Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures

Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies

by Evelyn Blackwood (Editor), Saskia Wieringa (Editor)

Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa have compiled thirteen essays from a group of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists who discuss same-sex desire among women outside the West, exploring female eroticism in such societies and cultures as India, Polynesia, Latin America, Native North America, and southern Africa.Female Desires offers compelling evidence against the commonly accepted notion that non-Western women are generally passive victims of male domination and compulsory heterosexuality. It also dispels the idea that same-sex female desire is rooted in Western neo-imperialist culture: contributors show non-Western women to be active agents of their own sexual identities. Essays include Giti Thadani on lesbian desire in ancient and modern India, Saskia Wieringa on butch-femme social types in Indonesia and Peru, and Norma Mogrovejo on the lesbian movement in Mexico. In a larger sense, the essays attempt to look past the ethnocentric categories in which sexuality, identity, and culture are often considered.

Genres: LGBT, Nonfiction, Lesbian, Transgender, Sexuality

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[fausto · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of articles about cross-cultural accounts on women-loving-women and female third genders, I really love the uniqueness of this anthology by far the only one I know focus enterely to lesbian anthropology (but Leila Rupp's book Sapphistries goes in the same line) the only article I really don´t like is the Evelyn Blackwood's analysis of butch lesbians in Indonesia, she analyzes them as part of the trans-men collective and use weird queer pronouns on the way. But in general, an excellent collection!

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book starts off great. The two essays (co-written by the editors) that begin the collection are excellent, and they give a good overview of the field as it currently exists. The subsequent essays discuss differing gender performances, gender identities, sexual practices, and sexual identities held by women in various different places in the world – Lesotho, Indonesia, Polynesia, Peru, India, Suriname. The final three essays of the book, however, are unrelated to the book's central philosophical investments; they are histories of lesbian and gay movements and anti-feminist/anti-gay oppression in particular places – México, Zimbabwe, Malaysia – and they don't really make much sense as part of this collection. When the book is at its best it is inquiring as to transgender practices and how they intersect with lesbian desire, local gender norms, and understandings about sexuality.