ABSTRACT
Lesbianism is the term used to describe a sexual orientation, sexual acts and desires, and romantic and sexual love between women. During the period known as the feminist Second Wave across the Western world, roughly from the late 1960s and into the late 1980s, an influential school of feminism emerged called lesbian feminism. This school of feminism put into practice and further developed theory from another adjacent strand of feminism, radical feminism. Lesbian feminism did not always emphasise lesbianism as a sexuality, but sometimes, in its rhetoric, presented this as a political choice to prioritise women, within a feminist context. Linked to this is the phenomenon of political lesbianism, frequently mistaken to mean enforced sexual relations between women, regardless of their sexual preferences. Political lesbianism, in fact, heralded from an essentialist form of cultural feminism, which promoted the reclamation and aggrandisement of women’s social role in patriarchy as a superior form of value and culture which should be adopted by all, men and women, regardless of their sexuality. In this chapter, I will explain and explore these terms and the strands of feminism they are associated with.
