Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

{"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":"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":" ","pages":"32-49"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","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":"Link to link: The 'Lesbian Eroticverse' of personal narratives and Indian Digital Platforms.","authors":"Arunima Theraja, Charul Mehndiratta","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2555666","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2555666","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Following the 2000s, India witnessed an emergence of cyber-queer spaces in the form of several online multimedia platforms, social media networking and dating sites which explored the intersections of gender and sexuality. Through an analysis of the queer 'I' in digital personal narratives by queer AFAB individuals on multimedia platforms like <i>Agents of Ishq (AOI)</i> and <i>Point of View (POV),</i> we argue that both the design of these websites and this written personal history contain a self-affirming erotic power. This power is enmeshed with and informed by an Indian lesbian political history which demands that we rethink our relationship with the challenges of lesbian desire, intersectionality, caste subalternity and the politics of inclusion both online and offline.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"608-624"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144993888","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":"Lesbian in/from South Asia: erotic and political geographies.","authors":"Kashish Dua, Sara Shroff, Niharika Banerjea, Shermal Wijewardene, Adnan Hossain","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2714665","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2714665","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This special issue emerged from a two-pronged question: what it means to be lesbian in/from South Asia and what it means to be so in the contemporary moment. The contemporary is marked by both enduring and emergent forms of precarities, changing strategies of survival, intensified digitalization and transformations in global queer politics. Seeking to open up the ideas of \"lesbian\" and \"South Asia\" both individually and in relation to each other, the issue underscores the inadequacy of singular modes of identity, territory or politics to apprehend either. The contributions broadly engage with two valences: negotiations with global queer politics and locally situated practices of solidarity and care. Instead of positioning South Asian lesbian experiences as either neatly adopting or rejecting global queer frameworks, they analyze everyday negotiations which appropriate, contest and rework such frameworks. They situate lesbian subjectivities in socio-historically and materially specific conditions to imagine political possibility beyond universalist paradigms while simultaneously resisting nationalist closures that reduce South Asian contexts to inherently coherent and culturally static ones. Anchored in immediate conditions of survival, belonging and futurity, the issue pays attention to how lesbian subjectivities are produced by and themselves shape intersecting structures of caste, class, religion, race and gender. Collectively, the articles call for a pluriversal understanding of lesbian lives grounded in partial connections, transversal solidarities and differences. The issue reflects on its uneven geographic representation and the institutional, linguistic and epistemological inequalities that shape whose lesbian experiences become available for scholarly circulation, thereby calling for greater methodological attention to the geographies of knowledge production in South Asian lesbian studies.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"533-546"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149012909","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":"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":" ","pages":"50-83"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","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":"Reframing female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern European history.","authors":"Natalie Cornett","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2565906","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2565906","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This historiographical essay presents different approaches in the realm of gender and sexuality studies that have been and can be used by historians of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to female same-sex relationships, especially focusing on the long nineteenth century before the widespread understanding of sexuality as medicalized and politicized categories of individual and collective identity emerged. It also explores the distinct challenges of writing such histories in the region, and ways those challenges might be overcome. Scholarship on the history of women's sexuality in CEE is brought into dialogue with interdisciplinary studies from elsewhere in Europe and North America in an effort to exchange ideas about ways of writing such histories, including addressing common definitional and conceptual questions related to historicizing women's relationships with each other that take into account erotic possibilities that have often been ignored or dismissed. The study takes as a starting point the problem faced by many historians who work on sexuality in CEE: the invisibility of female same-sex sexuality in historical records. This problem stems from phallocentric legal, cultural, and confessional definitions of sex which rendered a fuller public discussion of female-female sex (outside pornographic material) almost impossible until the first sexologists appear in the early twentieth century. Even then, such conversations remained highly specialized and confined to the elite. This essay explores scholarly approaches to female same-sex sexuality, how it appeared (or didn't) in nineteenth--century discourses in CEE, and the sexual politics underlying the framing of female same-sex sexuality then and now.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"316-334"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145432591","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":"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":"380-400"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","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":"In-betweenness: Lesbianity in socialist Slovenia.","authors":"Maja Pan","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2629225","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2629225","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines lesbianity (i.e., a less pathological term in Slavic languages than lesbianism) and the politicisation of lesbianity in socialist Slovenia during the \"democratisation\" processes in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The cumulative effect of various developments led to the first collective lesbian public self-representation (such as the media pamphlet \"We Love Women\"), and subsequently to the establishment of the group Lesbian Lilit (LL) in 1987. This paper traces lesbian organising in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia through interactions with the Yugoslav new feminist scene and the Slovene gay movement until 1993, when the squatting of the emptied Yugoslav army complex Metelkova in Ljubljana took place. The alliance of lesbian activism with more established feminist and gay political activist organising allows an examination of lesbianity through what I call \"in-betweenness\". Finally, the paper accounts for the missed - and still missing - chance for establishment of the Yugoslav Lesbian Socialist Party.