Róisín Ryan-Flood is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship (CISC) at the University of Essex, UK. Her research interests encompass gender, sexuality, kinship, digital intimacies, and feminist epistemology. Her books include Lesbian Motherhood: Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship (2009), Difficult Conversations: A Feminist Dialogue (2023) and Consent: Gender, Power and Subjectivity (2023). She is co-editor of the journal Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society.

Amy Tooth Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Her research interests include butch/femme identities and culture, and queer oral history theory and method. She is the co-editor of New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Disruption and is a Trustee of the Oral History Society.

Foreword

Introduction

SECTION 1: (IN)VISIBILITY AND THE QUEER GAZE

1. Queer old movie star

2. Staging our desires: Drag kings and the pleasures of community building

3. 'In their loving gaze I saw who I could be': Revisiting the butch/femme couple as joint subject through Esther Newton's My Butch Career

4. Transcripts, TransTape(TM), Transience: Locating the bisexual butch

5. The punchline isn't everything: Feminist and queer stand-up dramedy

6. Gender, sexuality and visual culture - an interview with Rosalind Gill

SECTION 2: LINEAGE AND GENERATIONAL SHIFTS

7. Femme frontiers: Tracing the lineage of fore-femmes through to contemporary identities and femme theory

8. Book Banning in the U.S.: A call for multi-generational activism

9. From Butch and Femme Lesbians to Non-binary and Queer Women: Intergenerational Shifts from In-person Places to Digital Spaces

10. Carabiners and Violet Tattoos: the desire for nostalgia in online lesbian space

11. Increased Lesbian Visibility and its Discontents: Comparing the coming out stories of women and nonbinary people across generations

12. Queer lineage: On generational sexualities, LGBTQ identity and visibility

SECTION 3: QUEER EMBODIMENT

13. Against Pathology: Exploring the Desire for Femininity

14. Complicating queer desires: Identity politics of the lesbian and bisexual communities in South Africa

15. My own private non-binary body

16. 'Aren't you ashamed?': Explicit representation and shame in the work of Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson and Melissa Febos

17. Trans history and politics - an interview with Susan Stryker

18. Midlife lesbian: Alison Bechdel and Me

SECTION 4: QUEER LONGINGS

19. Desiring Technologies: Digital Pathways toward Black Queer Sociality

20. The butch on the ferry: The affect and effect of butch longing

21. Desire on the Inside: Incarcerated Women, Bisexual Identity, and Human Connection

22. Queering romance: Expressions of love and intimacy in late-twentieth-century lesbian relationships

23. Intimacy or intimacies? Queering Jewish women's desires and intimate lives

24. Naming desire: Information seeking and breaking the silence around queer female desire in mid-twentieth-century Britain

25. Beloved: Crafting lesbian desire and femme intimacies with the Ladies of Llangollen