Publication Type: Panelist Abstract
Abstract: In this paper I describe my experiences as a Black lesbian interviewing other Black lesbians for my dissertation project. In the examination of social contextual influences on Black lesbian coming out experiences, family studies researchers primarily conclude that widespread homophobia in Black families isolate lesbians; and in turn, lead lesbians to deny or avoid disclosing their sexual identity. However, this conclusion does not capture my experience, and as a lesbian daughter and Black feminist family studies researcher, I seek to expand narrow depictions of Black family functioning. My dissertation project chronicled the coming out narratives of Black lesbians to mother(s) and family and used Black feminist theory to focus on the identity affirming potential of identity proclamation. In this paper I offer both my participants and my “personal” coming out story to reveal how the roles of researcher and participant intersected and transformed into storytelling between sisters. I describe how both Black feminist theory and my identities as Black lesbian feminist researcher influenced my subjectivity and reflectivity; and in turn, informed my research analysis and conclusions. Ours stories are offered to dispel the persistent myth of the objective family science researcher.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Television shows, particularly those that represent a group that is marginalized by the dominant social system, create new communal possibilities. These communal possibilities do not necessarily translate into new communities, however. In this paper I explore the television show The L Word, a program that, as the first series to show lesbians as more than isolated individuals or couples, offered a possible crossroad where the diversity and complexity of lesbian community could be explored. In this paper I will explore if and how lesbian fans of The L Word connect the visions of lesbian community and identity reflected in the show to their own lives. As Lisa Henderson noted in “Simple Pleasures: Lesbian Community and Go Fish,” “people accustomed to hostile infidelities between popular depictions of their social groups and their own senses of self are mobilized by jolts of recognition, those occasions when a text makes familiar (salient, plausible) references to a reality little known outside the group itself” (38). In the paper, I will explore if The L Word provides such jolts to lesbian fans. While Henderson’s work focuses on Go Fish, the1994 movie that ushered in a major shift in media representations of lesbians, this paper takes up the Showtime series The L Word, a similarly ground-breaking text, but one that entered pubic discourse in a very different time of queer community development. While Go Fish grew out of the New Queer Cinema movement, which itself was part of the new community organization that AIDS activism enabled, The L Word reflects a more neoliberally inclined, socially entrenched community. Drawing on interviews with self-identified lesbians who are fans of the show, this paper will question what it is lesbians see when they tune in. It will examine what terms of recognition lesbian fans of the show expect from their viewing and how the show aligns with their ideas of lesbian community and lesbian identity. The paper will particularly focus on how viewers respond to the way the show imagines race, class, and gender, aspects of identity that always impact, and the extent to which these representations impact fans’ ideas of the program and lesbian community. This paper will use interdisciplinary methods drawn from queer studies, media studies, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze the show and the fans’ reaction to it. It is one of a few audience response studies to focus on lesbians, a mode that is critical to exploring the ways in which people interact with cultural productions. Hence, this paper will indicate the extent to which cultural productions cross into our daily lives and senses of self, as well as the extent to which viewers interact with cultural productions in ways that make them dynamic texts.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Many researchers have examined the phenomenon of gay gentrification. However, only Adler and Brenner (1992), Rothenberg (1995), and Valentine (1995) have asked whether the unique circumstances of lesbians, including their increasing interest in raising children, contribute to such displacement. The authors above conducted their research prior to the addition of an “unmarried partner household” category in the 2000 census that allows researchers to accurately identify concentrations of lesbian couples. Using this new data to locate a lesbian community, this paper explores the question of what role, if any, lesbians play in changing neighborhoods and their public institutions. Similar in scope and design to previous studies, I interviewed eight lesbian residents of Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, the most lesbian-dense urban neighborhood in the country. The data from the interviews were compared to existing literature and quantitative data from the United States Census Bureau and the Boston Redevelopment Authority to draw conclusions. My findings suggest that, among other factors, lesbians’ unique family planning decisions have led them to Jamaica Plain and initiated a drastic change in the socioeconomic state of the neighborhood. The extension of this research is especially important as the housing patterns of lesbian couples grow easier to track.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Why are lesbians fans of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) when the league for the most part does not acknowledge their presence? Based on qualitative interviews with female WNBA fans, I argue that lesbians' attendance at WNBA games and experience of being a WNBA fan is part of a dynamic relationship between on one hand, a historical and contemporary experience of women's sports as part of lesbian culture and community and on the other hand, the WNBA's appropriation and commodification of lesbian culture and women's sports.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper shows how lesbianism and pornography are entangled from 1945 to today, and how pro-lesbian fiction writers have encountered, reworked, and fought to untangle that dense matrix. Pornography, voyeurism and most broadly, vision, is central to one major strain of lesbian literature that engages with porn, or more broadly put, voyeurism or vision. To reclaim a usable lesbian past, and to honor the radicalness of a certain strain of lesbian fiction that aspires to, in Teresa de Lauretis’s words, “autonomous lesbian representation”—we have to, in a seemingly contradictory move, discuss pornography.