{"title":"\"Then you tell me you've fallen in love with a tree\": Queer ecologies in Ali Smith's short stories.","authors":"Laura Schmitz-Justen","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2403878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2403878","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The present article takes the recurrent motif of trees in Ali Smith's oeuvre as a point of departure to analyze how Smith forges an alliance between environmental concerns and queerness. It argues that her short stories present their own version of queer ecology on both a conceptual and aesthetic level. Smith queers ecological relations and brings ecological concerns to bear on the queer on multiple scales, continuously disrupting linear narratives, anthropocentric thinking and capitalist imperatives of (re)production and productivity for the benefit of interdepenence, resistance and inter-species care. By means of non-linear storytelling, ambiguous pronouns and shifting narrative perspective she aesthetically and conceptually opens space for queer desires, interspecies care and a cyclical, distinctly ecological view of queer futurity that ultimately extends not just to environmental and social but also cultural relations.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142559099","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":"Pockets of tenderness: Lesbian earth in Alison Bechdel's <i>Fun Home</i>.","authors":"Katie Hogan","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2417912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2417912","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The subfield of rural queer studies and the concept of lesbian earth encourage scholars to explore the significance of rural place, nature, and climate change in queer texts. Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, <i>Fun Home: A Family TragicComic</i>, presents nature as a source of familial conflict, creativity, and mutual support and as under threat due to strip mining. The climate change novel, <i>2 Degrees,</i> focuses intensely on the realities of climate change and lesbian relations with the earth. These two texts are drastically different, yet they both convey a lesbian earth sensibility, featuring main characters who practice an open, vulnerable, interdependent stance with themselves and the more-than-human world.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477371","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":"A systematic review of the prevalence and associated factors of mental health conditions among lesbian, bisexual, and other sexual minority women in Southeast Asia.","authors":"Rowalt Alibudbud","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2415236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2415236","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The present review explored the prevalence and factors of mental health conditions among lesbian, bisexual, and other sexual minority women (LBSW) in Southeast Asia. It found that the rates of significant depression and depressive symptoms range from 10% to 93.2%, with a median of 27.7%. This wide range can be due to a study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which found elevated depression, stress, and anxiety rates. Studies also highlight high levels of sadness, hopelessness, sleep and eating problems, fatigue, and suicidal thoughts among LBSW. Suicide rates indicate that LBSW have higher odds of suicidal ideations and attempts than their heterosexual peers in the region. Additionally, bisexual and polysexual women report higher rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal behaviors than lesbian women, necessitating tailored mental health interventions. Substance use among LBSW is also notable, including smoking and heavy drinking, though some rates are below the global average. Factors influencing mental health include openness about sexuality, coping styles, and discrimination. Discrimination is linked to various mental health issues, supporting the minority stress model's applicability in the region. Aging-related factors also affect mental health among LBSW, with older age being possibly protective against depression. Overall, this review highlights the urgent need for more inclusive mental health research and interventions in the region. Recommendations include training healthcare providers, developing tailored mental health programs, adopting suicide prevention initiatives, enacting anti-discrimination laws, and addressing substance use. Future research should focus on underrepresented regions and older LBSW.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477369","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":"Environmental Eros: the films of Barbara Hammer as \"Creative Geographies\"1.","authors":"Lauran Whitworth","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2396711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2396711","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In her 1978 essay \"Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,\" Audre Lorde avers, \"The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information\" (1984, p. 54). Part of our maligning of the erotic, according to Lorde, is our separation of the spiritual from the erotic, a holdover of enlightenment thinking that insists on parsing apart that which is thought from that which is felt and sensed. This paper examines 1970s lesbian-feminist esthetics, specifically the works of American avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), to delineate an environmental eros, in which more-than-human nature is a source of erotic inspiration and interspecies connection. Just as Lorde theorizes the erotic as a \"reminder of [one's] capacity for feeling and joy\" (1984, p. 56), environmental eros understands the erotic as expansively sensual and sensory instead of solely sexual. My close readings of Hammer's films <i>Dyketactics</i> (1974), <i>Women I Love</i> (1976), and <i>Multiple Orgasm</i> (1976) challenge critiques of these materials as escapist relics of an essentializing past. Instead, I use feminist and film phenomenological theory to argue that the natural environment was an actor in radical re-imaginings of subjecthood and relationality that constitute an eco-erotic ethics with clear implications for contemporary environmental politics and ecological feminisms.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477370","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}
