ABSTRACT
The opportunities in industrialized sectors of the world for women to live and work independent of traditional kinship ties have created the conditions where it is possible for more and more women to refuse marriage and to shape our lives around affective, sexualized bonds with one another. On the one hand, lesbian relationships, identities, and desires are more possible and allowed — increasingly destigmatized, incorporated into the mainstream, and even glamorized in popular film, television, and advertising. More and more young women in their teens and twenties are experimenting openly in sexual relationships with other women (and I think “experimenting” may be the key word here). Nonetheless, even in youth culture, to identify as “lesbian” is still to risk derision (as opposed to claiming the more palatable “bisexual”), and lesbians are still persistently “overlooked” in social policy, social services, health care, and other areas of social life.
