This article examines lesbian existence as a form of resistance within the family, a central institution for the reproduction of gender, sexuality, and moral norms in Colombia. Drawing on 23 in-depth interviews conducted between 2021 and 2023 with Afro-descendant and white/mestiza lesbian women in Cali, this study asks how lesbian daughters navigate intrafamilial lesbophobic violence, negotiate belonging within the parental home, and develop strategies to remain in, leave, or redefine family relationships. Using discourse analysis complemented by thematic analysis, the study identifies four recurring themes: the central and ambivalent role of mothers in regulating sexuality; the spatial separation between the parental home and lesbian affective life; the importance of affective and support networks in negotiating family rejection; and forgiveness as a strategy for preserving family ties despite psychological and, in some cases, physical violence. These findings show how participants actively reshape family relationships while affirming lesbian identities beyond the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality.
Based on archival research and oral history interviews with lesbian activists in Argentina, this article argues that lesbian memory work exceeds the preservation of documents and instead emerges through situated practices of circulation, recognition, and narration. The article reconceptualizes archives as grassroots epistemic infrastructures by showing that archival work, as a constitutive dimension of collective action, is not a secondary activity that follows political mobilization. Rather, it is a political practice through which activists produce historical authority and temporal belonging, foster continuity across generations, and negotiate the conditions under which lesbian lives become historically knowable. The article shows that the marginalization of lesbian histories in Argentina cannot be explained simply by archival absence. Instead, the central challenge lies in the uneven accessibility of memory across territories and social worlds, as archival initiatives have been concentrated primarily in large urban centers, especially Buenos Aires. It further demonstrates that the fragmented geography of lesbian archives-including personal collections, grassroots libraries, activist publications, oral history initiatives, and the Dyke Power Archive (Archivo de Potencia Tortillera)-reflects not only political commitments to decentralized memory but also territorial inequalities, limited funding, and the precarious conditions of self-managed archival work. The article further examines the productive tension between activism and academia, showing how activists simultaneously challenge academic authority while strategically engaging with universities and researchers to secure visibility, resources, and historical legitimacy. Within this broader relationship between activism and knowledge production, oral history emerges not merely as a method for recovering marginalized voices but as a performative archival practice that helps fill archival gaps by documenting the experiences and testimonies of lesbians across different territories. In doing so, it participates in the production of historical subjects and expands what comes to count as part of the national record.
This article examines queer tattooing as both a historical and a contemporary practice of resistance, belonging and community formation. Bringing together three archives - oral history interviews and portraits of queer elders, historical medical records documenting tattooed queer women engaged in sex work at the turn of the twentieth century and a dialogue with queer tattoo artist Sara Swanson - we consider what queer tattooing reveals across generations, bodies and spaces. Our interdisciplinary approach combines archival research, oral history, artistic practice and activist perspectives to trace the ways in which tattoos have functioned as bodily inscriptions of intimacy, queer identification and resistance. The first part of the article explores spatial practices of queer tattooing as sites of visibility, intimacy, belonging and community. The second part addresses bodily autonomy and resistance, demonstrating how queer tattooing enacts what Mona Lilja terms constructive resistance. Such resistance is not merely a refusal of systems of control (e.g., medical authorities), but a means of generating new narratives, subjectivities and communities. Across time and place - from hospital wards at the turn of the twentieth century to contemporary queer tattoo studios - tattooing emerges as a spatial, embodied and relational practice through which queerness is marked and reclaimed. By foregrounding diverse stories of queer tattooing across memory, archives and affect, this article contributes to the generation of more nuanced and inclusive queer histories and demonstrates how interwoven archives can collectively render queer tattooing visible across time.
This article examines Anne Lister's diaries as a space for a queer reconfiguration of the Don Juan myth in early nineteenth-century English context. Rather than identifying Lister with the libertine hero, it treats Don Juan archetype as a critical lens through which to reconsider seduction and desire once it is no longer supported by masculine privilege. Through close readings of selected diary entries, the discussion traces how Lister's persistent courtships do not follow a pattern of conquest but emerge from vulnerability and in the hope of domestic stability. Instead of ending in moral punishment, her story is determined by exclusion and by the difficulty of finding recognition in the social sphere. The diary, especially in its coded passages, become a space to register her desire under conditions of risk and surveillance, allowing for a rethinking of Don Juanism as a historically situated negotiation of desire and survival.
