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1 results

  • 13 - Desire, Love, and Sex between Women in Global History

  • Edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Mathew Kuefler, San Diego State University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History of Sexualities
    Published online:
    26 April 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024, pp 273-292

  • Summary

    and sex between women. The history of female homoerotic relations throughout time and in different places is widely varied, shaped by the societies and cultures in which women lived. How women act on their desires, what kinds of acts they engage in and with whom, what kinds of meanings they attribute to those desires and acts, how they think about the relationship between love and sexuality, whether they think of sexuality as having meaning for identities, whether they form communities with people with like desires—all of this differs across time and place. Yet there are discernible patterns, both in the ways that homoerotic relations have been conceived within persistently male-dominated social arrangements and in the forms of desire and intimacy experienced by women. A global historical view makes clear that emergence into public is not everywhere significant, that desire and love between women can flourish within heteronormative social arrangements, and that the emergence of a lesbian identity is a minor part of the whole story of female homoerotic relations.