{"title":"Beyond trans* medicalisation: hapticality and the art of crafting trans*masculine identities in Ali Smith's <i>How to be both</i> (2014).","authors":"Lisselot El Martin-Plaza","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2372961","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2372961","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented rise in trans* representation in literature, with works of fictions that go from critically acclaimed best sellers like Torrey Peters' <i>Detransition Baby</i> (2021) to Booker-Prize winner postcolonial-centred study of non-binary characters in Bernardine Evaristo's <i>Girl, Woman, Other</i> (2019). In this blossoming context of exploring trans* voices, Ali Smith's <i>How to be both</i> (2014) breaks the mould in its defiance of traditional representations of transivity, usually grounded on medico-legal discourses. Following the precept of transnormativity as well as the theories of hapticality of Jeanne Vaccaro and Laura Marks, which respectively explore the possibilities of trans* identity perceived as a collective process of crafting and the potential found in a haptical approach to the visual, I hereby discuss Smith's representation of trans*masculine identity outside the regime of medicine. Pivoting around Smith's conceptualisation of 'the painter self', an original reinterpretation of trans* identity as expressed and crafted through the arts and the feeling of touch, I offer an analysis of the continual process of becoming of trans* Renaissance character Francescho del Cossa. Moreover, I offer analyses on the impact others may have on one's own trans* identity, with an interest on the trans* joy that comes from acceptance and on the role of arts to outgrow the pain that comes from rejection. Finally, I examine the role of the visual in the artistic representation of transivity, where Smith defies the limits of time, portraying trans* identity as the true never-ending process.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"140-152"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141601886","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":"Generous dissonance and wanderings: form and politics in Virginia Woolf's <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> and Ali Smith's <i>Hotel World</i>.","authors":"Turner Nat Byrd","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2375472","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2375472","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay looks at, and compares, <i>Hotel World</i> by Ali Smith and <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> by Virginia Woolf and attempts to understand the differences within both the formal and philosophical/political outlook of the two works. Presuming stream-of-consciousness as both a set of formal prosaic styles and a genre, the essay argues that the way the novels utilize formal style is indicative of their individual politics in counterintuitive ways. Furthermore, it argues that by looking at these two novels we can begin to map a lineage of queer stream-of-consciousness works and explore how those perspectives have changed over time.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"124-139"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141499320","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":"Creating havens for Black lesbian elders during COVID-19.","authors":"Porsha Hall, Mary Anne Adams","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2023.2236440","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2023.2236440","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Black lesbians experience more adverse health outcomes and economic insecurity in older age than their White counterparts due to enduring a lifetime of marginalization associated with the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Yet, there is a lack of organizations dedicated to empowering and supporting this population. ZAMI NOBLA (National Organization of Black Lesbians on Aging) is the only Black lesbian led national organization in the United States solely invested in improving the wellbeing of Black lesbian elders. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, they worked in solidarity with community partners across the country to leverage technological innovation and community solidarity to combat ageist ideology and elevate the spaces in which Black lesbians and their networks were able to learn, heal, thrive, and live. The organization's efforts fostered solidarity across generations of lesbians and the wider LGBTQ + community.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"88-100"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9826642","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":"Experimental fiction, lesbian aesthetics, and queer world making: living lesbian lives with Ali Smith.","authors":"Jaime Harker","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2467008","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2467008","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores how lesbian aesthetics inform Ali Smith's literary practice, including activism and gender nonconforming characters.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"109-123"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143531892","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}
Mónica Laliga-Mollá, Conchi San Martín-Martínez, Gerard Coll-Planas, Rocío Medina-Martín
{"title":"Intimate partner violence in lesbian couples: A systematic review on the barriers to seeking help.","authors":"Mónica Laliga-Mollá, Conchi San Martín-Martínez, Gerard Coll-Planas, Rocío Medina-Martín","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2346422","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2346422","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The process of seeking help for violence in lesbian couples is complex due to the variety of factors and actors that can be involved. It is a process in which the women may or may not take action to ask for some kind of support, depending on the stage at which they find themselves. However, even though women may realise that they are in a situation of mistreatment or abuse in their relationship with their partner or ex-partner, there may be barriers that hinder them from seeking help. This paper presents a systematic review of the barriers that lesbian women encounter in seeking help or accessing support systems when they are victims of intimate partner violence. Out of 139 studies reviewed, 120 were selected for further review, and 8 studies meeting the methodological inclusion criteria were finally selected. The results of this research show that psycho-social and legal barriers exist, which, within a system of oppression - heterosexist society - do not occur in isolation, but are inter-related, making it difficult for lesbian women victims of intimate partner violence to seek help or access support services. This review finds limitations in the literature reviewed and makes recommendations for future research.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140871673","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":"Tracing womyn-born-womyn & trans-exclusion: Into the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival archive.","authors":"Sarah Cooper","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2354656","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2354656","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Few events evoke a divisive response amongst lesbians like the mentioning of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Autoethnographies, interviews, podcasts, and books - just to name a few - continue to be crafted even after the forty-year festival's end. Unlike previous publications, this article approaches the festival using archival materials housed at Michigan State University donated by producer, Lisa Vogel, to unpack the signaling rhetoric of womyn-born-womyn (WBW). I center the experience Nancy Burkholder, a transsexual woman expelled from the festival, to navigate, as Nancy tried to navigate, the WBW \"policy.