Ally B Hand, Kelsey A Kehoe, Cali Panesis, Heidi M Levitt
{"title":"A retrospective study of sexual minority women's gendered sexuality: Butch and femme sex at the turn of the 21st century.","authors":"Ally B Hand, Kelsey A Kehoe, Cali Panesis, Heidi M Levitt","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2411482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2411482","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study is a retrospective examination of how sexual minority women have experienced their sexuality. The analysis examined a national archival dataset that was collected online in the US and Canada to examine the relationship between gender and sexuality in 1084 sexual minority women in 2003, with a focus on butch and femme identities. It provided an understanding of how gender and sexuality interacted at the turn of the last century when the gender identity landscape differed from that of today. While this study collected data from butch and femme women approximately 20-years ago, the results have implications for how we develop situated understandings of the relationship between gender and sexuality. Findings indicated gendered patterns in sexual preferences and attraction that can shed light on how gender and sexuality have evolved in connection. At the same time, there were no differences in sexual satisfaction, which suggests that the enactment of gendered sexuality (in which attraction is structured by a gender dynamic) was experienced as empowering rather than oppressive. We examine our findings in relation to current scholarship on gendered sexuality to consider how sexuality is constructed and reconstructed across time. The findings support a view of gendered sexuality as a source of pleasure, affirmation, and positive embodiment. We theorize gendered sexuality as functioning to enhance experiences of authenticity and resist heteronormativity. The study holds implications for research on the interaction of gender and sexuality.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142401590","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":"Black roses: The womanist partnership of Frances Reynolds Keyser and Mary McLeod Bethune.","authors":"Veronica Popp","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2385714","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2385714","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Through recovered biographies and unpublished archival papers, I examine the connection of two Black clubwomen, Frances Reynolds Keyser and Mary McLeod Bethune, who shared a modest ceremony that bonded them for life. I argue that their private relationship was deeper than they could credibly portray through their public image at the time, bound as they were by the strictures of respectability politics. Their cultivation of respectability was an irreplaceable asset in, and indeed a necessity of their work, but it also demanded the presentation of normative heterosexuality. In addition, I conducted a creative investigation of the archives to draw attention to their everyday lives and experiences in Daytona. Many Black women activists' experiences do not conform to the white male-centric narrative ethos present and the assumption of heterosexuality is a dominant yet wholly inaccurate narrative on Black club women's legacies and activism. Biographical recoveries can change, complicate, and enhance our understanding of these women's relationships regarding their well-curated public personas as clubwomen. This study aims to provide an intellectual history of Black women through the club movement by putting biographical data front and center, especially by examining their own words.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142394155","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":"Exiles of love?: uncovering lesbian voices in interwar Czechoslovakia.","authors":"Mark Cornwall","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2401264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2401264","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Lesbian voices and experiences have received little attention in Czech historiography: recent research has concentrated on the modern era from the 1950s. This article deepens our understanding of lesbian lives in interwar Prague. It focuses on two forgotten lesbian novels, <i>Exiles of Love</i> and <i>The Third Sex</i>, which were deliberately suppressed after 1948 by the Communist regime as examples of inferior bourgeois literature. The two authors, Lída Merlínová and Gill Sedláčková, both hailed from Prague's cultural world (theatre and film) and were active too in the 1930s Czech movement for homosexual reform. Spanning the late twenties to the late thirties, the novels reveal tantalising glimpses of the evolving sub-culture of interwar Prague. Merlínová's naïve novel of 1929, <i>Exiles of Love</i>, was the first Czech lesbian novel, and it betrayed the 1920s optimism of the 'Czech New Woman' who was prepared to challenge gender stereotypes. Sedláčková's novel, <i>The Third Sex</i>, is a more explicit study from 1937, reflecting the more mature sub-culture but also a cynicism about the chances of homosexual reform. Yet it manages, even more than <i>Exiles</i>, to convey an uplifting and moral message. Indeed, both novels are about lesbian self-knowledge, exploring the scope for same-sex survival in a world where the best solution may be abroad, not in 'provincial Prague'. In restoring these texts to lesbian literature we recover a range of voices, expressing the hopes and frustrations of some queer Czech women in an unusually liberal era.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142356103","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}
Ally B Hand, Kelsey A Kehoe, Cali Panesis, Heidi M Levitt