This article is a reconsideration of the object of the so-called feminist "sex wars", past and present. Building on the transfeminist effort to broaden our understanding of "sex" beyond a limiting sex-as-biology and gender-as-culture framework, this article seeks to show the importance of the pleasures of having a sex - a sexed body and role - to the sex wars. In order to do so, it reads two pieces of sex wars era polemical feminist literature in parallel, arguing that while the two texts represent radically different outlooks on ethics and possibility of enjoying having a sex and being sexed, they both show the importance of this question to the sex wars. Finally, the article argues that this broadened perspective on the sex wars can help us make sense of the contemporary feminist conflicts over sex, both as a desire, and as an embodiment - especially trans embodiment.
Malflora Collective is a digital memory project dedicated to preserving the everyday lives, memories, and legacies of Latina/e lesbians through the publication of a podcast and magazine. In this article, members from Malflora Collective examine the nontraditional and community-based archival practices that Latina/e lesbians engage in, arguing that our memory work is rooted in collectivity, lived experience, and cultural reclamation as a form of decolonial praxis. We also explore how digital spaces provide opportunities for transnational engagement, solidarity, and discourse, while at the same time these spaces remain highly contested. This article theorizes a political praxis of Latina/e lesbian memory work through plática/roda de conversa, a blend of Chicana/e and Brazilian forms of knowledge-making through everyday conversation. These methods draw from familial archival practices and foreground the importance of our cultural identities in the process of archiving Latina/e lesbian stories. We offer our own plática/roda de conversa adapted from our inaugural Malflora Podcast episode to model the distinct archival practices Latina/e lesbians employ and assert the significance of this work within our current context of intensified state repression and erasure of LGBTQ+ and Latine communities. Altogether, this article highlights how noninstitutional archives and digital memory projects like Malflora Collective are crucial for preserving the stories of Latina/e lesbians and other marginalized communities, while fostering transnational solidarity in the face of cultural and political oppression.
This introduction biographically contextualizes the life and work of Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-2023) while briefly summarizing the contributions to the special issue, "The Work and Legacy of Minnie Bruce Pratt." Pratt's personal life, social activism, writing career, teaching, and mentorship are discussed in conversation with prior scholarship about Pratt. The five scholarly articles, two roundtables, one interview, and two personal essays that make up the special issue are explained, and future potential research topics are highlighted. The co-editors' intentions in assembling the special issue in the wake of Pratt's death are shared throughout the introduction.
In this paper, I compare two works by contemporary British author Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), focusing on each text's thematic engagement with environmentalism and the natural world. Both texts are closely intertwined with Winterson's life: they trace her childhood and adolescence and chart her coming-of-age as a lesbian writer whose queerness is rejected-and at times violently regulated-by her orthodox adoptive mother. I argue that nature functions as a potential shelter or site of refuge from the intolerance that the protagonists face. I analyze the protagonists' years of solitude in the countryside, where Winterson's autobiographical persona confronts depression while simultaneously seeking hope through the search for her biological mother. Within this context, I explore how Winterson navigates and subverts patriarchal dichotomies that align femininity with nature and masculinity with culture and reason. Additionally, I also consider an equivalence between the figure of the adoptive mother and a harsh or inhospitable natural world, reflecting Winterson's fraught relationship with maternal care and nurture. After tracing the ways in which Winterson engages themes of resistance, escape, and isolation, I conclude that her representations of both maternal figures and natural spaces are marked by profound ambiguity. In Winterson's work, mothers and landscapes are united by ambivalence, resisting easy categorizations as either idyllic or hostile.
