In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 287 Julienne Obadia Responsibility, Respectability, Recognition, and Polyamory: Lessons in Subject Formation in the Age of Sexual Identity Introduction: It’s About Time “Sexuality” has become a strikingly capacious category in recent years. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans* have been joined by queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, Two Spirit, asexual, and ally, as the acronym LGBT increasingly serves as (...) a base for expanded formulations such as LGBTQQIP2SAA. In light of this trajectory, perhaps it should not have surprised me to hear so many of my polyamorist interlocutors identifying polyamory as their sexual orientation. While polyamory’s emergence as a named practice in 1990 was more closely associated with the sexual revolution than the gay liberation movement, the increasing intelligibility of polyamory as a sexual orientation, I argue, offers important insights into how, and to what effect, the category of sexuality is expanding, and illuminates contemporary mechanisms of subject formation in American late liberalism. It is tempting to analyze this phenomenon solely within the historical context of the twentieth century rise of identity politics. However, a focus on recent decades is insufficient for understanding the increasing capaciousness of the sexual orientation framework. I argue that, more than simply demonstrating a proliferation of sexual identities, polyamory ’s reconfiguration also highlights the powerful demands made of subjects of sexual orientation to be respectable by espousing particular forms of intimacy over others. These demands call for a longer historical 288 Julienne Obadia view of marriage, monogamy, and whiteness as constitutive of US social, political, and legal recognition. Consider my encounter with Steve: At the 2013 annual “Poly Living” convention in Philadelphia, organized by the polyamory advocacy group, Loving More, I gathered with the other attendees in a large circle in the main hall. After a brief welcome by the organizers, we introduced ourselves one by one and then dispersed for drinks and informal mingling. I took a seat alone and, after a moment, a man in his sixties with a graying ponytail and wearing a Hawaiian shirt approached me. “You’re an anthropologist?” he asked. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I smiled and gestured at the seat across from me, and he introduced himself, putting his beer on the table beside mine and sitting down. Fidgeting nervously, he explained that he and his wife had been married for over twenty years, but the last several years had been sexless, with her desire waning while his had not. After learning about polyamory, he cautiously suggested it and she reluctantly agreed to let him do some sexual exploring outside the marriage, but with tight restrictions: He could go to events like these and could have limited sexual interaction with others, but he could not have penetrative sex, nor could he pursue any emotional or more-than-casual intimacy with anyone. He found these constraints difficult, understandably so at such events, where people were in fact encouraged to seek out emotional intimacy and enjoy a wide range of consensual connections. Such limitations ran counter to polyamory’s ethos, which, as indicated by the organization’s name, sought more love, although particular arrangements varied significantly. As he elaborated on these details, I realized that Steve was not simply sharing as people often did, unprompted, at these events, which seek to foster open communication, curiosity, and self-exploration. He was torn about how to identify his sexual desire and make sense of his difficulty finding fulfillment within his wife’s conditions. He paused, looking at me searchingly with a mix of distress and hope, and asked if his desire to see other people was natural. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that being poly is a sexual orientation I was born with, like being gay?” He hoped that, precisely in my capacity as an anthropologist, I might have some definitive expert knowledge about human sexuality—an incontrovertible yes or no about the provenance of his desire and the legitimacy of his dissatisfaction. Julienne Obadia 289 As Steve’s conundrum makes clear, the intelligibility of polyamory as an immutable sexual orientation is very recent. Its inclusion marks a dramatic shift from Eve Sedgwick’s observation nearly three decades ago... (shrink)

Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body subverts the authority of the anatomy teaching text, and challenges its claim to objectivity, by writing to the texts of Andreas Vesalius. Vesalius, working in the late 15th century, is recognized as having set the precedent for how the anatomy of the human body is taught even today. By writing a ‘lesbian body’ in disarray, Wittig metaphorically topples the authority and order of the standard Vesalian anatomy. By writing that body as a desiring (...) subject, she also invites us to question the desire for knowledge and ownership of that knowledge, and the illusion of scientific objectivity. Indeed, she offers us a celebration of the subjectivity of the production of texts and identities. But in her rewriting, she must also adopt a particular subject position and guard that position from the ‘wrong’ interpretations. The Lesbian Body is then, despite its literary and political force, a text which fears the interpretive role of its reader. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the shifting definitions of the terms lesbian and postmodern, the lesbian in contemporary fiction and Hollywood film, and the pitfalls and rewards of the recent lesbian theory.

