IAS Book Launch: Lesbian Intimacies and Family Life

Taking a transnational perspective, Lesbian Intimacies and Family Life: Desire, domesticity and kinship in Britain and Australia, 1945-2000 (Bloomsbury, 2023) traces the relationship models and familial patterns constructed by lesbians and same-sex attracted women living in Britain and Australia between 1945 and 2000. Combining personal stories with analysis of representations of lesbian intimacy in literature, press articles, medical texts, and archival material, the book demonstrates the ways in which changing political and cultural concepts of sexuality impacted on individual and collective attitudes, highlighting the huge variety in women’s experiences. Through considering histories of lesbian desire within marriage and the experience of lesbian mothers in divorce courts, this book shows how lesbian relationships provided alternative models of interpersonal relations, impacting on broader patterns of sexuality, and helping redefine notions of the family in the modern era.

The discussion will be chaired by Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (UCL History). She will be joined by Professor Matt Cook (Jonathan Cooper Professor of the History of Sexualities, Mansfield College, Oxford) and Professor Alison Oram (Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research) who will comment on the book and its significance for the field.  

For more information about the book visit www.bloomsbury.com.