Lesbian Images in International Popular Culture

Lesbian images are everywhere these days-cable television, film, popular magazines, advertising, Internet and the news-creating desire in men and women alike, selling commercial products and services, and stirring up controversy on many levels. But do these images truly represent the diverse identities of women-centered women worldwide? This book addresses the limited access to images of diverse and international lesbian identities and experiences, in order to provide the reader with a more complete understanding of what it means to be lesbian in a global context. It investigates how lesbians portray themselves as well as how they are portrayed by others in several areas of popular culture, including television, film, the arts, Internet, advertising and the news. It features articles on U. S. lesbian cartoonists, Canadian viewer perceptions of lesbians on the cable show Queer as Folk, panoramic looks at lesbians' representation in Australian and Spanish television programming, and in-depth explorations of films by Spanish director Pedro Almodó var, leading Indian film producers, and independent Chinese-American filmmakers.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

1. Looking at Lesbians Internationally: An Introduction Sara E. Cooper 2. Lesbian Weddings and the Revenge of the Clones Jen Bacon 3. "It Feels More Like a Parody": Canadian Queer as Folk Viewers and the Show They Love to Complain About Wendy Peters 4. Screening the Dykes of Oz: Lesbian Representation on Australian Television Rebecca Beirne 5. We Are Family? Spanish Law and Lesbian Normalization in Hospital Central M onica Calvo and Maite Escudero 6. Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Dark Habits: Lesbian "Families" in the Films of Pedro Almod ovar Mar ia DiFrancesco 7. Articulating "Indianness": Woman-Centered Desire and the Parameters for Nationalism Shamira A. Meghani 8. Looking for Asian Butch-Dykes: Exploring Filmic Representations of East Asian Butch-Dykes in Donna Lee's Enter the Mullet Hui-Ling Lin 9. Through the Postcolonial Eyes: Images of Gender and Female Sexuality in Contemporary South Africa Henriette Gunkel 10. Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics Adrienne Shaw 11. "Them Ol' Nasty Lesbians"-Queer Memory, Place, and Rural Formations of Lesbian Reta Ugena Whitlock 12. Fad Lesbianism: Exposing Media's Posing Katherine Wirthlin