A deaf lesbian couple who chose to have a deaf child receive a lot of criticismA deaf lesbian couple in the US deliberately tried to create a deaf child. Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough hoped their child, conceived with the help of a sperm donor, would be deaf like the rest of the family. Their daughter, five year old Jehanne, is also deaf and was conceived with the same donor. News of the couple choosing to have a deaf (...) child has only been revealed with the birth of their son Gauvin.1–4To increase their chance of having a deaf baby the women sought a deaf sperm donor from a sperm bank but were told that congenital deafness is “precisely the sort of condition” that disqualifies would-be donors. Rather than dismiss the idea they found their own sperm donor by asking a deaf friend who comes from a family with five generations of deafness.1The women, both professionals in the mental health field, insist that they would still love …. (shrink)

Oliver Sacks MD, Clinical Professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, talked with Anthony Freeman during his visit to London in January 1995 to publicize his recently published book An Anthropologist on Mars. The interview is preceded by an overview of the book.

The proposal of the research is to review and analyse the role of the media as constructors of social imaginaries, and to do so, we will analyse the power of the audiovisual industry to create and re-create stereotypes about lesbians, and as generators of a social imaginary, we will also analyse lesbian plots and characters, through which direct messages are sent to society in general, but also to lesbians.Finally, after conducting discussion groups and focus groups with lesbians who have (...) participated in the research, we present some conclusions. (shrink)

I argue that Monique Wittig's view that lesbians are not women neglects the complexities involved in the composition of the category "woman." I develop an articulation of the concept "woman" in the contemporary United States, with thirteen distinct defining characteristics, none of which are necessary nor sufficient. I argue that Wittig's emphasis on the material production of "woman" through the political regime of heterosexuality, however, is enormously fruitful for feminist and queer strategizing.

This volume explores whether there can be a specific lesbian aesthetic, juxtaposed against reading as a 'woman' or as a 'heterosexual'. Contributors both explore the uses of recent theories such as post-structuralism and offer a lesbian critique of such methodologies. Close readings of contemporary lesbian fiction and popular culture focus on works such as _Zami, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Wanderground_, and _Desert of the Heart_ as well as on lesbian pornography. Together the essays (...) point to lesbian culture's ability to create new meanings for iteself and to foreground the intertextuality of lesbian identities.Contributors: Sonya Andemahr, Lisa Henderson, Hilary Hinds, Katie King, Reina Lewis, Sally Munt, Gillian Spraggs, Angela Weir, Anna Wilson, Elizabeth Wilson, and Bonnie Zimmerman. (shrink)

The identity of lesbian-mother combines a marginalized identity with one of the most revered mainstream identities. With data collected through exploratory in-depth interviews from nine lesbian-mothers, the authors use symbolic interaction framework to explore the strategies that lesbian birth mothers and comothers employ to gain acceptance for their marginal-mainstream identities in their family networks. Respondents experienced varying levels of resistance from their social networks, with comothers being especially vulnerable due to their lack of both biological and legal (...) substantiation. The authors explore the process of identity negotiation in three realms of everyday experience: in relationships with extended families, in relations within the nuclear family, and in lesbian relationships that have ended. (shrink)

Lesbian ethics is an ethics of resistance and creation. It is not a set of rules of right behavior or injunctions of duty and obligation or delineations of good character that one may find in utilitarian, deontologic, and virtue treatises. It is a liberatory conceptual journey which emerges from recognized contexts of oppression, and as such challenges some unstated assumptions of traditional Anglo‐European ethics. Lesbian ethics is an envisioning and discussion of possibilities, given lesbian lives, for a (...) transformation of values. As such it is not a matter of moral reform, a matter of preservation of and better adherence to existing values. It is a call for another type of moral change, moral revolution. (shrink)

