Toward a historiography of the lesbian transsexual, or the TERF's nightmare.

This essay asks after the possibility of making the transsexual lesbian signify as a historical mode of sexuality, as a contribution to an anti-TERF method in trans and lesbian studies. What logics of mid twentieth century gender and sexuality are responsible for the opacity of transsexual and transvestite lesbians prior to the 1970s, despite the ample evidence that desire between femmes played a central role in trans social life? To move towards such a historiography and method, the author considers two paradigmatically difficult cases. First, Louise Lawrence, a well-known trans women in the San Francisco Bay Area who transitioned entirely do-it-yourself in 1944, and whose long term relationship with a partner, Gay Elkins, is high opaque in the archival record. Second, the essay considers the compulsory heterosexuality embedded in the medical logic of transsexuality in the 1960s, arguing that the medical ontology of the transsexual vagina was itself dependent upon the avowal of its immediate and exclusive use for penetration by straight men, making transsexual lesbians implausible despite their evident existence.

Changes and challenges of the archives: researching early-twentieth century lesbianism in United States prisons during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Changes and Challenges of the Archives" is based on a still-in-progress master's thesis that I will complete by May 2021 at Sarah Lawrence College. The purpose of this article is not to come to any conclusions about the challenges of researching lesbian history during the COVID-19 pandemic but, rather, to explore how these world circumstances have further complicated the labor required of a lesbian historian. Many elements of this thesis and research are still in flux, including my investigation of the role race played in creating and developing a sexually deviant, criminalized definition of lesbian(ism). My ultimate hope is that this paper provides some valuable knowledge for my queer historian comrades and sparks a dialogue that can benefit historians who are continuing their research through debilitating circumstances.

TBG and Po: Discourses on authentic desire in 2010s lesbian subcultures in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan.

Across lesbian communities in Hong Kong, China (PRC), and Taiwan (ROC), a group of masculine-presenting, assigned-female-at-birth individuals have come to be known as tomboys. Their partners are often normatively-feminine women who are labeled po (wife) in the mandarin-speaking China and Taiwan and TBG ("TomBoy's Girl") in the former colony. Throughout the late twentieth century and the 2000s, po and TBG had been conceptualized as latent heterosexuals whose heterosexuality was "falsely" displaced onto the tomboy lover, and it was also widely suspected that these women would eventually return to their "true" heteronormative lives. On the other hand, the 2010s era also sees queer women in the three Chinese societies increasingly leaning towards doing away with tomboy, TBG, po and all kinds of sexual identity categories altogether. How has the decades-old image of the "falsely-desiring" TBG/po evolved in this context of postidentity politics? In what ways is TBG/po desire imagined to be "real" or "fake"? And how has the true/false framework itself been transformed by postcategory yearnings? This article traces the shifting discourses on "authentic desire" ascribed to TBG and po women by first examining two media texts popular in the three lesbian circles-Yes or No and Girls Love-and second by looking into how women in these circles interpret these texts.

Is this what a lesbian looks like? Lesbian fashion and the fashionable lesbian in the United States press, 1960s to 2010s.

We explored articulations of lesbian styles, fashions, and ways of dressing in mainstream fashion and media outlets within the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based upon our findings, we propose that there was trending ambivalence and multiple assemblages across space and time where the mainstream media did not necessarily perpetuate a single stereotypical or essentialist way of conceptualizing fashionable lesbians or lesbian fashions. However, we also noted across time a divide between representations of celebrity lesbians and the contemporary lived experience of ordinary lesbians. Though the press acknowledged this divide on occasion, they also established, circulated, and reinforced this difference. According to the press, while lesbians have been 'chic' since the 1990s-whether they embraced a butch or femme esthetic-the best way to be lesbian was to be rich, white, and fashionably dressed.

"That crosscountry 1969 vw squareback and holiday inn affair": lesbian mobility.

This article argues that lesbian mobility contributed to the development of lesbian identity in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing primarily on published accounts, it explores the ways in which women achieved and sustained their lesbian identity in part through their access to what cultural geographers term a transportation assemblage or constellation of mobility. This was constituted through the symbolic meaning of mobility for predominantly white women, the existence of new highway networks and Volkswagen vehicles, which were popularized through countercultural branding, and lesbians' embodied experiences of fear and desire.

