sapphism

Their suspected sapphism made the couple the target of attacks, true--but it also served as an inspiration for many self-avowed female lovers of their own sex, both in the lifetime of the Ladies of Llangollen and in the centuries since.

[and] suggests that sapphism, though unspeakable, may also be desired" (Lanser 10).

11, Pamela Dunbar describes sapphism as 'a modish nineties narcissism'.

The publication of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, which he originally intended to title Les Lesbiennes, is the starting point for Myriam Robic's comprehensive study of sapphism in French poetry from the period 1846-1889.

Sapphism, he says, is of 'equal ardour' as male homosexuality, but it involves less fantasy than its masculine homosexual counterpart: 'feminine love is less artistic and less about adoration than is masculine love' (p718)--another formulation whose unselfconscious partisanship cannot wholly obscure the radical potential of its logic.

Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern British Lesbian Culture.

But I find that "lesbian" is not simply a placeholder for women who loved women; I think it can give us a useful shortcut for evoking a whole range of words that have been used to describe attachments between women, ranging from such seemingly neutral words as sapphism, sexual inversion, and homosexuality to pornographic slang such as tribade, fricatrice, and "doing the flats." Like Ellis, I think the word "lesbian" still has an important place in our vocabulary for the study of sexual behaviors among women, though I agree with Nan Alamilla Boyd that it may be most useful to see "lesbian" as a historical artifact created at a particular period and used only intermittently as a self-defining noun.

Lesbian dames; Sapphism in the long eighteenth century.

Knopp " 'If I saw you would you kiss me?' Sapphism and Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando," in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed.

"'If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?': Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando." PMLA 103.1 (Jan 1988): 24-34.