Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women » (New Edition)

Leila J. Rupp is professor of feminist studies and associate dean of the division of social sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of many books, including A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Sexuality in America.

From the ancient poet Sappho to tombois in contemporary Indonesia, women throughout history and around the globe have desired, loved, and had sex with other women. In beautiful prose, Sapphistries tells their stories, capturing the multitude of ways that diverse societies have shaped female same-sex sexuality across time and place.

Leila J. Rupp reveals how, from the time of the very earliest societies, the possibility of love between women has been known, even when it is feared, ignored, or denied. We hear women in the sex-segregated spaces of convents and harems whispering words of love. We see women beginning to find each other on the streets of London and Amsterdam, in the aristocratic circles of Paris, in the factories of Shanghai. We find women’s desire and love for women meeting the light of day as Japanese schoolgirls fall in love, and lesbian bars and clubs spread from 1920s Berlin to 1950s Buffalo. And we encounter a world of difference in the twenty-first century, as transnational concepts and lesbian identities meet local understandings of how two women might love each other.

Giving voice to words from the mouths and pens of women, and from men’s prohibitions, reports, literature, art, imaginings, pornography, and court cases, Rupp also creatively employs fiction to imagine possibilities when there is no historical evidence. Sapphistries combines lyrical narrative with meticulous historical research, providing an eminently readable and uniquely sweeping story of desire, love, and sex between women around the globe from the beginning of time to the present.

Publishers Weekly

In this ambitious history of love, desire and sex between women, Rupp (A Desired Past) traces a path from antiquity to the present day, from tales of the Amazons, pirates (and possible lovers) Anne Bonny and Mary Read, communities of Montenegrin and Albanian “sworn virgins” and 1920s Berlin nightlife to the emergence of lesbian feminism in the 1970s and modern-day Thai “toms” (masculine women) and “dees” (the women who love them). She explores why studies in homosexuality have been so preoccupied with same-sex love between men and launches an investigation into the female counterpart—its penalties, manifestations, artistic depictions and the public and private life of its participants. The narrative shines when Rupp describes love between women in its many forms, whether innocent (the schoolgirl “raves” of early 20th-century England) or romantic (intense “romantic friendships” throughout the Western world) or outright erotic. With acute cultural sensitivity and a panoramic scope stretching from early Native American societies to contemporary India, Rupp delivers an academically rigorous and brilliantly told history. (Dec.)\