Claudette Kulkarni explores lesbian experience from a Jungian and feminist perspective, through interviews with women who see themselves as lesbians or who are in a lesbian relationship. Although a feminist treatment of the subject challenges the heterosexism of Jungian theory, the author presents a link between theory and experience that is consistent with both approaches. She concludes that when a woman finds herself loving another woman she is often responding to a profound psychological instinct to act, in spite (...) of internal conflict or external opposition, and that this is a significant move in the service of personal and collective individuation and a movement toward achieving self-understanding. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that lesbian couples who wish to have children who are genetically related to both of them should be allowed access to mitochondrial replacement techniques. First, we provide a brief explanation of mitochondrial diseases and MRTs. We then present the reasons why MRTs are not, by nature, therapeutic. The upshot of the view that MRTs are non-therapeutic techniques is that their therapeutic potential cannot be invoked for restricting their use only to those cases where a (...) mitochondrial DNA disease could be ‘cured’. We then argue that a positive case for MRTs is justified by an appeal to reproductive freedom, and that the criteria to access these techniques should hence be extended to include lesbian couples who wish to share genetic parenthood. Finally, we consider a potential objection to our argument: that the desire to have genetically related kin is not a morally sufficient reason to allow lesbian couples to access MRTs. (shrink)

In vitro fertilization with reception of oocytes from partners allows lesbian mothers to share biological motherhood. The gestational mother receives an egg from her partner who becomes the genetic mother. This article examines the ethics of IVF with ROPA with a focus on the welfare of the woman and the resulting child, on whether ROPA qualifies as a “legitimate” medical therapy that falls within the goals of medicine, and on the meaning and value attributed to a biologically shared bond (...) between parents and child. We also contrast IVF with ROPA with egg donor IVF for heterosexual couples and intrafamilial live uterus transplantation with IVF, and show how Swedish legislation makes certain ways of sharing biological bonds out of place. In Sweden, IVF with ROPA is illegal, egg donor IVF for heterosexual couples is allowed and practiced as is sperm donor IVF for lesbians, and live uterus transplantation is performed within a research project. But is ROPA really ethically more problematic than these other cases? The article argues that IVF with ROPA gives rise to fewer ethical questions than does live uterus transplantation with IVF and, in some cases, egg donor IVF. (shrink)

: For many of us, entry into motherhood involves an ambiguous visibility and intelligibility, where our acceptance into mainstream spaces as mothers entails a loss of lesbian difference. Mann explores this loss using the work of two philosophers of lesbian difference, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She argues that the figure of the lesbian mother is deployed on a broad cultural scale to reinvigorate and renaturalize the myth of the happy, natural, heterosexual mother.

This chapter contains section titled: Relation to Philosophy Lesbian Philosophies of Liberation Heterosexuality and Lesbianism. Ethics and Politics Essentialisms and Anti—Essentialisms The Future of Lesbian Philosophy Bibliography.

Can one theorize the lesbian within a feminist frame? I argue that a difference sensitive feminist frame closets lesbians because (1) heterosexist oppression has been under-theorized and thus gender analyses fail to intersect with sexual orientation analyses, (2) feminist values and goals have worked against representing lesbian difference from heterosexual women, and (3) difference sensitive feminism requires that lesbians be representable as women with a different sexuality and not as a “third sex”, not-women, not-men, i.e., not through the (...) very image through which lesbians historically were made conceivable. (shrink)

Anthropologists in Arms traces the troubled history of social scientists' collaboration with national military, security, and intelligence organizations and analyzes the moral and ethical debates provoked by the rise of "military anthropology"—particularly the practice of embedding anthropologists with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This article presents the findings of a study about the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. We explored published psychiatric and psychological literature, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual archives and anthologies. We identified 10 examples of young women receiving aversion therapy in England in the 1960s and 1970s. We situate our discussion within the context of post-war British and transnational medical (...) history. As a contribution to a significantly under-researched area, this article adds to a broader transnational history of the psychological treatment of marginalised sexualities and genders. As a consequence, it also contributes to LGBTQIA+ history, the history of medicine, and psychiatric survivor history. We also reflect on the ethical implications of the research for current mental health practice. (shrink)

Recent writing by Jewish lesbians is characterized by challenging and evocative reflection on themes of home and identity, family and choice, tradition and transformation. 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.