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"211-231"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147345244","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":"Unmarried Daughters, Caretaking Sons: Queer Transmasculinities and Natal Kinship in North India.","authors":"Medha Asthana","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2620922","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2620922","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores how unmarried queer and transgender individuals living with natal kin-particularly butch lesbian, non-binary, and transmasculine people raised as daughters-navigate structural and interpersonal norms that expect them to be future wives and mothers. I ask: How do unmarried queer and trans individuals slotted and socialized as daughters form and assert themselves as masculine members of their natal families, and what does this reveal about gender, kinship, and normativity in North India? The study draws on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lucknow, the capital of India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, with 20 core queer and trans individuals aged 21-38, as well as some of their mothers. This research finds that these individuals, who I term \"structural daughters,\" assert culturally inflected North Indian masculine esthetics and practices which allow them to be protectors of women such as their mothers. By establishing daily labor-related, financial, and emotional interdependence with natal kin, unmarried masculine daughters secure son-like emotional and material belonging while simultaneously reinforcing normative aspects of South Asian gender and kinship. This article contributes to queer and trans studies by centering queer transmasculine subject formation in North India, expanding conversations on queer futurity, care, and belonging.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"547-566"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146150931","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":"\"Watching the Ferns Uncurl\": Minnie Bruce Pratt and Lesbian-Feminist Community Building in North Carolina.","authors":"Hooper Schultz","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2612829","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2612829","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article traces fourteen years of the life of lesbian-feminist poet-activist Minnie Bruce Pratt in the state of North Carolina from 1968 to 1972. This history of Pratt's movement through North Carolina demonstrates that the landscape of the state, both its lesbian-feminist and natural ecologies, shaped Pratt's writing long after she left. First, Pratt's involvement in a radical, supportive, and connected community of lesbian-feminists across the South and nation fed her-figuratively and literally-as she embraced her identity as a lesbian in the mid-1970s. Second, it illuminates the strength and influence of the important North Carolina lesbian-feminist print movement, of which Pratt and the women of <i>Feminary</i>, a southern lesbian-feminist literary journal, were part. This movement developed anti-racist and anti-misogynist critiques of southern culture that spread in lesbian-feminist communities throughout the United States. The women of <i>Feminary</i> also produced a specific, non-essentialist view of womanhood through natural imagery that continued to influence Pratt's writing and engagement with the natural world throughout her life. Finally, it shows how violent anti-gay and racist events in North Carolina shook Pratt and developed her social justice consciousness, first in Fayetteville and later within the lesbian and gay movement in Durham. These experiences also connected the burgeoning lesbian movement to the broader activist Left in the state. Although the work produced by the lesbian-feminist community of Durham, North Carolina has had a far-reaching impact on the national movement, the size of the community itself was small. Understanding Durham's lesbian-feminist community illuminates Pratt's political and artistic perspective. Similarly, Pratt's biography and creative output highlight the story of North Carolina as a lesbian-feminist hub in the late twentieth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"363-379"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146144004","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":"Labor on gender: Butch lesbians and trans men in a Sri Lankan Economic Processing Zone.","authors":"Themal Ellawala","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2515747","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2515747","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper queries an anxiety that marks the nexus of queerness and transness in Sri Lanka, concerning the slippage between the butch lesbian and the trans man. Taking this anxiety seriously, I explore the phenomenon of butch women and trans men who seek employment at the garment factories in the Katunayake Economic Processing Zone to explore a range of gendered desires of masculinity, inspiring category confusions between lesbianism and trans masculinity in the process. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2022-2024 to ask: what is it about the factory that allows for such complex negotiations of gender and sexuality amidst the paranoid disciplining of bodies into productivity? How does centering labor shift our understandings of butchness, trans masculinity, and the performance of gender? This essay stages a conversation with lesbian studies and trans studies, specifically the scholarship on the <i>butch-FTM border wars</i>, by positing labor as a crucial analytic that reflects and refracts both field formations. I suggest that situating the butch and trans male figures within critical political economy foregrounds how labor conditions inflect, incentivize, and demand specific gender performances, which propels the laboring gender variant figure to negotiate their gender across a butch-trans masc continuum in ways that are plural, recursive, and erratic. I argue that, rather than grounds for war, the relationship between butchness and trans masculinity denotes the imbrications of labor and gender, and capitalist exploitation and gender (un)freedom.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"660-681"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144267587","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}