Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

{"title":"Breaking boundaries: unveiling Jewish lesbian narratives from the Pale to the horizons of early twentieth-century America.","authors":"Irina Rabinovich","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2575561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2575561","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article, inspired by Elana Dykewomon's <i>Beyond the Pale</i>, explores the intertwined histories of Jewish lesbian and non-lesbian women from the 1870s to the 1920s, tracing their journeys from the Pale of Settlement to early twentieth-century America. Focusing on themes of identity, resilience, and female friendship, it examines how antisemitic persecution and traditional gender norms shaped Jewish women's lives, both in Eastern Europe and in the immigrant communities of New York City. This article employs a literary-historiographical method, situating Dykewomon's novel within feminist and queer historiography, and treating narrative as a form of historical knowledge. By foregrounding Jewish lesbian immigrants' voices often marginalized in mainstream historiography, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of Jewish women's agency, sexuality, and cultural transformation during a period of profound upheaval.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145337757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"'To strive for a different place than the one we have lived': Following Minnie Bruce Pratt's 'long stepping out' toward a wor(l)d after mother.","authors":"Cristina M Dominguez, Meghan A Watts","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2572277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2572277","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this work, we explore Minnie Bruce Pratt's white lesbian mothering praxis, teasing out possibilities she leaves for unsettling white imperial/colonial motherhood and the family. Framing our exploration of her life and work with a discussion of settler sexuality, white maternalism, and Black feminist revolutionary mothering we put forth an understanding of Pratt as an <i>insider pushed out</i>. Engaging her poetry and prose we examine how Pratt's transgression is not simply, or at least not only, what led her to take up her lifelong, living intersectional feminist politic. Thinking with Sara Ahmed we tease out Pratt's \"complicated\" way toward living a solidarity praxis and <i>moving</i> in unending struggle toward collective liberation. Lastly, we engage writing as a method of inquiry and theorize with Pratt, bringing our learning with and from her in conversation with others, especially Sophie Lewis who asks us to consider to what end we are queering mothering. Locating Pratt within world-building and world-ending genealogies that map how we can find and lose ourselves (and more), we ask how we might join her \"on foot, in a long stepping out\" (2013, 28) toward a wor(l)d after mother?</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145294017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender at the Junction of Feminist and Trans Thought: Reading Minnie Bruce Pratt's <i>S/HE</i>.","authors":"Stephanie D Clare","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2572273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2572273","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay argues that Minnie Bruce Pratt's 1995 lyrical and auto-theoretical text <i>S/HE</i> provides a powerful and still-relevant lesbian feminist, anti-racist vision that is not simply trans-inclusive, but that also highlights deep overlaps between trans and lesbian feminist thought, politics and community. Reading <i>S/HE</i> challenges the notion that feminist and trans approaches to gender are necessarily divergent. To make this argument, I develop close readings of <i>S/HE,</i> interpreted in the context of Pratt's participation in Camp Trans, especially during the summer of 1994, and of the interviews Pratt gave surrounding the publications of her book. I show how Pratt's understanding in <i>S/HE</i> of her own identity and of her relationship with Leslie Feinberg provide approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality that disrupt trans-exclusive feminist logics. Reading <i>S/HE</i> clarifies an important point of intersection-not difference-between some lesbian feminist and trans histories: an attachment to something akin to gender identity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145294047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revisiting \"lesbian nationalism\": Lesbian activism and agency in Hungary from the 1990s to the illiberal present.","authors":"Katrin Kremmler, Anna Borgos","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2561137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2561137","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Can lesbians speak in Hungarian illiberalism? They can and they do, but they are facing new challenges in a polarized society, with NGOs sanctioned and the issue of LGBTQ+ rights instrumentalized to gain voters' support and oppose Western liberal hegemony. In order to understand the illiberal authoritarian present unfolding in real time, local lesbian scholars and activists are challenged to develop new strategies, which also includes rethinking existing academic concepts on lesbian activism. In this paper, we address and challenge how lesbian activism in post-socialist Hungary was implicated with nationalism and ahistoricism in academic literature still considered relevant today. Drawing on our own historical account as lesbian activists and scholars in Hungary since the 1990s, we argue for an (auto)ethnographic focus on lesbian micro-politics, as it responds seismographically and actively intervenes into the illiberal culture wars.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-22"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145125762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Things People Gave Me\": the Leslie Feinberg Archives.","authors":"Kelly A Wooten","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2551414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2551414","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University recently acquired the papers of writer, theorist, activist, and revolutionary communist Leslie Feinberg; these papers are held now alongside the papers of Feinberg's spouse and partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt. Feinberg's papers include hir manuscripts, correspondence, gifts from readers and activists, and an original compendium of ephemera from transgender lives. \"Things People Gave Me\" explores how Feinberg's papers arrived at the Bingham Center, and shares insight into the thought process and care that Feinberg's heirs, Minnie Bruce Pratt and her two sons, put into the decision. The journey of Feinberg's papers is a reminder of the urgency of making plans and decisions about legacy, including one's archives, papers, and copyright, while alive.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-15"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145001598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Lesbian Body without organs: Monique Wittig's critique of psychoanalysis and the poststructuralist turn.","authors":"Benoît Loiseau","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2543149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2543149","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In French thought, the poststructuralist turn that solidified after May '68 is associated with a critique of both structuralism and psychoanalysis, particularly Lacanian theories. While the materialist lesbian novelist and theorist Monique Wittig is rarely considered within the poststructuralist canon, her critique of psychoanalysis overlaps significantly with that of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Guy Hocquenghem. In this article, I argue that her resistance against the psychoanalytic paradigm is palpable through her experimental novel <i>The Lesbian Body</i> (1973/1975), anticipating her subsequent theoretical critique in \"The Straight Mind\" (1980). By examining Wittig's rejection of metaphorical language combined with her motifs of bodily dismemberment and lesbian cruising, this article positions <i>The Lesbian Body</i> as a fundamental text within the poststructuralist context of early 1970s France which troubles and nuances its phallocentric concepts.