For many of us, entry into motherhood involves an ambiguous visibility and intelligibility, where our acceptance into mainstream spaces as mothers entails a loss of lesbian difference. Mann explores this loss using the work of two philosophers of lesbian difference, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She argues that the figure of the lesbian mother is deployed on a broad cultural scale to reinvigorate and renaturaUze the myth of the happy, natural, heterosexual mother.

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 sex/gender 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 sex/gender identities, revealing the limitations of both "the postmodernized body" and "the essentialized modernist body.".

The Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Literature identifies key resources for topics important to the theory and practice of lesbian and gay politics, literature, religion, and more. The book contains hundreds of entries that summarize key issues at stake and then identify (mostly) book-length analysis of this topics. The topics range from activism, to age of consent, to legal history as well as individual entries on key authors and regional areas.

The article surveys lesbian culture and movement in Slovenia. Both are coinciding with media representations of lesbianism and lesbian visual arts, the latter beginning with the shocking exhibition ‘Obscene Women’ by Austrian photographer Krista Beinstein in 1986. The international lesbian exhibition ‘Lesbian Conne Xions’, which visited the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana in October 2000, represented images of lesbians in a very broad and realistic spectrum, in contrast with the asexual lesbian photographs by unknown authors in (...) the Slovenian main-stream press and in accordance with the depictions of lesbians in Slovenian lesbian press. The photographs from ‘Lesbian Conne Xions’ were, like Beinstein's exhibition, not very well accepted; even some lesbians argued that some of the photos, especially those of gender-benders, did not represent real and everyday lesbian life but rarities and odd exceptions. But lesbian life in general, far from being an ‘ordinary’ Slovenian lifestyle, may easily become unrecognizable to lesbians themselves and obscured by the dominant culture. (shrink)

In this book, Anthony R. D'Augelli and Charlotte J. Patterson bring together top experts to offer a comprehensive overview of what we have discovered--and what we still need to learn--about lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities.

In this commentary on Joyce Trebilcot's "Dyke Methods or Principles for the Discovery/Creation of the Withstanding," I discuss four areas of difficulty in Trebilcot's proposed methods: (1) an overly negative view of "the intention to persuade," (2) a tendency towards epistemological relativism and loss of cultural authorities, (3) a circularity in defining the proposed methods as dyke methods, and (4) a hint of repressive tolerance towards differences among lesbians by avoidance of painful confrontation involving those differences. Unlike Trebilcot, I make (...) a distinction between the abuse of persuasion and the art of persuasion, re-claiming the latter as a caring and challenging strategy, rather than an invasion of adversarial heteropatriarchal tactics. (shrink)

"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism.... In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists.... What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through its (...) basis in a particular conception of rationality." In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women’s Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism—an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior?—is considered as a test case. Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard. Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is. In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women’s movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism." In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg. (shrink)

"Allen’s work is virtually unique among American writers. It illustrates a deep knowledge of the issues raised by the postmodernists, yet she does not succumb to the playing field, constructing instead her own philosophical direction and aesthetic." —Sarah Hoagland Jeffner Allen shapes a poetic politics that transforms textual and everyday realities. The surprising, resilient, and transformative windings of lesbian writing and lesbian lives—a poetics of sinuous movement, the turning of women to women—informs these reflections.