Homosexuality and psychiatry in state-socialist Hungary: Representing women's same-sex desire in the psychomedical literature.

This study explores representations of homosexuality in the psychiatric and sexology literature between the 1960s and the 1980s in Hungary with special attention to women. The literature is indicative of how psy sciences interacted with the system of norms on gender and sexual orientation embedded within the social and political context of the era. Examination of these sources shows a predominantly pathologizing-normative discursive framework deployed by experts. The fundamental therapeutic aim was to achieve good social adaptation. In this process, psy experts were influential representatives of the heteronormative society, reinforcing gender norms and state-socialist family ideals. Within the psychological discourses on homosexuality, the case of women had some special characteristics. Their sexual choices were represented as more alterable than men's and linked to emotional factors in the first place. In women's case, there was usually no "need" for therapeutic conversion because socially prescribed gender norms worked strongly enough and the lack of sexual pleasure with men was not considered a significant problem. Professional and popular psychiatric and sexology literature on homosexuality indicate that whereas for men, transgressing normative (hetero)sexuality was the stronger taboo, for women, it was the unfulfilled order of marriage and motherhood that was considered the most serious deviance, and lesbian relationships had to be prevented for this reason. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Holding on to history and each other: The unexpected LGBTQ legacy of a Czech Holocaust survivor and a Torah scroll from her hometown.

A Czech Holocaust survivor rescued by a Kindertransport in 1939; a long-lost Torah scroll, rediscovered in 1964, from a Jewish community wiped out in World War II; a German American lesbian who converted to Judaism in 2001. Three disparate stories, unfolding decades apart, converge in one memorable encounter, a Kristallnacht commemoration in Los Angeles organized by Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), the world's first LGBTQ synagogue, which leads to an enduring friendship and fresh insight into contemporary queer Jewish life. In this personal essay, longtime BCC member Sylvia Sukop interweaves history and autobiography to explore the beauty and power of ritual, the resonance of the "Choose life" passage in Deuteronomy that her congregation reads from its rescued Czech scroll every Yom Kippur, and the many forms that good deeds and survival can take. Progressive faith communities, the author suggests, and the traditions in which they are rooted make space to witness and affirm the fullness of one another's humanity, bridging differences and fostering unexpected kinship in a brutally divisive world.

"Just like a natural man": The B.D. styles of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith.

This article pays homage to the antique term "B.D. (bulldyke) Woman" of the 1920s and 1930s, at a moment when the rise of a universal queer subject threatens to erase specific lesbian histories. Characterized by an aggressive stance and an enormousness that confronts rather than merely protests, Black B.D. artists "stole" both masculinity and White privilege to accumulate power and cultural capital. B.D. is therefore a multilayered response to sexism, racism, and homophobia. This performance style is a product of outrage at the oppressive conditions that marked the legacy of slavery, to which B.D. blues must be viewed as a response rather than a more static sexual aesthetic style belonging to lesbian women. Such masculine bravado in Black women disrupted gender/sex alignments and notions of cisnormativity embedded in African American communities. In order to think through this historical legacy, I perform close readings of song lyrics performed by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith. The rejection of oppressive conditions occurs most acutely through the theme of travelling in songs that decenter racialized and heteronormative conceptions of home. Through this theme, Rainey and Smith expanded the phallic possibilities of their time period, and for the 2010s, these artists tamper with our staid notions of what gender, sex, and sexuality have meant in the past.

Legible lesbian lines: The bilingual poetry of Irena Klepfisz.

This article focuses on the poetry of Jewish lesbian poet Irena Klepfisz, written in New York starting in the 1970s. While drawing on the tradition of Yiddish women's poetry from the first half of the twentieth century, both as scholar and poet, Klepfisz also creates a brand new, bilingual, Yiddish-English poetic mode. By mobilizing both Yiddish and English to voice her poetic and political concerns, Klepfisz stages the English/Yiddish encounter as a site where dominant norms in both languages can be challenged and new possibilities emerge. Exploring both her turn to the past and her bilingual poetry, this article reveals how Klepfisz puts her politics and scholarship to poetic practice and suggests that Klepfisz offers a model of queer translation that undoes the borders between past and present, English and Yiddish, creating a unique mode of Jewish lesbian reclamation and invention.

