Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

{"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":"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":"419-438"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","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":"Desi butch in the kitchen: The politics of queer masculinity from South Asia.","authors":"Naveen Minai","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2549226","DOIUrl":"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":"682-695"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","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":"Erotic Appetites: Food, Caste, and \"Lesbian\" Desire in Neeraj Ghaywan's \"Geeli Pucchi<i>\"</i>.","authors":"Sucheta M Choudhuri","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2528257","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2528257","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the dual signification of food a as tool of both intersectional oppression and queer resistance in Neeraj Ghaywan's short film \"Geeli Pucchi,\" anthologized in the Netflix web series <i>Ajeeb Dastaans</i> (2021). The politics of food is central to the film, which shows how it can constitute a powerful axis for the marginalization of the Dalit, queer protagonist. \"Geeli Pucchi\" works as a critique of the Savarna discourse on caste purity and its use of food to reinforce the subaltern position of the Dalit subject. At the same time, the film foregrounds how food can work as a materialization of queer desire that can make caste boundaries fluid. My analysis of the subversive role of food in the film demonstrates how food can become a language that can queer the heterosexual spaces and imagine alternative modes of being and connecting. Caste taboos around food, however, undermine its transgressive potential, and continue to reify Dalit alterity. In the article, I also examine the film's place in the genealogy of Dalit and queer cinema in India and consider how the film's avoidance of the word \"lesbian\" speaks to alternative homosocial frameworks that foster both same-gender desire and culinary intimacies in the South Asian context.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"642-659"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576553","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":"Can CEE lesbian speak? Towards Central and Eastern European Lesbian Studies-an introduction.","authors":"Aleksandra Gajowy","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2632222","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2632222","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>For several decades, there have been scholars across the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) contributing to the formulation of lesbian thought, yet these seem to rarely have been in conversation with one another, never collectively interrogating questions on what it means to write lesbian histories from the region relationally, enabling a mutual legibility across these disparate contributions. This is not simply to account for similarities or differences of queer womanhoods across the region but to reflect on the complexities of the region itself whose very \"regionality\" remains contested and volatile. CEE is a region whose common experiences and shared history were also often forcibly imposed, making its unity a gelatinous conceptualisation. This special issue is one of the ways hoped to bring some of these voices together. Focusing on queer women from the region, beginning to speak collectively, we have carefully been able to access different modes of history making, those based on collectivity, feeling, speculation, oral histories, and histories that becomes palpable not primarily through authoritative texts but through the accumulation of affect.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"151-163"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147366957","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":"\"We Were Movement People First\": Teaching Writing through Relationship and Struggle.","authors":"Montinique McEachern, L J Jaffee, Yanira Rodríguez, Vani Kannan","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2580092","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2580092","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We interviewed Minnie Bruce around her dining table in Syracuse, NY in December 2019. In this excerpt from the interview, we share how Minnie Bruce learned to teach through organizing; how her classroom shifted us from parallel learners to siblings in the struggle; and how she joined us as our coconspirator, friend, and mentor after her retirement. She touches on how much rural Alabama-particularly the Cahaba River and the creatures that inhabit it-shaped her understanding of land, liberation, and creative practice. Learning from Minnie Bruce, both in college classrooms and in community organizing spaces, revealed to us how inseparable movement principles are from pedagogy.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"470-487"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147482014","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":"Companionship, kinship and continuum: Reflections with lesbian identifying older persons in Mumbai and Kolkata.","authors":"Ranjita Biswas, Srabasti Majumdar, Niharika Banerjea","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2620925","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2620925","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>When Adrienne Rich wrote <i>Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence</i>, she indicated the erasure of lesbian lives from heteronormative life worlds in the Anglo-American context. Lesbian existence is a critical way of fighting compulsory heterosexuality and speaks of bonds and friendships that go beyond sexual desire between two cis women. With the concept of the lesbian continuum, Adrienne Rich represented woman-identified experiences that carry the possibility of politically realigning the relationship between the lesbian and the feminist. This paper is interested in understanding the textures of companionship in the 1980s and 1990s in urban India among lesbian identifying cis women. We engage with the narratives of lesbian identifying individuals who developed companionship and kinship through social stigma, legal oppression and political erasure. Today, all above 50 years of age, their life journeys of discrimination and political togetherness help sharpen the lesbian continuum. In their narratives of companionship are folded stories of resistance, subversion and resilience, of opening up their homes and hearts for queer and trans* individuals to connect, form friendships and care networks. By focusing on these lives' spatial and historical contexts and struggles, we ask if lesbian companionship can sharpen the concept of the lesbian continuum to arrive at a renewed understanding of kinship, care and solidarity. Apart from resistance against compulsory heterosexuality, what other possibilities can lesbian companionships and lesbian continuum present for trans-feminist solidarities?