During the last decades, the cognitive sciences and cognitive anthropology have increasingly veered away from each other. Cognitive anthropologists have become so rare within the cognitive sciences that Beller, Bender, and Medin (this issue) even propose a division of the cognitive sciences and cognitive anthropology. However, such a divorce might be premature. This commentary tries to illustrate the benefits that cognitive anthropologists have to offer, not despite, but because of their combination of humanistic and scientific elements. It argues (...) that the cognitive sciences (among others) profit from these benefits, as culture will become crucial for cognitive research. At the same time, problems within cognitive anthropology are discussed, including, for example, the responsibility of cognitive anthropologists to promote young academics. Finally, ideas are presented that might support future interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

A multiracial, socioeconomically diverse sample of 45 lesbians describe power relations in both satisfactory and problematic health care encounters with physicians. Whether doctors act in solidarity or dominate them is pivotal to lesbians' health care experiences. Solidarity means compassionate competence, empowering information exchange, and negotiated action. Domination takes form in the withholding of information, doomsaying, defensive dismissals, sexist comments, body sculpting, reproductive regulation, and bodily transgression.

This article examines the ways in which 1970s French feminists who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes – MLF) wielded the spectre of lesbianism as an American idiosyncrasy to counteract the politicisation of lesbianism in France. It argues that the erasure of lesbian difference from the domain of French feminism was a necessary condition for making ‘woman’ an amenable subject for incorporation into the abstract unity of the French nation, wherein heterosexuality is conceived as (...) a democratic crucible where men and women harmoniously come together and differences are deemed divisive. Looking at the history of feminism from the standpoint of a lesbian perspective reveals unforeseen continuities between French ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ genealogies insofar as they rest on common heterosexual and racial foundations. Finally, the article demonstrates that the alleged un-Frenchness ascribed to the word ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s feminist movement spectrally returned in the 1990s when the word ‘gender’ was, in its turn, deemed radically foreign to the French culture by feminist researchers. Fiercely reactionary constituencies against the legalisation of same-sex marriage have more recently taken up this rhetorical weapon against sexual and racial minorities. (shrink)

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.

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. (shrink)

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

In a post-feminist, post-lesbian feminist, postmodern or queer world, should lesbian work remain clearly identifiable, even when it refuses to claim lesbian identity as such? Scanning anthologies from the past three decades of lesbian poetry, and focusing particularly on the work of Maureen Duffy, Marge Yeo, Dorothea Smartt, Gillian Spraggs and Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Yorke addresses issues of lesbian visibility, lesbian identification, lesbian desire, and lesbian performativity. How do we identify what (...) constitutes a lesbian poetic in an era when ‘lesbian’ as an identity is less overtly defended, and many anthologies gloss over lesbian difference in prioritizing a higher order dedication to theme? (shrink)

This article focuses on the experiences of becoming and being mothers for lesbian co-parents who have children via donor insemination. Rather than the presence of children incorporating lesbians into the mainstream as “honorary heterosexuals,” the author argues that lesbian parenting represents a radical and radicalizing challenge to heterosexual norms that govern parenting roles and identities. It undermines traditional notions of the family and the heterosexual monopoly of reproduction. The same-sex context together with successful collaboration with donors supports the (...) refashioning of kinship relationships. An attentiveness to the gender dynamics of sexuality illuminates further contestations. The author argues that their structural similarities as women place them in contradiction with dominant gender practices enacted in heterosexual relationships. This facilitates the evaluation and negotiation of more egalitarian approaches to work and parenting, and through their operationalization, much of the logic supporting conventional divisions of labor is undermined. (shrink)

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 ground-work for lesbians becoming publicly recognized as the foremost interpreters of lesbian identity and history.

