Watch the full recording of the Lesbians on Chairs event from London in May 2019 here. Organised by Standing for Women, speakers include Sheila Jeffreys, Julia Long, Lesley Woodburn, Julia Beck and Dovile Lapinskaite. Chair was Anne Ruzlyo.

The Lesbian Revolution: lesbian feminism in the UK 1970-1990 Sheila Jeffreys FiLiA Salford, Greater Manchester October 2018   I am going to talk today about my new book The Lesbian Revolution: lesbian feminism in the UK 1970-1990. The book is a history of lesbian feminism, and I wrote it with two purposes. One was simply […]

The number of British women having same-sex encounters has quadrupled in the last 20 years, according to the largest ever survey of Britain’s sexual habits. The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles revealed a remarkable change in women’s sexual behaviour since the first survey two decades ago. Guests: Professor Sheila Jeffreys Lecturer in international […]

I have a radical lesbian feminist position on marriage which is well expressed by the US lesbian legal theorist Ruthann Robson (1992) who argues for the general abolition of marriage saying that ‘lesbian survival is not furthered by embracing the law’s rule of marriage. Our legal energy is better directed at abolishing marriage as a […]

In this article, I shall examine the ideas and practices of the bisexual movement that has developed in the Western world in the last decade. I shall offer a lesbian feminist critique. Bisexual theorists and activists have formulated critiques of lesbian feminism at their conferences and in anthologies of their writings. Lesbian feminists have been […]

Feminist analysis of transsexualism such as that of Janice Raymond has seen it as a deeply conservative phenomenon in which surgical mutilation is employed to maintain the genders of male dominance and female subordination. Transsexualism has a new face in the nineties in “transgenderism” which employs queer and postmodern theory to render transsexualism progressive. This […]

Feminist theorizing on heterosexuality has taken place in rather a stop/start fashion over the last 20 years. The punishments which are regularly visited upon those who seek to draw heterosexuality out of the protective camouflage of “nature” or “just the way things are”, and into the spotlight of political analysis can be considerably – and […]

This article suggests that the developing field of lesbian and gay studies shows a likelihood to discriminate against the interests of lesbians and certainly against lesbian feminist theory, through the incorporation of a ‘queer’ perspective. Recent writings in the field suggest that ‘queer’ theory and politics are and should be based on the celebration of […]