AfterEllen theorize a lesbian subjectivity that denigrates and dismisses trans lesbians. Utilizing convergence theory, this article additionally argues that heralding the web as the first liberating space of its kind for LGBT individuals obfuscates a rich history of investment in and dependence on communication networks for identity and community formation.

The article discusses the origins of Lesbian Studies as arising out of an intellectually engaged grassroots lesbian community and an emergent Women's Studies within the academy. The article contrasts Lesbian Studies in the UK with the USA, which has ‘professionalized’ work in Lesbian and Gay Studies, which concomitantly has produced its own problems. Feminism bequeathed to Lesbian Studies the axiom ‘the personal is political’ and this is discussed as both a positive and a negative inheritance. The academy itself collapses the personal on to the Lesbian Studies lecturer which produces particular pressures from students, colleagues, the institution, and upon one's own intellectual trajectory in the form of the ‘taint’ of subjectivity. Finally the article attempts to identify an ambivalent relationship to liberalism which has made a limited space for Lesbian Studies but also continues to seek to police that sphere.

This paper explores issues of sport, sponsorship, and consumption by critically interrogating the mass-mediated “coming out” narratives of professional golfer, Rosie Jones, and professional basketball player, Sheryl Swoopes. Both athletes came out publicly as gay in light of endorsements received by Olivia Cruises and Resorts—a company that serves lesbian travelers—thus marking a significant shift in the relationship between lesbian subjectivity, sport, and sponsorship. A concern with a neoliberal-infused GLBT politics underscores our analysis, and a close reading of these narratives raises complex questions about the corporatization of coming out and the existence of lesbian celebrity in sport.

Resumen. Este artículo trata sobre la negociación identitaria y los procesos de subjetivación y des-subjetivación. A través de la biografía contracultural o de la adversidad (anti) biográfica de Beatriz, se van desvelando las estrategias de intersección, predominancia, fragmentación y fusión que ella emprendió para conciliar sus múltiples pertenencias, darle significado a su vida y enfrentar las tensiones que le generan las relaciones de poder de las que participa por su condición social, como mujer, madre, esposa, obrera y lesbiana, en una experiencia de transfeminidad.Palabras clave: género, subjetividad femenina, transfeminidad, identidades lésbicas, fronteras simbólicasAbstract. This article is about the identity negotiation processes of subjectivation and de-subjectification. Through the contracultural biography or the (anti)biographical adversity of Beatriz it is uncovered the different strategies of intersection, dominance, fragmentation and merging that she undertook to reconcile their multiple belongings, give meaning to her life and deal with the stresses and contradictions that are generated by her social condition, as a woman, mother, wife, worker and lesbian, in a transfeminity experience.Keywords: gender, female subjectivity, transfeminine, lesbian identity, symbolic boundaries.