Jewish lesbians: New work in the field.

This introduction provides an overview of the field of Jewish lesbian studies, particularly in the United States and the English-speaking world. The author looks at the opening of the field of Jewish lesbian feminist work and then explores ways in which Jewish lesbians have been active in religious and spiritual initiatives, the arts, politics and history, as well as academic and organizational life, and matters of exclusion.

Lovers, enemies, and friends: The complex and coded early history of lesbian comic strip characters.

This article seeks to recuperate four previously unexamined early newspaper comic strip characters that could lay the groundwork for queer comic studies. The titular characters in Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye (1905), Sanjak in Terry and the Pirates (1939) by Milton Caniff, and Hank O'Hair in Brenda Starr, Reporter (1940) by Dale Messick are analyzed through close readings, supporting archival material, and interviews. The article also theorizes the identification of the creator of Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye as George O. Frink, and offers an overview of LGBTQ comics holdings at institutions in North America.

Making space: Jennifer Camper, LGBTQ anthologies, and queer comics communities.

This article examines the career of lesbian cartoonist Jennifer Camper and how she has fostered queer community both in her comics and in real life. Archival research in LGBTQ archives and in Camper's own personal papers evidences how Camper begins developing her comics in the 1980s by participating in various grassroots LGBTQ publication spaces. From this foundation of support, she engages in comics activism with her representations of these communities during the midst of the AIDS crisis. Through these analyses, this article theorizes how Camper foregrounds intersectionality and counterpublics in her work on and off the page.

Love and loss in wartime: An unpublished narrative by Pamela Frankau (1908-67).

This article discusses an unpublished book by the popular and prolific novelist Pamela Frankau (1908-67), which was rejected by her publishers in 1946 as "almost too personal for publication," and which for many years was believed lost. The work is addressed to Frankau's dead lover, Marjorie Vernon Whitefoord (1907-44), a fellow officer in the women's Auxiliary Territorial Service, and takes the form of a letter to Vernon. The article examines what Frankau's unpublished narrative of love and loss in wartime reveals about her life and later novels, and its implications for the official record of her life and writing.

"The third sex is here to stay": Rhetorical reconstructions of lesbian sexuality in Vice Versa.

Vice Versa, published in Los Angeles from 1947-1948 and regarded as the first lesbian periodical in the United States, was authored and edited by Lisa Ben (anagram for "lesbian"). While Vice Versa is lauded for inspiring later lesbian publications, little scholarship has analyzed the magazine's contents. Queer rhetorical analysis allows me to demonstrate the integral role Vice Versa played in counteracting cultural and medical classifications of lesbians during the 1940s. Through an analysis of Vice Versa's book and movie reviews, an editorial, and creative writing, this article analyzes the way Ben uses queer rhetoric to turn narratives of medical and psychological deviancy and inferiority into a means for empowerment and community building. By foregrounding queer rhetorical and discursive means through which the periodical engaged with and pushed back on culturally dominant views of lesbians as psychologically or biologically "inverted" and deviant within newspapers, film, and novels, my analysis of Vice Versa calls attention to the processes through which the magazine negotiated lesbian identity creation with dominant tropes that categorized lesbian bodies and desires as debased.

"I am not a friend to men": Embodiment and desire in Magnus Hirschfeld's Transvestites case studies.

This article reads sexological case studies of the fin-de siècle that contain accounts of trans women's lives in the period. It argues that these sources contradict the diagnostic criteria that doctors determine as the factors that define trans feminine identity in the period: desire for men, social isolation, and tortured bodily dissatisfaction. Chief among these contradictions is the prevalence of the expression of trans women's desire for women and easy participation in women's social and kinship networks. Therefore, this article considers these narratives to be a crucial and overlooked resource for considering the breadth of lesbian identity and sociality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

A no-man's-land of sex: Reading Stephen Gordon and "her" critics.

