Similar to Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, this is a sociological study from the 1990s on lesbian and bisexual women. In this case, all of the women are from the same college town community. Some of them are affiliated with the university, and some of them are not. Esterberg conducted initial interviews with them over a period of a couple years, and then came back a few years later to do follow-ups and see what (if anything) had changed.
The chapters cover topics such as, how do the women identify themselves? How did they come to identify this way? How have their identities and lives changed over time? How do race and class interact with their sexual identities? What does it mean to them to “be a lesbian” or “act lesbian”? What is the lesbian community like? What are the kinds of lesbians or lesbian social groups in their community? What internal rules or expectations are there? And how do the bisexual women in the community fit in or not fit in?
Quotes and Passages I Marked
Quote from Stuart Hall at the beginning of Chapter 2 about how identity is always “a cover story” and identity can be better conceptualized as the ongoing process of identification since it’s always in progress
p.32— Esterberg says the women interviewed referred to “4 different dimensions of lesbian identity” — 1) having sex with women, 2) having emotional relationships with women (does this mean romantic? Idk), 3) making their relationships with women central to their lives (including friendships), and 4) political dimension. One respondent (p.34) says she sees this political dimension as including that as a lesbian, people don’t expect her to act like other women, so she has more freedom from those standards. She says her brother in law treats her like her own person, instead of just As A Woman
p.41 “Coming-out stories…tell women how to interpret and recast their own past experiences to bring them in line with their current identities” — Esterberg also notes that the negative side of this is, her experiences didn’t match up with the coming out narratives she was familiar with, so she was very confused and worried she wasn’t actually a lesbian since her childhood experiences didn’t line up
p.45 “Other women felt that contact with other lesbians— both in person and through reading— was important in their coming out.” Yeah it definitely never occurred to me that I might like girls until I learned through others that it was POSSIBLE to like girls. Some people come to that on their own, even if they feel like they must be the only ones. I never did.
p.47— question of “can you choose to be a lesbian?” answer from one person: “Maybe.” Some respondents thought definitely yes, some thought definitely no, others thought some people can and some people can’t, etc.
p.49— quote from a respondent— “I think that all women are lesbians. I think it has to do with intimacy. In our society, I think to be with a man is to choose abuse. That’s negating one’s self, because they have power over us in this society. If that did not exist, then I think people would have freedom to choose.” There’s a lot to unpack here lol
p.52- quote from another respondent- “I’ve gotten to do so many of the things that I couldn’t even imagine wanting to do [if I were heterosexual], ‘cause there was no room to begin to imagine doing them.” I think this quote is important— some stuff imposed on us by heteronormativity doesn’t even have much directly to do with sexuality at all. But it still restricts those possibilities, because you’re so busy doing The Straight Things You’re Supposed To Do that it can’t occur to you to do those other things.
p.53— citation of Celia Kitzinger who identifies 5 kinds of lesbian identities— radical feminist, transitional, “special person,” individualistic, and lesbianism as path to personal fulfillment.
p.80— chapter on “performing lesbian identity”
p.88— section on gaydar and “what a lesbian looks like”
p.158— section on “the elusiveness of bisexual community”
Sources Marked
Rust 1992a and 1992b and 1993, Weinberg, Williams, Pryor 1994, Garber 1995, Klein 1993 — all listed as sources on bisexuality