Il presente lavoro si propone di apportare una prospettiva queer ed intersezionale al dibattito sociologico attorno alla diversità, alle differenze e alle minoranze urbane. Partendo da un approccio interdisciplinare, questo studio esplora il significato dellincontro con la differenza a partire da soggettività lesbiche, un posizionamento subalterno reso dominante allinterno della cornice omonazionalista. Lobbiettivo è quello di esplorare la città a partire dalle esperienze quotidiane di un soggetto minoritario, quello lesbico, raramente oggetto di attenzione nella letteratura non anglosassone. Si tratta di uno studio qualitativo interdisciplinare basato su un ragionamento abduttivo e radicato (grounded theory) e costante comparazione. Ho svolto due anni di osservazione etnografica tra il 2015 e il 2018 a Milano, Italia, e Bruxelles, Belgio. Inoltre ho intervistato 45 persone, 29 partecipanti e 16 informatori ed informatrici privilegiate. Le partecipanti sono state selezionate allorientamento sessuale e rispetto alla loro relazione con la città (essere immigrate in città). I risultati mostrano che le partecipanti si identificano, controidentificano e disidentificano con la categoria di lesbica in maniere diverse e ambivalenti. Infatti, la differenza lesbica produce a sua volta differenze allinterno della stessa categoria. In particolare dallanalisi emerge come genere, classe e razza si intreccino per produrre specifiche negoziazioni con lo spazio urbano, negli spazi lesbici e con la categoria di lesbica stessa. Sono i conflitti per laccesso a certi spazi, fisici ma anche relazionali, che rendendo visibili le linee di privilegio: bianchezza, conformità di genere, classe media, etc. Queste modalità di assimilazione, resistenza e disidentificazione, infatti, si riflettono nelle esperienze spaziali della città tramite mappe che si restringono (shrinking maps), risultato di evitamenti e negoziazioni tra etero- e omo- normatività tra lessere un cliente come chiunque altro e la ricerca di posti safe, fatti di persone con cui non ho bisogno di spiegarmi. Riconsiderando la centralità della categoria di visibilità, mostro come le partecipanti attraversano talvolta gli spazi come presenze-assenti, non intellegibili attraverso i codici dei luoghi e delle relazioni, venendo percepite ad esempio come uomini, o come etero. Queste tattiche e questi luoghi, tuttavia, non sono accessibili a tutti i corpi nella stessa maniera: la materialità delle esperienze di diversità si manifesta nelle diverse possibilità di accesso a strategie e luoghi di identificazione. Queste presenze-assenze si riproducono lungo linee di classe, di razza, e di espressioni di genere percepite come ostentatorie e esagerate, come nel caso delle butch e delle femme. Non cè spazio sicuro: nate dallesperienza di una doppia esclusione (dentro il movimento omosessuale e dentro il movimento femminista), le soggettività lesbiche intese come una co-formazione riproduce nuove esclusioni, in particolare con comportamenti omonormativi transescludenti nel contesto di Milano e di riproduzione dellegemonia bianca, particolarmente contestata a Bruxelles. Alla luce della letteratura sugli encounters, questo studio mostra che dove la pluralità non è riconosciuta attraverso gli immaginari, le pratiche e le performances viene cancellata la possibilità di identificazione per alcune soggettività e con essa si elimina anche la possibilità di incontro. Analisi in termini di co-formazioni possono favorire il riconoscimento delle strutture di potere al di là di dicotomici discorsi oppositivi, incoraggiando forme di solidarietà transidentitarie e espandendo laccessibilità a immaginari, relazioni e spazi dentro la città.
This work aims at expanding the debate about diversity, difference and urban minorities in Western European cities, looking from a queer and intersectional perspective. This interdisciplinary study explores the meaning of encounter and the spatial dimension of lesbian identifications, a subaltern location in terms of gender and sexuality but dominant from a homonationalist frame. My aim was to explore the everyday relationships with the city from the perspective of lesbians, a largely understudied subject within urban literature outside the U.K. or the U.S.A. The research is based on participant observation that I conducted between 2015 and 2018 in Milan and in Brussels, and 45 interviews: 29 with participants and 16 with key informants. I adopted qualitative methodologies and a grounded approach based on abductive reasoning and constant comparison. The participants were selected on the basis of their sexual orientation and their relationship with the city (being a migrant to the city). I retrace the emergence of lesbian subjectivities in Milan and Brussels as a result of a double exclusion (both within gay and feminist movements). Challenging the majoritarian/minoritarian opposition, the research highlights that differences are reproduced within the definition of the lesbian category itself. In particular, I look at how gender, race, and class weave together and impact the negotiations with the urban space, with lesbian spaces and with the category of lesbian itself. The results show that the participants identify, counteridentify, and disidentify with the category of lesbian in many ambiguous ways. Ultimately, the conflicts for accessing certain spaces of comfort (both physical and relational) render intelligible the other lines of privilege: white, gender-conforming, middle-class. These modalities of assimilation, resistance, and disidentification, in fact, are reflected in their spatial experiences of the city through what I call shrinking maps as a result of avoidance and negotiation of both homo- and hetero- normativities between being just a normal client and looking for safe spaces made of people with whom I dont have to explain. By shrinking maps I mean that the possibilities of encounters are reduced by non-encounters. Reconsidering the centrality of visibility, I show how the participants sometimes move through the spaces as what I call present-absences: they are not intelligible through places and relationships scripts when they pass sometimes as man, sometimes as straight. Places, indeed, are not accessible to everybody: the materiality of difference emerges in the embodied possibilities to choose, or not, among different strategies to access spaces and identifications. Exclusionary practices are reproduced along the lines of class, race and notably nonconforming gender expressions, as in the case of butches and femmes that are perceived as excessive. The price is being excluded not only from spaces, but from lesbian existance: you cannot be a real lesbian. To sum up, in this thesis I suggest that there is no safe space: lesbian as a co-formation reproduces other exclusions through homonormative transexclusions in the case of Milan and reproducing white hegemony, particularly contested in the case of Brussels. Reconsidering the literature on encounter, this study shows that where plurality is not recognized through imaginaries, practices and performances the access to identification for certain subjectivities is erased and, along with it, so does the very possibility of encounters. An analysis in terms of co-formations might be helpful in order to recognize power dynamics beyond oppositional discourses, therefore enhancing transidentiarian solidarities and broaden the accessibility to imaginaries, relationships and spaces within the city. Keywords encounters, lesbian subjectivities, visibility, disidentifications, whiteness.

