Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery

This paper is concerned with the different forms of pleasure and identification activated in the consumption of dominant and subcultural print media. It centres on an analysis of the lesbian visual pleasures generated through the reading of fashion editorial in the new lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines. This consideration of the lesbian gaze is contrasted to the lesbian visual pleasures obtained from an against the grain reading of mainstream women's fashion magazines. The development of the lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines, in the context of the pink pound, produces a situation in which an eroticized lesbian visual pleasure is the overt remit of the magazine, rather than a clandestine pleasure obtained through a transgressive reading of dominant cultural imagery. In contrast to the polysemic free-play of fashion fantasy by which readers produce lesbian pleasure in the consumption of mainstream magazines, responses to the fashion content in the lesbian magazine Diva suggest that in a subcultural context readers deploy a realist mode of reading that demands a monosemic positive images iconography. The article uses the concept of subcultural competency to consider the different ways lesbians read mainstream and subcultural print media and suggests that the conflict over Diva's fashion spreads may be linked to changing patterns of identification and the use of dress for recognizability.     

Identity Profiles in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth: The Role of Family Influences

Sexual identity development is a central task of adolescence and young adulthood and can be especially challenging for sexual minority youth. Recent research has moved from a stage model of identity development in lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth to examining identity in a non-linear, multidimensional manner. In addition, although families have been identified as important to youth’s identity development, limited research has examined the influence of parental responses to youth’s disclosure of their LGB sexual orientation on LGB identity. The current study examined a multidimensional model of LGB identity and its links with parental support and rejection. One hundred and sixty-nine LGB adolescents and young adults (ages 14–24, 56 % male, 48 % gay, 31 % lesbian, 21 % bisexual) described themselves on dimensions of LGB identity and reported on parental rejection, sexuality-specific social support, and non-sexuality-specific social support. Using latent profile analysis (LPA), two profiles were identified, indicating that youth experience both affirmed and struggling identities. Results indicated that parental rejection and sexuality-specific social support from families were salient links to LGB identity profile classification, while non-sexuality specific social support was unrelated. Parental rejection and sexuality-specific social support may be important to target in interventions for families to foster affirmed LGB identity development in youth.     

‘I Teach Therefore I Am’: Lesbian Studies in the Liberal Academy

The article discusses the origins of Lesbian Studies as arising out of an intellectually engaged grassroots lesbian community and an emergent Women's Studies within the academy. The article contrasts Lesbian Studies in the UK with the USA, which has ‘professionalized’ work in Lesbian and Gay Studies, which concomitantly has produced its own problems. Feminism bequeathed to Lesbian Studies the axiom ‘the personal is political’ and this is discussed as both a positive and a negative inheritance. The academy itself collapses the personal on to the Lesbian Studies lecturer which produces particular pressures from students, colleagues, the institution, and upon one's own intellectual trajectory in the form of the ‘taint’ of subjectivity. Finally the article attempts to identify an ambivalent relationship to liberalism which has made a limited space for Lesbian Studies but also continues to seek to police that sphere.     

The liminal body: the language of pain and symbolism around Sati

Recent scholarship on sati has stressed the fact that the ‘problem’ of sati is that the problem extends far beyond and begins far before the act itself. One of the things that lies prior to and post the act is language, yet sati is an act that stands in a curious relationship to language. I will examine the relationship between the physical act of sati and the language that surrounds it: the ‘story’ prior to the act which gives the act its meaning; the act itself which stands in an ironic relationship to the story – I will argue that the act is in fact possible only because it displaces the original story, so that every act of becoming sati presents itself not as a radical act in experience, but as an ‘acting out’ of the original story. It is in this acting out of a displaced story, that the boundary between the physical act and language becomes obscured and the body doing the act begins to occupy a liminal position, as it itself begins to function as a language – a language, which in its aspect of an ‘acting out’ obscures its own act. Lastly, I will consider the implications of the symbolic language of sati for the contemporary woman.