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3 books match the query 'Lesbians in popular culture'

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Becoming Lesbian

Tamara Chaplin

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A landmark analysis of how a marginalized subculture used modern media to transform public attitudes toward sexual desire.

In Becoming Lesbian, historian Tamara Chaplin argues that the history of female same-sex intimacy is central to understanding the struggle to control the public sphere. This monumental study draws on undiscovered sources culled from cabaret culture, sexology, police files, radio, TV, photography, the Minitel (an early form of internet), and private letters, as well as over one hundred interviews filmed by the author. Becoming Lesbian demonstrates how women of diverse classes and races came to define themselves as lesbian and used public spaces and public media to exert claims on the world around them in ways that made possible new forms of gendered and sexual citizenship. Chaplin begins in the sapphic cabarets of interwar Paris. These venues, she shows, exploited female same-sex desire for profit while simultaneously launching an incipient queer female counterpublic. Refuting claims that World War II destroyed this female world, Chaplin reveals instead how prewar sapphic subcultures flourished in the postwar period, laying crucial groundwork for the politicization of lesbian identity into the twenty-first century.

Becoming Lesbian is filled with colorful vignettes about female cabaret owners, singers, TV personalities, writers, and activists, all brought to life to make larger points about rights, belonging, and citizenship. As a history of lesbianism, this book represents a major contribution to modern French history, queer studies, and genealogies of the media and its publics.

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Lesbians on Television

New Queer Visibility & the Lesbian Normal

Kate McNicholas Smith

Intellect Books, 2020

A look at the emergence of queer women characters in popular storytelling and the wide-ranging effects of this mainstream representation.

The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. In Lesbians on Television, Kate McNicholas Smith maps concurrent contemporary shifts in lesbian visibility within popular media, focusing on the small screens of Europe and North America. Central to these shifts has been a re-imagining of queer lives—or a “new queer visibility”—as LGBTQ+ characters have become increasingly visible within popular culture. Kate McNicholas Smith explores this increased visibility through the lens of television, and in doing so, she identifies a “new lesbian normal”—a normalization of lesbian subjects that both helps and hinders those it represents.

Structured around five central case studies of popular British and American television shows featuring lesbian, bisexual, and queer women characters—The L Word, Skins, Glee, Coronation Street, and The Fosters—the book develops a detailed analysis of the shaping of a new “lesbian normal” through representations of LGBTQ+ figures and examines their televisual representation and reception. Presenting critical queer and feminist theory alongside empirical research that includes interviews and multi-platform media analyses, McNicholas Smith works to untangle the social, political, and cultural implications of new visibility in a period of significant social change in the LGBTQ+ experience.

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