Spectacular lesbians : discourses of same-sex desire from the Renaissance to the present

A. Lindenmeyer

Review of:Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550-1714. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001.Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000.Sherry Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000.Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novels1796-1996. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000.Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.The books reviewed in the following essay span more than 400 years of Iesbian literary and cultural history, beginning in the English renaissance and ending with contemporary French Iesbian novels. The theme that unites them is the ever-developing discourse of Iesbian sexuality and women's agency in adapting it, rebelling against it or successfully evading it. Another ongoing concern is the development of female masculinities, reaching from monstrous, phallic tribades and cross-dressing Amazons and warriors to masculine female dressing styles in the 1920s. Although historical circumstances are markedly different in different times and places, the paralleIs between them are surprising and fascinating: it goes without saying that all these books would be highly interesting for anyone doing research in the field of sexualities.