TY - JOUR TI - Risking everything for that touch DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3J964P2 PY - 2014 AB - Risking Everything for That Touch examines lesbian culture in New York City from the end of World War II in 1945 to the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the late-1960s and early-1970s. Analyzing gendered subjectivities, erotics, self-fashioning, cultural rituals, and the production and distribution of sexual knowledge, it demonstrates the pervasiveness of butch-femme – a gendered style of lesbianism that encompasses dress and appearance, behaviors and mannerisms, courtship, relationships, and sex. But it also expands and complicates prevailing notions of this prominent erotic dyad. Rather than the uniformity implied by historical depictions of stark visual contrast and firm sexual standards, this dissertation explores the ways that varied groups of lesbians interpreted butch-femme identities and roles, demonstrating that they showed remarkable creativity and ingenuity in negotiating a hostile dominant culture while remaining fiercely committed to queer sexual and gendered explorations. Women played with queer legibility according to personal preference and the level of risk they encountered, and explored their sexuality both within and beyond the gendered framework of their culture. Moreover, lesbians maintained a complicated connection to postwar norms, displaying a sexual fortitude that flouted dominant ideologies of womanhood while remaining entangled with normative ideologies of gender and romance. Drawing on sources rooted in the voices and experiences of postwar femmes and butches, such as oral histories and memoirs, I take an ethnographic approach to this historical moment, recreating the sights, sounds, and emotions of postwar lesbian life. This dissertation offers a window into their world, their culture, their understandings of themselves, and the meanings that they created under difficult circumstances. In the process, it demonstrates the flexibility and ingenuity of that powerful and enduring style of queer erotics – butch-femme. KW - History KW - Lesbian culture--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century KW - Lesbians--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century KW - Butch and femme (Lesbian culture)--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century LA - eng ER -