This article attempts to intervene in the scholarly debate about Monique Wittig's status as an "anti-identitarian" thinker by highlighting the ways that mathematics appears throughout her oeuvre as a privileged site of pre-linguistic creativity, wherein a form identification seems to remain possible. Whereas Wittig pointed to language as the semiotic system that allows discourse to smuggle heterosexual and masculinist determination into all the identificatory acts of the speaking and writing subject, the counting and numbering subject seems for her to escape a similar critique. I investigate how this distinction structures her novel The Lesbian Body: I apply concepts drawn from mathematics, focusing especially on the concept of homology, to ask under what conditions we can understand Wittig's lesbian as having, or rather producing through her particular approach to enumeration, an identity. I claim that Wittig gives us an example of how mathematical thinking can bleed into literary thinking in the domain of sex, gender, and identity, without imagining that bleed as dangerous abstraction, a masculinist domination of the affective, or a cheap metaphor. As Wittig's importance as an author and philosopher undergoes reevaluation, my wager is that it would be useful to attend to her interventions in the way that the Western philosophical canon and the history of mathematics have been entwined.
The aim of this article is to analyze how the organization of the 40th anniversary of a lesbian self-managed space operates as a site of collective memory-making and contributes to the production of a lesbian genealogy, particularly in relation to aging lesbians and intergenerational transmission. It examines how archival practices, oral histories, and intergenerational exchanges contribute to sustaining lesbian existence over time, while revealing the role of social relations of power, particularly age and class, in shaping collective memory. It focuses on the practices and challenges involved in constructing lesbian historical memory and on the broader political significance of such memory work. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research initiated in October 2021, the article argues that community-driven practices, such as archival work, oral histories, and intergenerational discussions, play a central role in constructing lesbian historical memory and in sustaining a continuum of lesbian existence. Founded in the mid-1980s by lesbians seeking an autonomous space, the association has witnessed four decades of lesbian and feminist activism in a context marked by political transition, urban transformation, and the progressive disappearance of lesbian venues. Despite recurrent crises, its self-managed structure has enabled its survival, making the 40th anniversary a pivotal moment for collective reflection on its history. The article shows how this commemorative process foregrounds the political and affective dimensions of memory work, particularly within a space frequented by aging lesbians, a group often marginalized in dominant feminist, lesbian, and queer narratives.
This article argues that Alison Bechdel envisioned a new way of looking at lesbians in her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008). Through simultaneously universalizing lesbian experiences while celebrating the ways in which her characters' sexualities rendered them different from each other and from the so-called 'universal' white male protagonists of much mainstream media, Bechdel created what I term a 'universalizing' gaze. This gaze usurped Laura Mulvey's 'male gaze' through presenting lesbian characters, not as sexual objects drawn for the reader's pleasure, but as aligned with readers: as the sexual subjects of the comic. This technique allowed Bechdel to portray lesbians as sexual people without hyper-sexualizing them, enabling a diverse group of readers to see themselves represented in the strip.
This article investigates female homoeroticism encoded in cinematic form. I read two Polish films, In Custody/Nadzór (dir. Wiesław Saniewski, 1983) and By Touch/Przez Dotyk (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.
Members of the Feminary Collective-Eleanor Holland (b. 1948), Helen Langa (b. 1945), Mab Segrest (b. 1949), and Cris South (b. 1950)-convened for a roundtable on July 10, 2024, to discuss the legacy of Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-2023) and her work with the Durham, North Carolina, collective. First published as the Research Triangle Women's Liberation Newsletter in 1969, Feminary was rebranded first as Feminary Newsletter, then as a journal-Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South Emphasizing the Lesbian Vision-in 1978. Holland, Langa, Pratt, Segrest, and South participated in the publication of Feminary from the mid-seventies until the collective's end in 1982. This roundtable discussion covers the social, political, historical, and personal contexts in which Feminary developed. Participants detail the emotional, intellectual, and physical labor involved in journal production, alongside the collective's political goals and common themes in various journal issues. Reflecting on their lives after Feminary, participants comment on the journal's lasting impact on them individually, as well as its cultural interventions. Peppered throughout the conversation are anecdotes and meditations on Pratt's poetry and her influence on roundtable participants, Feminary, and 20th and 21st-century U.S. social justice struggles.