One of the most read novels of lesbian, transgender, and queer criticism, Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) has given rise to numerous and contradictory interpretations of the protagonist Stephen Gordon's complex relationship to her body. Some have argued that she is a historically specific example of female masculinity, others that she is a lesbian who wishes she were more feminine, and others still that she is a prototypical transsexual character. Focusing on the exemplary essays by Jack Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, and Jay Prosser, I argue that the coexistence of mutually exclusive interpretations of Stephen Gordon's relationship to her femaleness suggests that the novel is, in fact, a demand to readers to unmoor identity from sex and to recognize what I call "sexual indeterminacy." Lesbian, transgender, and queer theory's tendency to elide the literariness of literary objects and their reliance on critique as the primary mode of reading and argumentation have made it impossible for critics to see that the novel is explicitly about what cannot be settled.

Queer signs: The women of the British projective test movement.

As queer history is often hidden, historians must look for "signs" that hint at queer lives and experiences. When psychologists use projective tests, the search for queer signs has historically been more literal, and this was especially true in the homophobic practices of Psychology in the mid-twentieth century. In this paper, I respond to Elizabeth Scarborough's call for more analytic history about the lesser known women in Psychology's history. By focusing on British projective research conducted by lesbian psychologist June Hopkins, I shift perspective and consider, not those who were tested (which has been historically more common), but those who did the testing, and position them as potential queer subjects. After briefly outlining why the projective test movement is ripe for such analysis and the kinds of queer signs that were identified using the Rorschach ink blot test in the mid-twentieth century, I then present June Hopkins' (1969, 1970) research on the "lesbian personality." This work forms a framework upon which I then consider the lives of Margaret Lowenfeld, Ann Kaldegg, and Effie Lillian Hutton, all of whom were involved in the British projective test movement a generation prior to Hopkins. By adopting Hopkins' research to frame their lives, I present the possibility of this ambiguous history being distinctly queer.

States of emergence: Writing African female same-sex sexuality.

Tracing a series of intertextually linked short stories from the 1990s to the present by women writers from Nigeria and its diaspora-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Unoma Azuah, Chinelo Okparanta, and Lola Shoneyin-I suggest that although the figure of the African lesbian appears "new" in the context of heightened contemporary attention to the issue of homosexuality, this figure has a literary history. Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Our Sister Killjoy: Or, Reflections From A Black-Eyed Squint (1977) inaugurates this formation, in which the imagining of female same-sex desire is entangled with articulating the experience of migration under the shadow of imperial histories. In these short stories, the emphasis on the difficulties of love in puritanical times and transnational places produces the figure of the African lesbian as a symbol of appealingly human vulnerability, resilience, and complexity.

"Telling our stories": Print media interpretations of Moscow lesbians' life stories in 2004 and 2005.

This article analyzes print media interviews of Moscow lesbians in Moskovsky Komsomolets in 2004 and 2005 using qualitative content analysis. The qualitative content analysis shows recurring and consistent themes: (1) the stereotypes lesbians face; (2) public negativity toward same-sex relations and the impact on their families; (3) the expectations of heterosexuality and all that that entails; (4) the existence of lesbian-only spaces in Russia and the importance of those spaces; and (5) the complexities of navigating motherhood, previous heterosexual relationships, and current partnerships. Analysis of print media representations of female same-sex sexuality in a period of economic prosperity, popular culture visibility, and before restrictive laws were passed that suppress homosexuality adds to the previous literature on lesbianism in Russia.

A Fragmentary Archive: Migratory Feelings in Early Anglo-Saxon Women's Letters.

The letters by Anglo-Saxon women in the Boniface correspondence are connected by cultural practices and emotions centered on the conversion mission that functioned to maintain connections between the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. A striking recurring focus of these letters is on loss and isolation, which connects them to the Old English elegies. Many of the letters describe the writers' traumatic experiences that result from the death or absence of kin. These are women who endured the trauma of being left behind when others migrated overseas or who, in traveling away from their homeland, found themselves isolated in an alien environment, displaced in time as well as space. This article offers an analysis of the letters, focusing on the queer temporalities they explore, the queer emotions they evoke, and the queer kinships that they forge. It argues that the women's letters represent fragments of an early queer archive of migratory feelings.