Lesbian  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

"It is a remarkable fact that in fiction, lesbic love is frequently used as the leading theme, viz., Diderot, "La Religieuse"; Balzac, "La fille aux yeux d'or"; Th. Gautier, "Mademoiselle de Maupin"; Feydeau, "La Comtesse de Chalis"; Flaubert, "Salammbo"; Belot, "Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme"; Rachilde, "Monsieur Venus." The heroines of these (lesbic) novelles appear to the beloved persons of the same sex in the character and the role of a man; their love is most intense."--Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

A lesbian is a woman who is romantically and sexually attracted only to other women. Women who are attracted to both women and men are more often referred to as bisexual. An individual's self-identification might not correspond with her behaviour, and may be expressed with either, both, or neither of these words.

Origin and transformation of the term

The word "lesbian" is derived from the name of the Greek island of Lesbos, home to the 6th-century BCE poet Sappho. From various ancient writings, historians have gathered that a group of young women were left in Sappho's charge for their instruction or cultural edification. Not much of Sappho's poetry remains, but that which does reflects the topics she wrote about: women's daily lives, their relationships, and rituals. She focused on the beauty of women and proclaimed her love for girls. Before the late 19th century, the word "Lesbian" referred to any derivative or aspect of Lesbos, including a type of wine.

Author Emma Donoghue found that the term lesbian (with its modern meaning) was in use in the English language from at least the 17th century. A 1732 book by William King, The Toast, uses "lesbian loves" and "tribadism" interchangeably : "she loved Women in the same Manner as Men love them; she was a Tribad". In 1890 the term was used in a medical dictionary as an adjective to describe tribadism (as "Lesbian love"): sexual gratification of two women by simulating intercourse. "Lesbianism" to describe erotic relationships between women had been documented in 1870. The terms were interchangeable with "Sapphist" and "Sapphism" around the turn of the 20th century. The use of "Lesbian" in medical literature became prominent; by 1925 the word was recorded as a noun to mean the female equivalent of a sodomite.

The development of medical knowledge was a significant factor in further connotations of the term. In the middle of the 19th century, medical writers attempted to establish ways to identify male homosexuality, which was considered a significant social problem in most Western societies. In categorizing behavior that indicated what was referred to as "inversion" by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, researchers determined what was normal sexual behavior for men and women, and therefore to what extent men and women varied from the "perfect male sexual type" and the "perfect female sexual type". Far less literature focused on female homosexual behavior than on male homosexuality, as medical professionals did not consider it a significant problem. In some cases it was not acknowledged to exist. However, sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebbing from Germany, and Britain's Havelock Ellis wrote some of the earliest and more enduring categorizations of female same sex attraction, approaching it as a form of insanity. Krafft-Ebbing, who considered lesbianism (what he termed "Uranism") a neurological disease, and Ellis, who was influenced by Krafft-Ebbing's writings, disagreed about whether sexual inversion was generally a lifelong condition. Ellis believed that many women who professed love for other women changed their feelings about such relationships after they had experienced marriage and a "practical life".

However, Ellis conceded that there were "true inverts" who would spend their lives pursuing erotic relationships with women. These were members of the "third sex" who rejected the roles of women to be subservient, feminine, and domestic. "Invert" described the opposite gender roles and the related attraction to women instead of men; since women in the Victorian period were considered unable to initiate sexual encounters, women who did so with other women were thought of as possessing masculine sexual desires. The work of Krafft-Ebbing and Ellis was widely read, and helped to create public consciousness of female homosexuality. The sexologists' claims that homosexuality was a congenital anomaly were generally well-accepted by homosexual men; it indicated that their behavior was not inspired by nor should be considered a criminal vice, as was widely acknowledged. In the absence of any other material to describe their emotions, homosexuals accepted the designation of different or perverted, and used their outlaw status to form social circles in Paris and Berlin. "Lesbian" began to describe elements of a subculture.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Lesbian" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools