num_pages: 146
description: Explore affirmation and coping rituals for lesbian singles, couples, and communities!This pioneering book is a multidisciplinary compilation of scholarship addressing lesbians, the rituals in their lives, and the meaning and impact of those rituals for the women involved and the people and communities around them. It offers a diverse range of perspectives on what it means to be a lesbian, what ritual is, what it means to enact a ritual, and how we can understand lesbian ritual experiences.Lesbian Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community presents five explorations of ritual that bring forth themes of lesbian-centered social change. In addition, Lesbian Rites also includes two chapters that examine how lesbians have been compromised, if not harmed, by the ritualization of heterosexism and homophobia. The first is an insightful analysis of the community response to the feminist retreat known as Camp Sister Spirit. In this chapter, Kate Greene uses Mary Daly's seven patterns of sado-ritual syndrome to show how the people opposed to the camp were organized to uphold heterosexual patriarchy through an obsession with purity that defined the camp as a refuge for immorality. The second chapter on this subject reviews the editor's own experiences of being hidden and devalued at heterosexual family weddings.
language: English
title: Lesbian Rites: Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community
titlecomplete: Lesbian Rites: Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community
genres: Lesbian, Feminism, Queer, LGBT
ratings_count: 3
publisher: Routledge