Recommended Books on Lesbianism
Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis This groundbreaking book, based on the authors' clinical experience as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, provides a challenging exploration of psychoanalytic ideas about lesbians and lesbianism from Freud, Deutsch, Jung and Lacan to contemporary object-relations theorists, such as Klein and McDougall. Questions of sexual identity, sexual desire and gender identity, of transference and countertransference, and also of institutional practices in relation to training, are all critically -- and stimulatingly -- addressed.
Lesbians and Lesbianisms: A Post-Jungian Perspective Claudette Kulkarni's study of lesbianism aims to explore the lesbian experience from both a feminist and Jungian standpoint. Although a feminist treatment of the subject may be regarded as a challenge to the alleged heterosexism of Jungian theory, the author presents a link between theory and experience which is consistent with both approaches. Chapters of the author's narrative are interspersed with interviews with lesbians. Asked what it was like to love another woman, their responses indicated a motivation to act in spite of internal conflict and external opposition. This book finds that it was in the pursuit of their lesbian desires that a significant opportunity for individuation and growth was found.
Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (Routledge Advances in Film Studies)
This book notes that stories of lesbianism invariably engage with an apartment setting, a spatial motif not typically associated with lesbian history or cultural representation. Through the formal analysis of five lesbian apartment films, Wallace demonstrates how the standard repertoire of visual techniques and spatial devices are used to scaffold female sexual visibility.
Social Construction of Lesbianism (Inquiries in Social Construction series)
The old model of lesbianism as a pathological affliction has largely given way to a liberal social scientific one which presents it as an alternative lifestyle, a way of loving, a sexual preference, or a source of personal fulfillment. This controversial book argues that the shift from ‘pathological’ to ‘gay affirmative’ research merely substitutes one depoliticized construction of lesbianism for another. The author contends that the liberal 'social construction', instead of furthering the liberation of women, represents a new development in the oppression of women in general and lesbians in particular. Gay affirmative constructions are fundamentally incompatible with radical feminist theory in which lesbianism is a political statement representing the bonding of women against male supremacy. Two chapters use the literature on lesbianism and male homosexuality to illustrate the rhetorical techniques through which social science constructs the conditions for its own legitimacy. Kitzinger then draws upon her own research to show the operation of liberal ideology in the construction of lesbian identities, lesbian politics and in heterosexual attitudes to lesbians. In the final chapter, she urges researchers to reject the traditional model of science as an objective search for truth or facts, but instead to examine their own rhetoric and evaluate their political commitments. The Social Construction of Lesbianism is a book which challenges many cherished beliefs held by social science researchers. Winner of the 1989 Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology, it is essential reading for all feminists and for all scholars interested in the social construction of science.
The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (Between Men~Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies)
From Renaissance love poems to twentieth-century novels, plays, and short stories, The Literature of Lesbianism brings together hundreds of literary works on the subject of female homosexuality with an astonishing and often unpredictable range of attitudes. Both male and female authors are represented as Castle explores the emergence and transformation of the "idea of lesbianism" over the past five centuries.
Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as "the Papin affair," the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacan's effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and H.D.'s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century films--including Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the "psychotic lesbian" repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected.
Late Bloomers: Awakening to Lesbianism After Forty Join thirty-eight smart, funny, sexy women over forty as they take you on their exuberant journeys of awakening lesbianism. What they have to say will make you laugh, will make you cry, and most certainly will make you reach for your bedmate.
Historical, Literary, and Erotic Aspects of Lesbianism (The Research on Homosexuality Series, No 13) (12 Papers) In this thought-provoking book on lesbian history, literature, and sexuality, a diverse group of knowledgeable contributors addresses the subject of women and homosexuality. Topics deal with lesbian history, change and disparity, the lesbian corporate experience, the politics of Willa Cather's lesbianism, confronting internalized oppression in sex therapy with lesbians, and more.
Lesbianism Made Easy A hilarious look at lesbian life. In this irreverent how-to, even the least lesbian among readers can learn how to pick up girls, how to have sex, how to cope with the woman of their dreams, even how to heal, or heel, the inner lesbian. National ads/media.
From the Hardcover edition.If you've always wanted to give this lesbianism thing a whirl, this manual for sapphic living from a dedicated womanizer may be just what you're looking for. First, Eisenbach will help you discover if you're truly ready to be a lesbian. Then she'll take you step by step through picking up other women (or being picked up yourself), making love to them, and how to settle down with one for a relationship. The author's dry wit is an acquired taste, but try to stick with it, because just beneath the unrelenting subtlety and irony, you'll find sensible advice about self-esteem and relationships.
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