Through newly discovered archival sources, including love letters, police records, hospital files and censuses, this article tracks the love story of two young women, Flora and Agnes, a same-sex couple at the turn of the nineteenth century, working in the sex trade. Their story takes us through police arrest, forced hospitalisation and leisure spaces such as dance halls. Historically, Flora and Agnes represent the many sex workers, who engaged in same-sex relations. It has been estimated that as many as 25% of women selling sex in European metropoles were in sapphic relationships, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The article describes the historical entanglement of sapphic love and sex work and provides example of how sapphic love and sapphic communities could provide solidarity and emotional support for sex workers, as well as enable class mobility and fertilised conditions for collective resistance towards authorities. Differently from male same-sex activities, female same-sex engagements were not criminalised in countries like Britain, Germany and Denmark. However, young women, like Flora and Agnes, were heavily surveilled by police and medical doctors, due to contemporary aims to control venereal diseases. We employ the notion of a “disobedient archive” to explore the ways in which historically marginalised subjects, such as young, working class, sapphic sex workers, contested structures of control, power, violence and confinement. Here, we pay attention to everyday acts and practices that challenged oppressive or disciplinary forces, as well as to failed or unsuccessful attempts of resistance. This permits a reading of the archive as a record of struggle and resistance, documenting previously silenced subjects’ assertions of presence and agency against institutional control and erasure.

This article investigates female homoeroticism encoded in cinematic form. I read two Polish films, In Custody/Nadzór (dir. Wiesław Saniewski, 1983) and By Touch/Przez Dotyk (dir. Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, 1985) to explore the new forms of femininity I call ‘proto-queer’. ‘Proto-queer’ is used here to conceptualize the figure of woman bearing a gendered and sexual instability that carries the hallmarks of what subsequently has become known as queerness. At the historical moment of state socialism, these fledgling forms of queer femininity were neither fully developed nor clearly legible. Yet, their distinctly Polish and socialist inflections allow us to view them as precursors to transgressions that would only later be more recognizable within a queer interpretive framework. The analysis of sexual or erotic otherness in the context of isolation and social exclusion around which both films develop foregrounds the affective power of shame and its transformative abilities. I demonstrate how shame and humiliation are both de-constituting and foundational in relation to sexual identity. I analyze how cinematic articulations of proto-queer intimacies generate a reimagined understanding of female homoeroticism in socialist Poland and how this study contributes to the literature on queerness and its representation more generally.

This article explores The Island of the Lost Plane, a novella written by Li Zishu during her time in Europe that has largely gone unnoticed. Through an analysis of the novella’s portrayal of queer intimacy between two immigrant women—one a Sinophone Malaysian and the other a Jewish Israeli—this article examines their healing relationship and how it intertwines with the MH370 accident and the novella’s use of the ocean as an ecological trope. This analysis highlights Li Zishu’s literary intention to address themes of healing violence, and transnationalism, marking a significant departure from the canonized Sinophone Malaysian literature, which predominantly focuses on violence, rainforests, and heteronormative local experiences. My reading draws from the frameworks of queer Sinophone studies while incorporating perspectives from queer ecology, queer intimacy, and queer world-making. I first analyze how the nationalism and patriarchy tied to each character’s origins contribute to their marginalization as “others” in Europe, and how their bond forms despite differences in nationality and ethnicity. This dynamic is metaphorically reflected in their first encounter in the UK. I pay particular attention to the narrator’s experiences of discrimination in Germany, which are tied to her Sinophone Malaysian identity, particularly in the aftermath of the MH370 disappearance. These experiences reveal how nationalism, shaped by global power dynamics and rooted in origin narratives, subtly manifests as a form of violence imposed upon her. I then further examine the intimacy between the characters within the imagined oceanic space—an alternative realm that holds the potential to address the colonial violence tied to their respective origins and facilitate the healing of their traumas. By highlighting the peaceful and restorative interactions between the two characters, I argue that this imagined space offers a vision of queer world-making: one that envisions sensory, nonhierarchical, and non-patriarchal worlds that challenge heteronormative structures and dominant power relations.

