This review essay covers the lesbian writing of philosopher Jeffner Allen, contrasting’ her fiercely separatist earlier work with her more recent experimental writing. A quest for a separate ontic space—defining difference qua Lesbian and consistently characterized by Allen as “the open”—links her earlier work with her more recent atonalities richly coded with ritual, myth, memory, and play.

We were relaxing after supper, my daughter, who was ten, and my ninety-six-year-old grandmother, and I. Marcella had long known that I was a lesbian, and in her simple child's way understood perfectly. Grandma was another matter; I would have to wait for her to die before I could be open in the family about who I was. She could never be told. I loved her; there seemed no reason to distress her, who kept herself so deliberately innocent about the facts of life, let alone their infinite variety.

Borderlands/La Frontera deads with the psychology of resistance to oppression. The possibility of resistance is revealed by perceiving the self in the process of being oppressed as another face of the self in the process of resisting oppression. The new mestiza consciousness is bom from this interplay between oppression and resistance. Resistance is understood as social, collective activity, by adding to Anzaldúa's theory the distinction between the act and the process of resistance.

Presenting reasoned rejections of the hierarchical implications of “philosopher” and the sexual implications of “lesbian,” the author's method leads her to indicate that her resistance to these names is motivated partly by particular facts of her early life.

In this essay 1 examine the history of the sexuality debates among feminists. In both the nineteenth century and the recent sexuality debates the personal is taken to be foundational for a political stance, while simultaneously the debates transform feminist understandings of the extent to which the personal is political. 1 suggest that this transformation undermines the epistemological assumptions of the debates, resulting in a feminism that cannot be radical.

Should Lesbian and women's events have policies banning sadomasochists or sadomasochistic acts? This question is being heatedly debated in the Lesbian community. In this paper, 1 examine the moral and political problems with sadomasochism from a Lesbian-feminist perspective, concluding that sadomasochism is antifeminist and antih'beratory for many reasons. Then, given this conclusion, I explore how events such as women's music festivals should determine their policies about sado-masochism.

Audre horde reopened the question of the position of the erotic with respect to both knowledge and power in her 1983 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” This is not a new question in the philosophical literature; it is a very old one. What is different about Audre Lorde's examination of Eros is that she starts with a decidedly lesbian conception of Eros, in marked contrast to other Western philosophers’ work.

Due to its problematic political and social position between two opposed sexual cultures, bisexuality has often been ignored by feminist and lesbian theorists both as a concept and a realm of experiences. The essay argues that bisexuality, precisely because it transgresses bipolar notions of fixed gendered and sexed identities, is usefully explored by lesbian and feminist theorists, enhancing our effort to devise an ethics of difference and to develop nonoppressive ways of responding to alterity.

This essay explores the criteria for lesbian identity attribution through the case study of “male lesbians”: biological males who claim to be lesbians. I analyze such sexlgender identity attribution through the lens of postmodernism, which provides a workable theoretical framework for “male lesbian” identities. My conclusions explore the historicity and cultural constructedness of the body's sexlgender identities, revealing the limitations of both “the postmodemized body” and “the essentialized modernist body.”

Recent writers in feminist ethics have been concerned to find ways to reclaim and augment women's moral agency. This essay considers Sarah Hoagland's intriguing suggestion that we renounce moral praise and blame and pursue what she calls an “ethic of intelligibility.” I argue that the eschewal of moral blame would not help but rather hinder our efforts to increase our sense of moral agency. It would, I claim, further intensify our demoralization.

This essay examines two tendencies in lesbian ethics as differing visions of community, as well as contrasting views of the relationship between the erotic and the ethical. In addition to considering those authors who make explicit claims about lesbian ethics, this paper reflects on the works of some lesbians whose works are less frequently attended to in discussions about lesbian ethics, including lesbians writing from the perspectives of theology and of literature.

The legal category “mother” operates restrictively and punitively to “domesticate” lesbian existence. Our domestication is the reason that we have difficulty thinking beyond the category “mother.” I explore how “mother” is used by both lesbians and nonlesbians within the legal system. In order to ensure lesbian survival on lesbian terms, we must strategize theories that do not preserve the dominant legal paradigm thatcodifies “mother,” even if that category is expanded to include “lesbian mother.”

Recent writing by Jewish lesbians is characterized BY challenging and evocative reflection on themes of home and identity, family and choice, tradition and transfor’ mation. This essay is a personal journey through some of this writing. An exploration of the obvious and troubling tensions between lesbian or feminist and Jewish identities leads to the paradoxical but ultimately unsurprising suggestion that lesbian identity and eroticism can provide a route of return to and affirmation of Jewish identity.

This essay is part of a recent version of a talk 1 have given by way of introducing Lesbian Ethics. J mention ways in which lesbian existence creates certain conceptual possibilities that can effect conceptual shifts and transform consciousness.

Lesbian Ethics, a U.S. journal of lesbian culture, has offered highly readable philosophical essays, reviews, discussions, and other nonfiction since late 1984 (twelve issues to date). It provides a forum in which the meaning of “lesbian” takes shape from self concepts formed in cooperative interaction and thus lays the groundwork for lesbians becoming publicly recognized as the foremost interpreters of lesbian identity and history.