Through newly discovered archival sources, including love letters, police records, hospital files and censuses, this article tracks the love story of two young women, Flora and Agnes, a same-sex couple at the turn of the nineteenth century, working in the sex trade. Their story takes us through police arrest, forced hospitalisation and leisure spaces such as dance halls. Historically, Flora and Agnes represent the many sex workers, who engaged in same-sex relations. It has been estimated that as many as 25% of women selling sex in European metropoles were in sapphic relationships, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The article describes the historical entanglement of sapphic love and sex work and provides example of how sapphic love and sapphic communities could provide solidarity and emotional support for sex workers, as well as enable class mobility and fertilised conditions for collective resistance towards authorities. Differently from male same-sex activities, female same-sex engagements were not criminalised in countries like Britain, Germany and Denmark. However, young women, like Flora and Agnes, were heavily surveilled by police and medical doctors, due to contemporary aims to control venereal diseases. We employ the notion of a "disobedient archive" to explore the ways in which historically marginalised subjects, such as young, working class, sapphic sex workers, contested structures of control, power, violence and confinement. Here, we pay attention to everyday acts and practices that challenged oppressive or disciplinary forces, as well as to failed or unsuccessful attempts of resistance. This permits a reading of the archive as a record of struggle and resistance, documenting previously silenced subjects' assertions of presence and agency against institutional control and erasure.
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.
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.
This article explores how oral historians might more fully engage the sensory and affective dimensions of queer memory by centering the body as an archival site within the interview encounter. Drawing on the Pussy Palace Oral History Project-a public history initiative documenting Toronto's trans-inclusive lesbian bathhouse events and the 2000 police raid that followed-we introduce somatic elicitation, a contemplative interview technique designed to surface embodied memory. Rooted in arts-based facilitation and developed to access what Paula Hamilton calls "subliminal histories," the method relies on breathwork, inward attention, and five-sense cueing to interrupt narrative flow and prompt body-based recollection. We argue that somatic elicitation invites narrators to remember not only what happened but how it felt-producing interview material that is sensorily dense, emotionally layered, and grounded in first-person perception. The article situates this technique within queer and radical public history, the history of the senses, and existing practices of sensory elicitation, reflecting on its implications for archival theory, affect studies, and the politics of embodied recordmaking. Through three analytical frames-Attunements, Atmosphere, and Asynchrony-we examine how narrators responded to the technique and what it made newly perceptible about Toronto's queer erotic life at the turn of the millennium. Ultimately, we propose somatic elicitation as a method for listening queerly: one that honors ephemeral experience, amplifies embodied knowledge, and expands what can be surfaced, recorded, and remembered within queer oral history.
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.
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 Feminary, 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 Feminary 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.
Historians have long argued that queer women in urban spaces received a level of legal and social tolerance or impunity toward their same sex relationships. This article argues that queer women were not arrested on charges of homosexuality or sodomy, but on charges of public indecency, "crimes of lewdness," distribution of immoral literature, or prostitution. The use of sex work archives such as the Committee of Fourteen allows scholars to uncover more intersectional lesbian narratives by focusing on those who were most heavily impacted by vice and penal reform. Some historians have laid scholarly foundations by noting the queer subcultures within cooperative housing buildings in cities such as Chicago and New York. However, few historians have used the rich archive built around surveilling female sex workers to identify under-represented lesbian subcultures in this period. While white and upper-class queer women may have been able to live together without raising concerns or accusations of sexual misconduct, the existing social and judicial attitudes toward Black and working-class immigrant women's sexuality meant that their same-sex relationships made them a greater target than their white counterparts. While sex work provided means for queer women of any race to support themselves outside of a marriage to a man, Black queer women were disproportionately prosecuted. By understanding the history of early twentieth century sex work and lesbian communities as inextricable, scholars can uncover narratives of working class, Black queer women who have been systematically erased from the historical record.