</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"567-586"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146126680","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":"Minnie Bruce Pratt's Longed-for but Unrealized World: A Roundtable with Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Matt Richardson.","authors":"Taylor Marie Doherty","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2620930","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2620930","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This roundtable features a conversation with three scholar-activists Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Matt Richardson, each of whom engaged deeply with Minnie Bruce Pratt's work and life in different ways. Mohanty and Okazawa-Rey were both faculty members with Pratt at Hamilton College in New York and the Union Institute in Ohio and Mohanty later worked with her at Syracuse University. The three sustained a friendship spanning across decades and different geographic locations. Richardson first met Pratt in the 1990s at a writing workshop he organized and then worked with her through the <i>Feminist Studies</i> editorial collective; although Richardson did not have the same sustained relationship with Pratt, he was shaped by her work and her presence in his life. Together, roundtable participants reflect on their relationships with Pratt, draw our attention to the nuanced ways Pratt theorized identity, and discuss how she might make sense of our current moment, remembering that for Pratt theory was connected to everyday life and thus, immensely political <i>and</i> personal.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"513-531"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146114567","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":"Liberation in confinement: proto-queer relationalities in <i>Custody</i> and <i>By Touch</i>.","authors":"Liliana Bajger","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2629226","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10894160.2026.2629226","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article investigates female homoeroticism encoded in cinematic form. I read two Polish films, In <i>Custody</i>/<i>Nadzór</i> (dir. Wiesław Saniewski, 1983) and <i>By Touch</i>/<i>Przez Dotyk</i> (dir. Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, 1985) to explore the new forms of femininity I call 'proto-queer'. 'Proto-queer' is used here to conceptualize the figure of woman bearing a gendered and sexual instability that carries the hallmarks of what subsequently has become known as queerness. At the historical moment of state socialism, these fledgling forms of queer femininity were neither fully developed nor clearly legible. Yet, their distinctly Polish and socialist inflections allow us to view them as precursors to transgressions that would only later be more recognizable within a queer interpretive framework. The analysis of sexual or erotic otherness in the context of isolation and social exclusion around which both films develop foregrounds the affective power of shame and its transformative abilities. I demonstrate how shame and humiliation are both de-constituting and foundational in relation to sexual identity. I analyze how cinematic articulations of proto-queer intimacies generate a reimagined understanding of female homoeroticism in socialist Poland and how this study contributes to the literature on queerness and its representation more generally.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"251-270"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147378981","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":"Reveries of a lesbian lover: The haptic geometry of Monique Wittig's <i>The Lesbian Body</i>.","authors":"Theo Mantion","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2600785","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2600785","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how <i>The Lesbian Body</i>, Monique Wittig's 1973 literary \"reverie,\" reconfigures the spatial logic of language. As its lovers come together and undo one another through words, the text dismantles the projective regime in which interlocution fixes and delimits subjects in space. In its place, Wittig develops a haptic poetics in which meaning emerges à mesure-word by word-through tactile and communal relation. Central to this reorientation is the j/e pronoun, whose typographic slash interrupts the capture of representation and opens language to ongoing transformation. Reading <i>The Lesbian Body</i> as a material practice in which subjectivity and world co-emerge, I argue that Wittig's spatial experiments unsettle the heterosexual body schema and imagine forms of becoming unbound by inherited coordinates of identity. Her work ultimately advances a lesbian universalism grounded not in projection or identification, but in a shared, haptic geometry of touch.</p>","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145726596","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":"Correction.","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/10894160.2025.2578155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2025.2578155","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46044,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Lesbian Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1-5"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145662312","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}