Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation
Author(s): Arlene Stein (Author)
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication Date: 2 April 1997
- Language: English
- Print length: 268 pages
- ISBN-10: 0520206746
- ISBN-13: 9780520206748
Book Description
In the first book to analyze shifts in lesbian identity, consciousness, and culture from the 1970s to the 1990s, Arlene Stein contributes an important chapter to the study of the women’s movement and offers a revealing portrait of the exchange between a radical generation of feminists and its successors. Tracing the evolution of the lesbian movement from the bar scene to the growth of alternative families, Stein illustrates how a generation of women transformed the woman-centered ideals of feminism into a culture and a lifestyle.
Sex and Sensibility relates the development of a “queer” sensibility in the 1990s to the foundation laid by the gay rights and feminist movements a generation earlier. Beginning with the stories of thirty women who came of age at the climax of the 70s women’s movement-many of whom defined lesbianism as a form of resistance to dominant gender and sexual norms-Stein explores the complex issues of identity that these women confronted as they discovered who they were and defined themselves in relation to their communities and to society at large.
Sex and Sensibility ends with interviews of ten younger women, members of the post-feminist generation who have made it a fashion to dismiss lesbian feminism as overly idealistic and reductive. Enmeshed in Stein’s compelling and personal narrative are coming-out experiences, questions of separatism, work, desire, children, and family. Stein considers the multiple identities of women of color and the experiences of intermittent and “ex” lesbians.
Was the lesbian feminist experiment a success? What has become of these ideas and the women who held them? In answering these questions, Stein illustrates the lasting and profound effect that the lesbian feminist movement had, and continues to have, on contemporary women’s definitions of sexual identity.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“By highlighting the complexity of sexual identity as an individual, cultural, and political project, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of sexuality. But it is also a carefully crafted and compelling history of lesbian feminism in the United States since Stonewall that should be read by anyone interested in the long-term significance of lesbian feminism, especially its contribution to contemporary queer and poststructural debates concerning the fluidity of gender and sexuality”– “Contemporary Sociology”
“Stein has done an important service by reminding us of the radical nature of the lesbian-feminist vision and of the legacy inherited by today’s queer movement. Lesbian feminists opened the way for the critique of gender and sexuality that underlies queer performance. Many of the contributors to Femme acknowledge this debt. They expand the conversation by forcing us to acknowledge femme as another critique of femininity, a mode of resistance that acknowledges the persistence of gender while demanding respect for powerful women with queer desires.”– “Women’s Review of Books”
“Stein presents a clear, accessible discussion of the politics of cultural feminism and lesbian separatism. . . . [
Sex and Sensibility is a] thought-provoking contribution to the expanding research literature on lesbians. . . . [Stein] illuminates consequential connections between sexuality and gender.”– “Gender and Society”
“This is a nuanced, exhaustive history of a vital chapter in a period that was a coming of age in lesbian and gay political and personal consciousness. Stein’s work joins Barry D. Adam’s
The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement (rev. ed., Twayne, 1995), Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (Columbia University Press, 1991), Ken Plummer’s Modern Homosexualities (Routledge, 1992), and others in contributing to the development of what is becoming a lesbian and gay sociological canon.”– “American Journal of Sociology”
From the Inside Flap
“In describing brilliantly the great complexity of sexual identity as an individual, a cultural and a political project, Arlene Stein definitively reshapes our understanding of sexuality. No one, after reading Sex and Sensibility, can think that sexual orientation is an obvious matter.” Nancy J. Chodorow, author of Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond
“Stein does an outstanding job of relating the development of a queer sensibility in the 1990s to the foundation created by gay rights and feminist movements a generation earlier.” Ellen Lewin, author of
Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture
“At last a work that escapes the stultifying quagmire of the feminist ‘sex wars’ between social constructionism and essentialism. Arlene Stein is the Jane Austen of lesbian identity politics.” Judith Stacey, author of
In the Name of the Family
From the Back Cover
“In describing brilliantly the great complexity of sexual identity as an individual, a cultural and a political project, Arlene Stein definitively reshapes our understanding of sexuality. No one, after reading Sex and Sensibility, can think that sexual orientation is an obvious matter.”–Nancy J. Chodorow, author of Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond
“Stein does an outstanding job of relating the development of a queer sensibility in the 1990s to the foundation created by gay rights and feminist movements a generation earlier.”–Ellen Lewin, author of
Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture
“At last a work that escapes the stultifying quagmire of the feminist ‘sex wars’ between social constructionism and essentialism. Arlene Stein is the Jane Austen of lesbian identity politics.”–Judith Stacey, author of
In the Name of the Family
About the Author
Arlene Stein is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Sisters, Sexperts, Queers (1993).
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