碩士
國立臺北教育大學
藝術與造形設計學系碩士班
97
This thesis derives from the ever-popular and controversial TV series of the Showtime Channel, pursuing a process of implementation of “Collective Identity.” Through interviews and discussions with 13 respondents: Lai-Tong、A-Man、Yi-Mei、Ciao-Ciao、Shi-Ting、Yu-Huan、Shiao-Mai、Yi-Jyun、Meng-Yu、Zih-Ting、A-Luo、Mi-di and Da-Mao, we have experienced the exploration, debate and dialectic of subjectivity, in search of the new meanings of Taiwanese lesbians’ identities. This thesis is based on qualitative research from the audience’s point of view. The researcher considers that the importance of is to create the discourse space through which the audience “bonds” with others in depth meaningfully. In the collective process, lesbians discover their true faces as well as others’, rendering the possibility of rediscovery and empowerment of their lesbian identity. To the Taiwanese lesbians, it is such a precious experience to have found the collective identity. Although after investing in profound effort in various Gay and Lesbian Movements, Taiwanese lesbians have been gradually moving forward towards an optimistic and positive image, in general, they are still trapped by the self-hatred, gender role system and ethnocentrism, which cause denials and rejections to bisexual women, transgender people, male lesbian, blue class lesbians, typical butch/femme, and androgyny within the LGBT society. Being a “fictional” media text, < The L Word > “truthfully” weaves the life stories and thought process of its audience, contriving collaborative platform of their subjectivity. Furthermore, < The L Word > taps into another level, connecting other individual and collective identities, educating Taiwanese lesbians about the contradiction and narrowness in such self-identity, and brings about the true meaning of liberalism.

