From the earliest marches in 1970 to this month’s events around the Bay Area and the world, Pride has celebrated and commemorated the LGBTQ community’s culture and heritage for over 40 years. While COVID-19 has changed the nature of celebrations this year, UC Press is honored to publish titles that shed light on the unique experiences of LGBTQ individuals and ongoing struggles of the LGBTQ community. The titles featured in this list speak to the lesbian voices and experience.
The Family of Woman
Lesbian Mothers, Their Children, and the Undoing of Gender
by Maureen Sullivan
Amidst the shrill and discordant notes struck in debates over the make-up—or breakdown—of the American family, the family keeps evolving. This book offers a close and clear-eyed look into a form this change has taken most recently, the lesbian coparent family. Based on intensive interviews and extensive firsthand observation, The Family of Woman chronicles the experience of thirty-four families headed by lesbian mothers whose children were conceived by means of donor insemination.With its intimate perspective on the interior dynamics of these families and its penetrating view of their public lives, the book provides rare insight into the workings of emerging family forms and their significance for our understanding of “family”—and our culture itself.
Sex and Sensibility
Stories of a Lesbian Generation
by Arlene Stein
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.
The Family Silver
Essays on Relationships among Women
by Susan Krieger
In an inventive and controversial collection of essays, sociologist Susan Krieger considers the many forms of wealth, both material and emotional, that women pass on to each other. This domestic heritage—the “family silver”—is the keystone for a discussion of mother-daughter relationships, intimate relationships between lesbians, ties between students and feminist teachers, the dilemmas of women in academia as well as in the broader work world, and the importance of female separatism. Drawing on her experiences as a lesbian, a feminist, and a teacher, Krieger presents a stunning critique of higher education. She argues for acknowledging gender in all areas of women’s lives and for valuing women’s inner realities and outer forms of expression.
