The Lesbian Style Wars

Lesbian communities, in San Francisco and elsewhere, have undergone tremendous shifts in tone and emphasis during the past decade (Stein 476).

This is partly a generational battleground as younger lesbians structure sexual identities based on elements of seventies lesbian-feminism, punk, and other influences. The battle is to redefine lesbianism for a new generation. One element has been the fact that lesbianism is becoming more visible as part of the American cultural landscape, appearing in advertising and other cultural expressions (Stein 476).

At the same time, Becker, Citron, Lesage, and Rich find that while lesbian imagery is seen in film, it is suppressed as far as creating any positive images is concerned. Lesbianism as an explicit vision is left to pornography, and depictions of women in any context in film are determined by male fantasy and male power:

As long as lesbianism remains a component of pornography made by and for men, lesbian sexuality will be received by most sectors of the dominant society as pornography (Becker, Citron, Lesage, and Rich 27).

. . .
s affected American society in far-reaching and unexpected ways, touching our institutions, our value systems, and our private lives. Social issues of long standing have been changed and distorted because of AIDS. The disease has raised questions of discrimination in housing, employment, insurance, and medical services. As the readings show, however, AIDS is not merely a disease but has become a cultural artifact and in some ways a culture of its own. Yingling cites the need to make seine of AIDS and finds that this is a process that has already begun, "even if only in noting how it defeats our usual academic practice of careful, inclusive analysis" (Yingling 292). He also notes that the disease follows a process in destroying and changing the body that can be seen in how it destroys or changes "our cultural assumptions about identity, justice, desire, and knowledge" to such a degree that "it seems at times able to threaten the entire system of Western thought" (Yingling 292). Of course, as Nunokawa notes, awareness of AIDS has followed the destruction it has brought about in the homosexual community in terms of a "morbid delineation of gay identity in current constructions of people with AIDS" (Nunokawa 312). The disea
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Approximate Word count = 2763
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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