This thesis is a study of the work of Amy Levy, poet, novelist and essay writer who came to prominence in the 1880s and whose life was cut short by suicide in 1889. As a Jewish woman with literary and professional aspirations and with no apparent desire to marry, Levy’s life challenged contemporary notions of gender, religion, race, and sexuality. She produced three novels, three collections of poetry, and numerous short stories and essays. I analyse Levy’s works as literary products, literary criticisms, and as genealogies of late-Victorian identities. Levy’s scholarly and creative writings reflect a keen awareness of literary and cultural movements, often prefiguring discussions regarding feminism and modernism which would not take place until after her death. I argue that her textual productions analyse the power relations at play in 1880s Britain: what actions and, indeed, subjects, are made possible and impossible by the contemporary field of representation. Levy’s apparent interests in literary traditions and debates, genre, poetic convention and the representation of marginal lives and experiences all concern the intersections between discourse, power, and knowledge. I begin with an examination of gender, class, and space, particularly public or semi-public space, in Levy’s work. Her first novel, The Romance of a Shop, critiques conventional femininity through its inverse relationship between class and spatial mobility for its female characters. This is read alongside the 1888 article, ‘Women and Club Life’. I then consider, with reference also to George Gissing’s The Odd Women, how shifts in class and spatial mobility influence the trajectory of the romance plot. Finally, this chapter considers a range of Levy’s lyric poetry, predominately from A London-Plane Tree and Other Verse, showing how the modern city and street are celebrated spaces, where the boundaries of identity can, if temporarily, be transcended. Next, I go back to Levy’s childhood and adolescence, reading a series of letters written by Levy to her sister Katie Levy and others. I read these letters queerly, resisting the imposition of assumed heterosexuality. Together with a selection of what I call Levy’s “queer poetry”, I argue that these are representations of same-sex desire. Building upon the models of identity formulated in Chapter One, I argue that Levy’s representations of subjectivity are markedly queer: they refuse stability, escape recognition, and find fullest articulation in transience. The final chapter considers Levy’s most complex novel, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch. I examine its representations of Jewishness and gender and, importantly, its techniques of representation, revealing the novel’s self-reflexivity. I show, together with Levy’s writings in The Jewish Chronicle and elsewhere, that Levy actively writes back to a history of Jewish literary representation. Finally, reading the short story ‘Cohen of Trinity’, I observe Levy’s most tragic representation of marginal identity and how representation and associated mis/recognition shape subjectivity. Amy Levy’s work critically engages with the creation of identities and subjectivities, anticipating the disruptive cultural politics more commonly associated with the 1890s.
Thesis (M.Phil.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2016.

Abstract Studying pre-2000s pink porn magazines reveals the importance of politics in-between in the development of LGBTQ transnational organising in the twentieth century. The usual historical narratives of LGBTQ politics in the North are based on medical or legislative documents or on self-identified queers’ descriptions of their own interactions with these discourses. However, these discourses and data only capture parts of how twentieth-century queers developed sexual subjectivity, became nationally and transnationally organised, and conducted sexual politics. This chapter uses Claire Colebrook’s (Understanding Deleuze. Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002) feminist engagement in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept device to discuss transnational political networks that rhizomatically connected the makers, disseminators and subscribers of male same-sex porn magazines produced in Denmark and Sweden between 1960 and 1980. The concepts enable an analysis of the messy entanglement of desire, subjectivity processes, consumption, organising and activism, and of the shaping of certain queer communities of belonging while also excluding others. The application of gender analysis to the entanglement of pink porn economies in queer transnational networks sheds a genealogical light on the historical division between the emergence of vis-à-vis lesbian and gay networks and politics—and on the tensions between them regarding so-called positive or negative sexual rights in the decades to come.

The chapter unpacks the book’s method as a history of living activists, set in the context of feminism’s affiliation with oral history and life-course analysis. It discusses the S&A oral history archive on which the book is based, outlining how S&A approached interviewee selection and representation, and acknowledging how such questions continue to divide the movement. Offering an overview of feminist oral history practice, addressing the ethics involved and the interpretative challenges of working with memory, subjectivity and emotion, it shows how the ‘baby boomers’, ‘second generation migrants’ and ‘lesbian-feminists’ who powered the WLM were shaped by the post-war worlds in which they grew up, and talked back to these categories, particularly as they gained control over fertility. The chapter concludes with the story of Sue Lopez, women’s footballer and champion for women’s rights in the sport, demonstrating oral history’s ethical challenges whilst celebrating an inspiring athlete and campaigner. 149 words