Journal of Lesbian Studies

“Sapphic Renaissance”? Critical Perspectives on Lesbian Pop Culture

If previous decades were defined by lesbian erasure, the present moment is defined by lesbian hypervisibility. Lesbians now occupy center stage across film, music, television, social media, and even the news. Films such as Love Lies Bleeding, Bottoms, Drive-Away Dolls, and Girls Like Girls have found mainstream audiences, while artists including Chappell Roan, Reneé Rapp, and Kehlani are consolidating a sapphic pop canon. Reality programs such as I Kissed a Girl and The Ultimatum: Queer Love, together with lesbian influencers whose content circulates through algorithmically driven platforms, address both lesbian and heterosexual gazes and, in doing so, reconfigure lesbian identities, erotics, and community norms. Meanwhile, period and nostalgia-driven series such as Gentleman Jack, Stranger Things, Yellowjackets, and Derry Girls are reimagining the lesbian past for contemporary viewers. Strikingly, sapphic, lesbian, and queer women’s narratives continue to proliferate amid a virulent anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ political backlash. This paradox of heightened visibility alongside intensified hostility demands sustained critical attention to contemporary sapphic representation.

This special issue examines how lesbian representation and sapphic desire are constructed in popular culture across a range of media, including film, television, music, sports,  and content-creation platforms such as TikTok. We are equally interested in how these representations affect contemporary lesbian and heterosexual audiences. We invite critical analyses of the political, economic, and cultural forces that produce and shape new sapphic representations, lesbian identities, relationships, and cultures, as well as the forms of inclusion and exclusion they perpetuate.

We welcome submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• New Lesbian Depictions
  What new narratives of lesbian identity are emerging in the contemporary media landscape? How does today’s lesbian representation break from, or build on, the lesbian past? How are platforms, algorithms, and emerging technologies reshaping the models available for lesbian genders, relationships, socialities, and politics? We are particularly interested in how current media depictions transgress longstanding stereotypes of lesbians, and in how platform logics, commercial pressures, and mainstream circulation may appropriate lesbian culture or depoliticize lesbian identities.
• Histories of Lesbian Popular Culture
  How are historical lesbian figures, along with gender-nonconforming, queer, and trans women of the past, reimagined in popular culture today? How have new technological affordances transformed the production, circulation, and reception of lesbian media? How do digitization, online archives, and platform cultures shape what we remember of the lesbian past and how it is remediated for contemporary audiences? How does historical lesbian media inform the lesbian media of today, and which sapphic icons of the past continue to shape lesbian popular culture?

• Sapphic Fandom and Lesbian “Ships”
  How do lesbian and non-lesbian audiences engage with, interpret, and invest in lesbian “ships” across popular media, sports, art, and music? How is lesbian fandom shaped, mediated, or contested by the heterosexual gaze? How do lesbian pairings shape fan spaces and practices, both online and offline, and what forms of community, creativity, and affective investment do they produce?

• Lesbian Subjectivities
  How do images, media, and influencers shape lesbian adolescence, coming-out processes, sense of communities, romantic relationships, sexuality, and gender formations? How do lesbian communities in different parts of the globe create online communities and produce culturally specific lesbian subjectivities? What are the effects of hegemonic American, white, and Western media production on non-white and non-Western spaces locally and globally?

We welcome work from a wide range of disciplines and methodological approaches, including but not limited to media studies, the sociology of media, critical theory, and cultural studies.