Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1976.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1994. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-254).

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-92).

[pt] O objeto central deste trabalho é a mulher negra lésbica: um sujeito político em construção no Brasil. O estudo busca dar visibilidade aos processos de opressão e discriminação interseccional, cotidianamente vivenciados pela mulher negra lésbica. A pesquisa deseja contribuir com a construção e afirmação desta identidade, bem como fornecer elementos para intervenções profissionais do serviço social e para a formação de novos assistentes sociais, em face às expressões contemporâneas das desigualdades sociais. Quatro mulheres colaboraram na construção deste estudo, sendo adotado como critério central nesta seleção suas autodeclarações enquanto negras e lésbicas. Adicionalmente, a pesquisadora buscou colaboradoras que fossem ativistas políticas, com representatividade no movimento de mulheres negras lésbicas, entre 35 e 65 anos, com o objetivo de garantir a percepção de diferenças geracionais. A pesquisa de campo, de natureza qualitativa, baseou-se em entrevistas semiestruturadas configuradas a partir de quatro aspectos: a) trajetória política e pessoal; b) questões raciais, de gênero e orientação sexual; c) preconceito e discriminação, e d) políticas públicas e serviço social. Cada um destes aspectos foi discutido em termos de identidade e preconceito, todos relacionados ao Serviço Social. O trabalho de pesquisa revelou que em algumas situações o peso do racismo é mais relevante e perverso do que a discriminação e o preconceito decorrentes da lesbofobia. / [en] The core object of this work is the black lesbian woman: a political subject under construction in Brazil. This study aims to give visibility to the processes of intersectional discrimination and oppression daily experienced by the black lesbian woman. The research wants to contribute with the construction and affirmation of this identity, as well as to provide elements for Social Work professional interventions and for the education of new Social Workers, in the face of contemporary expressions of social inequalities. Four women contributed to the construction of this work, and the main criteria for their selection were their self-determination as black and lesbians. Furthermore, the researcher looked for recognized political activists of the black lesbians movement, between the ages of 35 and 65, in order to enable the expression of generational differences. The field work, qualitative in nature, was based on semi-structured interviews, dealing with the following aspects: a) Personal and political history; b) Questions related to race, gender and sexuality; c) Prejudice and discrimination, and d) Public policies and Social Work. Each one of those aspects was discussed in terms of identity, race and prejudice, all of them related to Social Work. The fieldwork revealed that in some situations of racism are far more perverse and relevant than discrimination and prejudice based on lesbian phobia.

Magister Artium - MA / When lesbians, as women divert from social norms and reject the compulsory heterosexual norm, they are either punished through legal systems for transgressing patriarchial structures or not recognised at all. As women, lesbians suffer at the hands of a homophobic society which believs that women have stepped out of line through challenging the hegemonic discourses stipulating that they have specific and distinct roles to play - that of wives, mothers, homemakers and sexual partners to men. Because lesbians do not fit into this construct, their behaviour is socially and legally condemned for diverting from the "natural order". This study aimed to identify and explore the various ways people construct and perceive lesbians and to reveal how sexuality, as a product of history and culture, determines the ways lesbians are treated in their own communities. This study attempted to explore how, despite the democratic stance of the new constitution, South African lesbians still experience discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation. / South Africa

Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / This study aims at exposing and challenging the effects of heterosexist assumptions that are prevalent in institutions of higher learning. It (study) further seeks to highlight and address the gaps that exist within the academic literature in South Africa with regards to homosexuality. Five students from an institution of higher learning in the Western Cape Province of South Africa with predominantly Black Students were used for this study. All the participants were Black students aged between 19 and 25 years who openly identify themselves as lesbians. Their participation was voluntary. A narrative approach was utilised as an attempt to afford the participants an opportunity to narrate their histories and personal experiences. This is a qualitative research approach which deals with personal stories that are told to describe human action and make sense of events that surround an individual. It involves getting a story from an individual who is identified as having some knowledge or experience with the topic of study. In an attempt to gain a better understanding and an insightful perspective into the personal narratives that were shared by the participants of this study, all their experiences will be put under the control of the thematic analysis. / South Africa

Mujeres de papel examines the representation of female same-sex desire in Spanish literature and culture between 1868 and 1936, drawing on novels, popular sex manuals, sexological treatises, postcards, and illustrations. While scholars have productively attended to Post-Francoist literary and cinematographic expressions of non-normative sexualities, my dissertation sheds new light on its rich yet discontinuous prehistories. I argue that the figure of the “lesbian” is a convergence point for the ideas, beliefs and anxieties of Spanish modernity. From the will to know and categorize to erotic fantasies, the “lesbian” constitutes a pervasive yet unstable trope, which resists and at the same time motivates its definition and control. Chapter one analyzes Francisco de Sales Mayo’s 1869 La Condesita (Memorias de una doncella), a work halfway between a private diary, an erotic novel, and a medical treatise, which features a provocative case of female homosexuality. The next two chapters grapple with literary, (pseudo)scientific, and visual artifacts of the so-called “sicalipsis,” or erotic wave that inundated Spanish culture between the late 19th century and the 1930s. Works studied in these sections include novels by Rafael Cansinos-Assens, Álvaro Retana, Artemio Precioso, and Felipe Trigo, popular sex manuals by Vicente Suárez Casañ and Ángel Martín de Lucenay, and visual erotica. Chapter four turns to the fiction of Feminist writer Carmen de Burgos in conjunction with the theories on “intersexuality” formulated by Gregorio Marañon, Spain’s most renowned scientist and public intellectual of the 1920s. / Romance Languages and Literatures