This essay explores how Audre Lorde’s work as a professor can help contemporary educators teach students about difference and power. Drawing from my new book Open Admissions, it focuses on two particular facets of her teaching: first, the ways Lorde centered students’ ideas to generate collective investment in courses and allow them to learn from one another, and second, how she combined both a public and private pedagogy to help them address the injustice they were studying. I conclude with a brief discussion of how Lorde’s work has shaped my own approach to classrooms.

In this short piece I think about the ocean as queer and its liberating sensualities as a practice of writing into the surf. What are the dissolutions that emerge from the wetness of the sea? This piece is based on forthcoming work where I expand upon the themes of queer and trans ecologies at the sea’s edge.

In 1974, women inspired by the back-to-the-land commune movement and women’s liberation politics began forming lesbian intentional communities in rural Oregon. Living outside the mainstream allowed them to relinquish gender norms and experience their bodies differently in nature—their lesbian identity was not just a sexual orientation, it was gender non-conforming engaged ecofeminist praxis. The different lands they purchased fifty years ago are situated in the middle of logging country—huge swaths of land around them have been clear-cut over the years, while the lands they continue to care for today serve as conservation sites for old growth forests and all of their more-than-human inhabitants. This essay merges research gathered ten years ago for my master’s thesis about the southern Oregon lesbian land community with ongoing written and photographic reflections of my time in the community over many years. This essay is a collection of vignettes and excerpts from interviews that speak to the interspecies and intergenerational intimacies of life on lesbian land and the possible implications for queer and feminist ecological futures more broadly.

“Post-lesbian” discourse has posited that the increasing popularity of queer identity has challenged the endurance of lesbian identity. Using 16 in-depth interviews collected between 2019 and 2020 with people who identify as lesbian and queer, I offer empirical examples of why lesbian identity endures and the utility of the identity’s specificity. While several recent publications have also demonstrated the durability of lesbian identity, this study offers a unique portrait of this identity project in its portrayal of why some moved away from lesbian identity and why they have returned to it. I argue that there is a cultural opening for reinvigorated understandings of lesbian identity, and that it is crucial to understand this opening in order to resist the declaration that lesbian identity is in decline. To do so we must grapple with lesbian critiques of queerness, as well as the continued political relevance of lesbian. The shifts in personal identities of participants is emblematic of shifting community understandings of these identity terms over time, indicating a generational shift in perception of identities.

The present article takes the recurrent motif of trees in Ali Smith’s oeuvre as a point of departure to analyze how Smith forges an alliance between environmental concerns and queerness. It argues that her short stories present their own version of queer ecology on both a conceptual and aesthetic level. Smith queers ecological relations and brings ecological concerns to bear on the queer on multiple scales, continuously disrupting linear narratives, anthropocentric thinking and capitalist imperatives of (re)production and productivity for the benefit of interdepenence, resistance and inter-species care. By means of non-linear storytelling, ambiguous pronouns and shifting narrative perspective she aesthetically and conceptually opens space for queer desires, interspecies care and a cyclical, distinctly ecological view of queer futurity that ultimately extends not just to environmental and social but also cultural relations.

While the concept of “coming out” is relatively well-critiqued, few of these critiques trouble the way a near exclusive focus on disclosure positions sexuality as an essential identity. Based on life history interviews with 18 lesbian, pansexual, and queer women elders (ages 65+), I find coming out did not describe disclosing or even acknowledging same-gender desire, but, rather, choosing to act on it. For participants, coming out is the process of forming desire into a coherent identity (lesbian woman), a process that required continued interactions with lesbian existence; contrary to essentialist understandings, desire alone did not enable participants to become lesbians. In this article, I describe the two paths participants followed while becoming lesbians and consider how the historical context in which participants came out, specifically the second wave feminist movement, uniquely facilitated coming out for white women. Ultimately, I argue lesbian sexuality is a richly constructed social identity formed in community and defined by resistance to compulsory heterosexuality. By viewing sexual identity as based on shared political commitments formed in community, this article both corrects an essentializing tendency in the coming out literature and offers a potential point of repair between older and younger generations of lesbians.