\" I then take readers on a journey into the archive and articulate my research through calculated steps of tracing language through years of the festival. This article demonstrates how documents, created by festival producers, incited confusion for Nancy Burkholder during the festival and how these same documents now sustain an archival ambiguity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"57-71"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140945808","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":"Queering as a tool of narrative knowledge in Ali Smith's <i>Girl Meets Boy</i> and <i>The First Person and Other Stories</i>.","authors":"Attila Dósa","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2448346","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2024.2448346","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>My paper analyses Ali Smith's innovative use of queering as a narrative strategy in <i>Girl Meets Boy</i> (2007) and <i>The First Person and Other Stories</i> (2008), focusing on her transformation of narrative structures, epistemic realities, and identity through intertextual engagement. Smith's fiction queers temporality and narrative agency by reimagining classical and literary texts, including Ovid's <i>Metamorphoses</i>, John Lyly's <i>Gallathea</i>, Shakespeare's plays, and <i>Jane Eyre</i>. I suggest that in <i>Girl Meets Boy</i>, Smith reinterprets Ovid's myth of Iphis and Ianthe to celebrate fluid and transformative identities, intertwining this with feminist activism and queer desire. By employing techniques such as prolepsis and analepsis, she destabilizes binary categories of gender and narrative form. My paper also examines <i>The First Person and Other Stories</i>, where Smith uses the short story form to experiment with self-reflexive and elliptical structures, disrupting traditional notions of linearity. I will examine how stories such as \"third person,\" \"second person,\" and \"fidelio and bess\" illustrate her capacity to reframe historical and cultural narratives, transforming them into spaces for queer textual exploration. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler, Marina Warner, and Linda Hutcheon, my analysis positions Smith's work within a lineage of literary metamorphosis that resists static notions of identity and storytelling. Ultimately, I argue that Smith queers the boundaries of knowledge, time, and narrative itself, creating fiction that is endlessly dynamic and self-referential.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"170-185"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142915841","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}
Jonathan G Tubman, Candace Moore, Jacquie Lee, Avital J Shapiro
{"title":"Multivariate patterns of substance use, minority stress and environmental violence associated with sexual revictimization of lesbian and bisexual emerging adult women.","authors":"Jonathan G Tubman, Candace Moore, Jacquie Lee, Avital J Shapiro","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2023.2240552","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2023.2240552","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study documented between-group differences in factors associated with sexual revictimization histories in a sample of young sexual minority women. Diverse samples of lesbian (<i>N</i> = 204, age<sub>M</sub> = 23.55 years) and bisexual (<i>N</i> = 249, age<sub>M</sub> = 23.35 years) women from the United States were recruited using the CloudResearch platform to assess factors associated with recent experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). Participants were categorized into four groups based on self-reports of sexual victimization (a) during childhood and (b) during adulthood in intimate relationships. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was used to model between-group differences in three variable domains: Past-year substance use involvement, minority stress, and violence in relationship and community settings. Lesbian women reporting sexual revictimization in adulthood reported significantly higher scores for measures of past-year substance use involvement and negative consequences, daily discrimination experiences, relational victimization, and criminal victimization, compared to their counterparts with no history of sexual victimization. Among bisexual women, sexual revictimization was associated with a similar pattern of between-group differences. The sexual revictimization experiences of sexual minority women appear to occur in the context of multivariate patterns of harmful substance use, minority stress, and violence in both relationship and community settings. Our findings have implications for how intervention services are provided to emerging adult sexual minority women who experience multiple episodes of sexual abuse during their lifespans. Recommendations include specialized training for counseling or intervention service providers, integrated trauma-informed services that address both substance use and sexual assault issues, and affirmative services for sexual minority women.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"36-56"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9886104","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":"Intersecting gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in Arantxa Echevarría's film <i>Carmen & Lola</i> (Spain, 2018).","authors":"Jessica Rodrigues Poletti","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2023.2253418","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2023.2253418","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Arantxa Echevarría's film <i>Carmen y Lola</i> (2018) takes a groundbreaking new approach to intersectionality and lesbian identity contextualizing a lesbian coming-of-age-story and its multicultural background and context. Owing to the colonial gaze and the outsider's perspective in the story telling, the film makes some major missteps in its representation of the Romani community in Spain. But nonetheless, the intersectional presentation is groundbreaking in terms of representation of lesbian diversity and experiences, since it portrays the lesbian subject as a triple minority: <i>woman, lesbian, and Roma</i> - a minority ethnic group still discriminated against in Spain. The story of two female Roma adolescents coming to terms with their mutual homoerotic desire intertwines with the marginality of their community and a conservative and homophobic environment in which lesbianism does not find a space. I argue that Echevarría's film explores the topics of minorities both in terms of ethnicity and sexual orientation. The director aims to represent this <i>otherness</i> as a marginalized and decentered subjectivity that intersects with other axes of discrimination. It is from this marginal position that the film explores the forms of resistance against the control of the lesbian body that women directors are carrying out in Spanish cinema.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"20-35"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10553337","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":"Ali Smith's queer autobiocritical aesthetics.","authors":"Mark Llewellyn","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2461903","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2461903","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Ali Smith's allusive relationship to the literary and cultural canon is a prominent feature of her writing life. Smith's works offer a rich and diverse perspective on the magpie-like appreciation of cultural mo(ve)ments as accretive and cumulative sites of creative re/construction. But they also provide a sense of the writer as reader, thinker and re-visioner of personalised literary and cultural canons including not only books but paintings, films and music. In this essay, I explore Smith's work through what I term the \"autobiocritical\" - that is literary texts which serve to play with notions of identity, authorial positioning and critical approaches <i>via</i> an allusive, metafictional and theoretically informed exploration of fiction, form and self-representation. The essay focuses on Smith's <i>Artful</i> (2012) in which I suggest she engages in a complex process of homage and adaptation that is invested in the queering of the acts of reading, re-reading and critical perspective. Smith's subversive approach to the nature of critical analysis when divested of personality, character and readerly interaction presents a degree of cynicism and scepticism about the role of the aesthetic when anaesthetised from the quirks and individualities of character and of reading - that are central to Smith's aesthetic.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"153-169"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143558325","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}