At the crossroads of Italian studies; film studies; and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, my dissertation investigates a group of films by Italian women filmmakers whose narratives center on women and unfold in constrained spaces. Confinement is generally considered antithetical to feminist projects that imagine emancipation to be synonymous with freedom of movement. Why would women filmmakers, then, making films in the new millennium choose to stage their narratives in cloistered spaces? I find that the spatial restrictions are not responding to familiar dialectics. First feature films Benzina (Gasoline, Monica Stambrini 2001), Aprimi il cuore (Aprimi il cuore, Giada Colagrande 2002), and Via Castellana Bandiera (A Street in Palermo, Emma Dante 2013) find ways to place us snugly inside a familiar space, a space that comes with a standardized set of expectations and associations: the apartment with the nuclear family; Rome’s GRA (grande-raccordo anulare; Rome’s ring road) with travel around the capital; the narrow street as a classically Italian impasse. But when the films have us “overstay our welcome,” these spaces no longer align with our original understanding, instead, we begin to see the kinds of exclusions that have come to define those standardized narratives. And so, the films queer space, and by queering space we might come to see that the world we inhabit is much more dynamic than our traditional narratives might have us believe. I begin by analyzing the only documentary in my project, Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, Alina Marazzi, 2007). This film is a launching pad from which to establish a more robust backdrop of feminist history, philosophies, and concepts that re-emerge in subsequent chapters. Vis-à-vis the historiography I provide, I argue that each of the films’ restricted spatial configurations incite tense interpersonal dynamics within female pairings that dramatize both local and global political tensions within real feminist and lesbian collectives. Allusions to these long-lasting tensions in women’s political history provide not only an image of its past but also of its present, and perhaps its future. In other words, the films are a hard mirror to look into for feminist and lesbian activists and for women whose lives are affected by their (in)decisions, inclusions, and exclusions.

Orientador: Fernando Silva Teixeira Filho / Banca: Suane Felippe Soares / Banca: Leonardo Lemos de Souza / Resumo: Este estudo tem como objetivo tecer reflexões sobre o processo suicida entre jovens mulheres cisgêneros lésbicas, salientando-se a problemática ocasionada pela ocorrência das lesbofobias, tanto de ordem social quanto a interiorizada. Como arcabouço teórico da discussão realizou-se, em um primeiro momento, uma revisão da bibliografia sobre o suicídio entre a população LGBT (Lésbicas, gays, bissexuais, travestis e transexuais) com foco especial nos estudos com mulheres cisgêneros lésbicas. Posteriormente, organizou-se a coleta das falas, utilizando, para isso, a técnica de grupos focais com jovens mulheres cisgêneros lésbicas universitárias de 18-29 anos, buscando investigar como ocorreu a assunção das lesbianidades, as formas de lesbofobias e os modos de resistência ao processo suicida. Com estas informações procurou-se descrever como elas encararam as manifestações sociais de ojeriza e desrespeito em relação à orientação sexual assumida e as consequências destas para as suas vidas. Por intermédio das falas das participantes, baseando-se, para tal, na perspectiva foucaultiana da análise do discurso e dialogando com as teorias queer, interseccionais e pós-feministas, observou-se a composição das estruturas das lesbofobias e a construção discursiva sobre as resistências lésbicas em relação às problemáticas envoltas a processualidade suicida. Os dados compilados nesta pesquisa apontam a necessidade da ampliação do debate sobre a invisibilização e silêncio das lesbianidades como importante forma de resistência às conjunturas profícuas para o estabelecimento dos processos suicidas / Abstract: This study aims to make reflections about the suicidal process among young lesbian cisgender women, highlighting the problems caused by the occurrence of lesbophobias, both social and internalized. As a theoretical framework of the discussion, a review of the literature on suicide among the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transvestite, and Transgender) population was conducted at first, with a special focus on studies with lesbian cisgender women. Subsequently, speech collection was organized using the focus group technique with young universitylesbian cisgender women aged 18-29 years, seeking to investigate how lesbian assumptions, lesbophobias and modes of resistance occurred. to the suicidal process. With this information we tried to describe how they faced the social manifestations of ojeriza and disrespect in relation to the assumed sexual orientation and their consequences for their lives. Through the speeches of the participants, based on the Foucaultian perspective of discourse analysis and dialoguing with queer, intersectional and postfeminist theories, the composition of lesbophobia structures and the discursive construction on resistances were observed. lesbians in relation to the problems involved in suicidal procedurality. The data compiled in this research point to the need to broaden the debate on the invisibility and silence of lesbianities as an important form of resistance to the fruitful conjunctures for the establishment of suicidal processes / Mestre

This thesis examines the evolution and adaptive function of female homosexuality. Biological, sociological, evolutionary, socioecological, and sociobiological theories are discussed. To assess the evolution of female homoerotic behavior, primate and human behavior are examined. Because the purpose of this thesis is to investigate the evolution of female same-sex relations, particular emphasis is placed on chimpanzees and bonobos, species in which these relations have been extensively documented. It is proposed that human females form homoerotic relationships to achieve independence from males and maintain alliances. If sufficient resources are present, aggregates of females can control their most significant resource-sex. Sex is utilized to recruit new females, to maintain alliances within the aggregate, and to distribute to males in exchange for strategic resources. This thesis concludes with several suggestions for future research.