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EVELYN BLACKWOOD and SASKIA E. WIERINGA, eds., Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 348 p.
The essays in this volume offer a powerful contribution to lesbian, gender and sexuality studies in anthropology. The authors bring together complex analyses of gender, sexuality and "female same-sex desires" outside of North American and European contexts, paying particular attention to post-colonial politics, local and transnational lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and feminist movements and the impact of homophobia on women's lives and lived expressions of desire. Read in dialogue with each other, the essays invoke critical attention to, and problematize, the polarization of essentialist and constructionist theories of sexuality.
In the Introduction, Blackwood and Wieringa, trace the development of feminist studies of sexuality and female same-sex desires, outlining the contributions of key theorists from Gayle Rubin to Judith Butler. The editors also relate the dilemmas of defining both the bodies (i.e. material female bodies including female to male transgender individuals) and the politics (i.e. choosing the gender specific "lesbian" as opposed to "queer" and not defining same-sex/same-gender practices as "lesbian")...