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Desi butch in the kitchen: The politics of queer masculinity from South Asia.","authors":"Naveen Minai","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2549226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2549226","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Cooking is central to my understanding of desi butch as a form of Pakistani queer masculinity. A part of me is reluctant to write about this understanding because cooking (like so many other things and practices) immediately activates feelings, attachments, and meanings-a practice through which romances of home and family are conjured, pleasure is shared, cultures are inherited, defiance is crafted, labor is devalued, pedagogy is mobilized, sex becomes a metaphor, and global sinews of war and trade are glossed. Yet I write anyway, with and against these meanings (and with great restraint against the delicious puns noted outside the margins) because, well-I can't resist food. In this autotheoretical essay, I take up cooking as a site from which to think about desi butch as a particular formation within the erotic and political cartographies mapped by 'lesbian' and 'South Asia.' Situating cooking at the nexus of Pakistani, queer, and masculinity, I think about class and ethnic politics of livable spaces across postcolonial and settler colonial regimes, and the messy, sticky relationship between the 'global' and the vernacular,' to trouble familiar metrics of the authentication of 'South Asian' and 'lesbian.' I ask after cooking as queer kin-making rather than familial inheritance through imaginaries which are not diasporic but are, nonetheless, marked by transnational mobility, afforded by class and accent. Thickening the plot (like a stew), I think of what cooking as labor in multiple modes means for butch as a form of queer masculinity, routed through the class politics of Pakistan. I write from desi butch, a term which situates desi (Urdu for land and people simultaneously) and butch (most often understood as female masculinity among queer women, bordering into trans). Desi butch is a sexual-spatial analytic which I use to examine sexuality, class, and race as embodied and embedded logics of difference across spaces, borders, and colonial formations. Desi butch allows me to think about masculinity at the intersection of 'lesbian' and 'South Asia.' I use autotheory because desi butch is a term which I use to name how the 'I' on this page becomes a subject across transnational regimes of capital, empire, and war-complex, vast socio-cultural and politico-economic processes including multiple empires, postcolonial damages and dreams, different routes of migration, and accented hierarchies of class. I use cooking as a site for thinking about the infrastructural and the intimate, and the infrastructural <i>in</i> the intimate, where complicated and dense meanings of labor, desire, care, and compulsion accumulate.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interview with Mária Takács, documentary filmmaker, journalist and activist, founding member of the first Hungarian lesbian organization, Labrisz.","authors":"Aniko Imre","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2543155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2543155","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Anikó Imre conducted this interview with Hungarian documentary filmmaker, journalist and activist Mária Takács specifically for the special issue entitled \"Toward Central and Eastern European Lesbian Studies.\" We discuss Takács's pivotal work for lesbian, LGBTQ, and more broadly, underrepresented minority rights and representations over the past two decades. We address how her three main areas of engagement have overlapped and integrated and how this work has become increasingly precarious against the backdrop of the Orbán government's repressive policies since 2010. We pay special attention to Takács's pioneering work as a filmmaker, from making the first documentary about the secret lives of lesbians under socialism to her latest, participatory project, a scripted web series about lesbian romance in a politically hostile atmosphere.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-7"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144800550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond binaries: Negotiating the diasporic \"queer Muslim woman\" in the memoirs of Samra Habib and Lamya H.","authors":"Apeksha Pareek, Niraja Saraswat","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2535187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2535187","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the intersections of migration and queerness by investigating how queer Muslim women from Pakistan negotiate with religion, queer desire, and belonging in transnational spaces. Two memoirs by queer Muslim women-<i>We Have Always Been Here</i> (2019) by Samra Habib and <i>Hijab Butch Blues</i> (2023) by Lamya H.-not only map their authors' journeys across geographical borders but also trace the realization, exploration, and assertion of their queer identities. By engaging with these two texts, this paper analyzes Samra and Lamya's journeys, as they try to exercise and make sense of their agency (or lack thereof) with respect to their cultural and geographical displacement. This analysis highlights how the position of queer Muslim women in the diaspora both enables and challenges queerness. In addition, this analysis underscores subjective approaches to reconciling religion with queerness and emphasizes the significance of such life narratives for fostering intersectional polylogues on sexuality, religion, and migration. Consequently, this paper contributes to the project of Queer Worldmaking by showing how queer Muslim women create communities, support networks, and exhibit resilience by challenging conventional hierarchies to develop viable life possibilities for themselves in Canada and the United States.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144676029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching in the War Years Notes on the Lesbian Class as (Butch) Labor of Love in 2024.","authors":"Melissa Mora Hidalgo","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2532125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2532125","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay explores lesbian pedagogy as a \"labor of love\" in a \"lesbian histories and cultures\" class I regularly teach at CSU Long Beach. Using bell hooks's concept of the \"love ethic\" as the root of \"radical transformation\" and \"ending domination,\" I examine the stakes of teaching this \"lesbian class\" as an adjunct instructor and butch lesbian of color in back-to-back semesters in 2024, a year marked by an unprecedented convergence of national and world events that formed the backdrop of our teaching that year: an historic statewide faculty strike in January; the student-led Palestine-solidarity protest encampments against the US-sponsored Israeli war on Gaza in Spring; and the November election of convicted felon Donald J. Trump again to the US presidency. These three moments informed my pedagogical approach to teaching the lesbian class in ways that illuminate this butch \"labor of love\" as central to the critical and necessary interventions made possible by a course like Lesbian Histories and Cultures in the first place.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144650824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}