By Joy Parks   http://www.gaylinkcontent.com/storydetail.cfm?storyid=1128

Wood, Christine. From Barracks to Barstools: A Sociological Reading of the Lesbian Pulp Fiction Genre  Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Aug 11, 2006Online <PDF>. 2006-10-05.

ABSTRACT: Abstract: Because none exist, this preliminary literature review carves a space for a systematic, cultural-sociological study of the lesbian pulp genre during the 1950s. It draws on scholarly research on lesbian pulp from American studies, cultural studies, literary studies and queer studies. It examines ethnographic writing on the lesbian sub-culture of the 1950s (in particular the bar culture) in order to understand the social context to which these novels correspond. Finally, it examines major contributions to the sociology of sexuality, with specific attention to writing on “class-inflected” dimensions of sexuality. The literature review culminates in a set of preliminary questions that will guide an impending research design.

One of the newsletter’s primary modes of education was the book review. The editors found lesbian representation not only in mainstream novels by D.H. Lawrence, Patrick White, and John Wyndham, but also in contemporary pulp fiction by women such as Ann Bannon, Tereska Torres, and Claire Morgan. My conference paper will examine the representation of lesbian identity in both The Ladder and 1950s lesbian pulp fiction in order to consider the role of literature in the consolidation of North American lesbian identity, the development of the discourse of lesbian self-determination, and the writing of lesbian history in the 1950s. Representing and reading lesbian identity in fiction, I will suggest, offered a way to validate and historicize lesbian identity at a moment when  American Senate Committees threatened to censor depictions of lesbianism as immoral.

Nealon, Christopher S. (Christopher Shaun) 1967- Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction. New Literary History - Volume 31, Number 4, Autumn 2000, pp. 745-764.

ABSTRACT (FIRST PAGE) : Forty years after the demise of the genre, lesbian pulp fiction seems both funny and sad. In part, the novels seem funny because of their outrageous melodrama; and sad because the women who wrote the most popular lesbian pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties were always under pressure to remember that, officially, they were writing for a male readership, who would best appreciate stories that would ultimately either punish lesbian characters (with suicide or insanity), or "reform" them (with men for sexual partners). But the ambivalence about the novels extends to its latter-day readers: as lesbian pulp gets claimed as US queer "heritage," it turns out to be hard to say what exactly is being claimed--is it the novels' production, or their consumption? Is it the courage it took to have written such novels in the McCarthy era, or the camp pleasure we feel, reading them now, that we can recycle earlier forms of pain at an ironic distance? Another way of putting this ambivalence is to say that, in most readings of lesbian pulp fiction today, two theories of US queer history are at work, each animating a particular kind of historical affect--a feeling about history, and a feeling generated by it--and each making a different claim on our understanding of the last half-century. Both approaches to the pulps take for granted that things are better now than they used to be; but they see the relationship between the homosexual past and the lesbian, gay, queer present in slightly different terms. In one reading, the melodrama of the...