This guest column asks how Bruno Latour has contributed to any present and future refiguring of relations between the sciences and the humanities. To answer the question, it traces three select and shifting figures of knowledge by means of which Latour himself has been charting his progress—from the anthropologist, charged with unraveling techno-scientific networks, to the moralist, participating in the parliament of nature, to the diplomat, negotiating the moderns’ many modes of existence. Rather than a neat blueprint for carving up (...) the knowledge space, this essay argues, Latour leaves us with “an ethos of knowledges that verges on a chaos of in-disciplines.” The essay concludes, however, that Latour’s “in-disciplinary” thinking is and will likely continue to be an important resource for explorations into the uncertain, “nonmodern” erritories that Latour has so valuably observed. (shrink)

Phelan examines lesbian political theory and points out the pitfalls of a lesbian feminism that ignores the specificities of race. As she searches for a democratic identity politics, she explores the possibilities for lesbian community and for alliances with other groups, as well as the political goals of lesbian action.

The German translation of Frye, Marilyn (1980). Lesbian Perspectives on Women's Studies. Sinister Wisdom 14:3-7. See the links below for the original article.

It is argued that anthropologists become moral relativists by mistake typically in two ways: (1) by confusing moral with factual discourse (dubbed the Normativist Fallacy) which derives in turn from a failure to distinguish adequately between direct and indirect discourse in the description of moral systems and preferences; or (2) by confusing definitive with hypothetical statements in descriptive ethics (the Definitivist Fallacy). Two representative arguments illustrating these errors are analyzed and some morals drawn from the results regarding the status (...) of relativist arguments in descriptive ethics and the prerogatives of applied anthropologists. (shrink)

The article gives an overview of the past and present situation on the Croatian lesbian scene – from the period prior to the war in Croatia, after the war, right up to the present situation. The ‘coming out’ process of Croatian lesbians during the 1980s and 1990s has been determined by social and cultural homophobic indoctrination, which sends out clear messages about how deviant and unacceptable homosexuality is. Heterosexuality has traditionally been the imperative of social normality within Croatian society. (...) Not being compatible with the social norm, lesbians are condemned by society to failure and isolation. Nevertheless, after the 10-year rule of a strongly nationalistic, rightist and patriarchal regime, recent political changes have brought Croatia to the threshold of a new transitional period. Even though the new Social Democratic and Liberal coalition government is sending mixed signals on many issues to do with gender equality, the homosexual population of Croatia can finally hope for better times to come. (shrink)

Parenthood is a highly valued life goal, independent of one’s sexual orientation. However, the majority of studies exploring young adults’ parenthood plans have relied exclusively on samples of heterosexual individuals. This study aimed (i) to explore differences in parenthood intentions as a function of sexual orientation, (ii) to investigate to what extent sociodemographic and psychological characteristics predict parenthood intentions of lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) and heterosexual individuals, (iii) to test the mediating effect of stigma between sexual orientation and parenthood (...) intentions, and (iv) to identify and characterize profiles of prospective parenthood (through cluster analysis). Data were gathered using an online survey from 375 self-identified LGB and heterosexual young adults without children in Portugal, with a mean age of 25.83 years old (SD = 4.49). Findings indicated that LGB individuals were less likely to intend to have children than heterosexual individuals; furthermore, among LGB individuals, lesbian women expressed stronger intentions to have children than did gay men. Similarities between heterosexual and LGB young adults were observed concerning the psychological determinants of parenthood intentions. Four distinctive profiles of prospective parenthood were identified: aspiring parents not anticipating stigma, aspiring parents anticipating stigma, childfree intent, and childfree ambivalent. Lesbian and bisexual women mostly populated the childfree ambivalent cluster, in contrast the aspiring parents anticipating stigma cluster contained an overrepresentation of men, including sexual minority men. Professionals may want to attend to communalities and specificities of prospective parenthood as a function of sexual orientation, in order to provide unbiased and culturally competent support to sexual minority individuals. (shrink)

Lesbian εἴκοιστοѕ is now supplemented by τριάκοιστοѕ and ⋯ξήκοιστοѕ, which occur in a Lesbian inscription found at Delos, just published in Bull. Corr. Hell. xxix. p. 210 ff.

Is feminism compatible with psychology or therapy? This text suggests alternatives to the dangers offered by the many practitioners of psychology. The authors offer in-depth information on traditional theories alongside an encyclopaedic knowledge of therapy praxis on both sides of the Atlantic.