{"title":"A Retrospective Study of Sexual Minority Women's Gendered Sexuality: Butch and Femme Sex at the Turn of the 21<sup>st</sup> Century.","authors":"Ally B Hand, Kelsey A Kehoe, Cali Panesis, Heidi M Levitt","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2406161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2406161","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study is a retrospective examination of how sexual minority women have experienced their sexuality. The analysis examined a national archival dataset that was collected online in the US and Canada to examine the relationship between gender and sexuality in 1084 sexual minority women in 2003, with a focus on butch and femme identities. It provided an understanding of how gender and sexuality interacted at the turn of the last century when the gender identity landscape differed from that of today. While this study collected data from butch and femme women approximately 20-years ago, the results have implications for how we develop situated understandings of the relationship between gender and sexuality. Findings indicated gendered patterns in sexual preferences and attraction that can shed light on how gender and sexuality have evolved in connection. At the same time, there were no differences in sexual satisfaction, which suggests that the enactment of gendered sexuality (in which attraction is structured by a gender dynamic) was experienced as empowering rather than oppressive. We examine our findings in relation to current scholarship on gendered sexuality to consider how sexuality is constructed and reconstructed across time. The findings support a view of gendered sexuality as a source of pleasure, affirmation, and positive embodiment. We theorize gendered sexuality as functioning to enhance experiences of authenticity and resist heteronormativity. The study holds implications for research on the interaction of gender and sexuality.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142356102","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":"Comparing the health information practices of sapphic people by age group and generation.","authors":"Vanessa Kitzie","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2403877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2403877","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This qualitative research examines how sapphic people (i.e., umbrella term inclusive of lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual trans femmes, mascs, nonbinary people, and ciswomen) in South Carolina navigate informational barriers within healthcare systems. An information practices lens that examines how sapphic people create, seek, use, and share information to achieve desired healthcare outcomes describes such navigation. The research focuses on how intersectional identities, with a particular emphasis on age and considerations of race/ethnicity, geography, and gender, mediate these practices and their outcomes. The research uses participant data from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 34 sapphic people about their health information practices. Participants varied in age and generational representation from 18 through 64. Data analysis utilized qualitative coding to compare how participants experience and circumnavigate health information barriers across age and generation. Data analysis highlighted age-related and generational barriers and facilitators in health information practices within SC sapphic communities. These barriers, shaped by cultural and community dynamics, affected how participants sought and shared health information. Older participants faced barriers rooted in historical experiences, leading to mistrust of healthcare systems, while younger ones encountered challenges imposed by adults. Despite differences, both groups sought sources aligned with their identities and shared frustrations with changing LGBTQIA + language. Across generations, there was a consistent effort to support younger members through protective and defensive health information practices. Implications of these findings identify strategies for healthcare providers and information professionals to dismantle health and healthcare information barriers experienced by those under the LGBTQIA + umbrella who experience less visibility than white gay men from urban areas-additional implications center on strategies for sapphic communities to engender communal care spanning generations.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142298250","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 earth is a big badass butch dyke in menopause.","authors":"Beth Stephens,Annie Sprinkle","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2395223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2024.2395223","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, ecosexual artists and activists Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle re-envision our planet as a butch dyke in menopause. This displacement of the \"mother\" earth trope re-orients the urgent questions of climate change and consent. Acknowledging the common pitfalls of anthropomorphism, they argue that imagining the Earth as a butch dyke lover enables a radically embodied and joyous mode of environmentalist politics. Stephens and Sprinkle situate their bodies in continuity with the earth in a relationship of queer interdependency as they invent new ways of being in the world that disengage from an abusive, extractive relation to the earth through the cultivation of a loving, playful relationship with our planet. They envision Butch Earth as a switch who invites us into a multitude of embodied, sensual, mindful responses beyond the limits of self-other paradigms. To counter the dominionistic practice of extraction and exploitation, the artists propose an ethical practice of co-sense, rather than consent, in which humans attune themselves to the earth via the senses, a process enabled by repeated, communal, non-monogamous marriages to the planet. Stephens & Sprinkle's curiosity and imagination invite the reader to play and perhaps think about the Earth reciprocally in a relationship grounded by love and sensuality.","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142267991","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}