Paper short abstract:

Drawing on Fanon, this paper discusses the contested representations of feminine lesbianism amongst British expats in a gay tourist town in Spain. Any potential challenge feminine lesbianism poses gets cancelled-out, as media images are used to resignify it as an extension of female heterosexuality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the effects that constructions of lesbianism - generated and circulated widely throughout the Anglo-American media - have on normative discourses of gender and sexuality amongst British expats living in the affluent tourist town of Sitges, Spain. Sitges is marketed as a 'cosmopolitan' location par excellence; an identity built partly on its reputation for playing host to an internationally diverse gay community. As alternative sexual identities are rendered explicitly visible within this cosmopolitan place-marketing discourse, British expats subsequently regard it as a space of tolerance and equality.

Despite this, specifically feminine lesbianism challenges the normative gender paradigm in a way that masculine lesbianism does not. I show how expats draw on media constructions within their everyday interactions to resignify feminine lesbianism as an extension of female heterosexuality, cancelling-out any challenge feminine lesbianism initially poses to prevailing gender norms. I argue that this resignification is based on particular understandings of 'representation' in which the act of having been made visible is understood to thereby render those visible differences equally and positively-valued.

Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon (1967) and Kelly Oliver (1998; 2001), I suggest that this conflation actually confers a 'double alienation' so that through this resignification, all female homosexuality paradoxically becomes invisible at the exact moment representation and 'equality' is explicitly deemed to have been achieved. Far from elaborating a cosmopolitan 'openness towards difference', I argue that the resulting double alienation actually substantiates, and concretises highly conservative gender norms, even as it masquerades as the opposite.