Lesbian Studies

Step-Daughters of England by Jane Garrity

Jane Garrity shows how Dorothy Richardson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf used experimental techniques to place themselves as national subjects, arguing that women’s modernist writing is inseparable from their ambivalent relation to Britain’s imperial history. Drawing on archival research, she reads their work alongside interwar culture, including new visual techniques, neo-medievalism, ethnography of ‘primitive’ mysticism and nostalgia for rural England, to show how nationalism, empire, gender and sexuality intersected in English national culture.

Dear Tiny Heart by Jane Heap; Florence Reynolds

Letters from Jane Heap, later co-editor with Margaret Anderson of the modernist magazine The Little Review, to her close friend Florence Reynolds, spanning 1908 to 1949, with additional letters to Reynolds from others in Heap’s life. They trace Heap’s transformation from a dreamy young Midwestern woman into a forceful arbiter of international modernism, her relationships with women, the struggle for lesbian identity and community between the wars, and her turn from art to the mysticism of George Gurdjieff.

Geographies of Learning by Jill Dolan

Five linked essays mapping the divisions between theory and practice that stall progressive knowledge in theater and performance studies, lesbian/gay/queer studies and women’s studies. Writing as teacher, administrator, author and performer, Jill Dolan treats the production and sharing of knowledge as forms of activism and explores what these fields can offer one another in community, pedagogy, public culture and citizenship.

Invisible Relations by Elizabeth Susan Wahl

Elizabeth Susan Wahl explores how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and French writers represented intimacy between women, through both a sexualized model of the ‘lesbian’ tribade and an idealized model of female friendship without sexual expression. She shows how these two models shaped literature and cultural responses to places where women gathered, such as the salon, convent, theater and brothel. Drawing on legal, medical and historical sources and on writers including Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Madeleine de Scudéry, Catherine Descartes, Delarivier Manley and John Cleland, she recovers an emerging discourse of female homosexuality and the fears it provoked.

Shanghai Lalas by Lucetta Yip Lo Kam

The first ethnographic study of lala (lesbian, bisexual and transgender) communities and politics in China, focused on Shanghai. Drawing on years of interviews, Lucetta Yip Lo Kam examines lalas’ daily struggle to reconcile same-sex desire with the demands of family harmony and compulsory marriage in a culture that denies women sexual agency. She analyzes discourses of homophobia and ‘Chinese tolerance,’ and the ‘politics of public correctness’ as a tongzhi survival strategy, weaving her own queer biography with her fieldwork.

Making Out by Kathryn Bond Stockton

Kathryn Bond Stockton uses kissing as a lens on the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books and movies. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, Making Out recalls her non-binary childhood before that idea existed in her world, moving from bedroom to closet to playground to movie theater to the solitary pleasure of reading.

Marie Equi by Michael Helquist

Born in 1872 to Italian-Irish parents, Marie Equi worked as a child in a Massachusetts textile mill before fleeing to an Oregon homestead with her first long-term woman companion. She put herself through medical school and became one of the first women physicians in the Pacific Northwest, using her status to fight for woman suffrage, labor rights and reproductive freedom. She fought police, shared a jail cell with Margaret Sanger, marched with the unemployed, and opposed U.S. entry into the First World War, earning a sedition conviction and three years in San Quentin. The first well-known lesbian in Oregon, she saw her same-sex relationships figure in two U.S. Supreme Court cases.