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Lesbian Ethics, a U.S. journal of lesbian culture, has offered highly readable philosophical essays, reviews, discussions, and other nonfiction since late 1984 (twelve issues to date). It provides a forum in which the meaning of "lesbian" takes shape from self concepts formed in cooperative interaction and thus lays the groundwork for lesbians becoming publicly recognized as the foremost interpreters of lesbian identity and history.

This paper explores how lesbians aged 18 to 25 negotiate their sexual identity in relation to post-lesbian discourse. Post-lesbian discourse refers to the postmodern conceptualisation of lesbian identity as irrelevant, unnecessary, and minor because of increased acceptance of homosexuality and the popularity of queer theory and its deconstruction of identity categories. In three small focus groups with a total of 10 participants, we explored the themes of word usage, meanings, and associations, as well as exclusion, boundaries, and stigma. We found that our participants' disdain and discomfort with the word "lesbian" does not result, as post-lesbian discourse would suggest, from its irrelevance but rather due to the old yet persisting stigmas towards lesbian sexuality. To mitigate these stigmas, most of our participants use gender-neutral terms, most notably the word "gay," to describe themselves. Using relevant literature, we contextualise the usage of gender-neutral terms and analyse their often-overlooked negative impact on female and lesbian visibility. Moreover, we found that while participants wished to avoid the exclusion and specificity of lesbian spaces, they desired these spaces all the same, which had a positive effect on their identity formation, confidence, and sense of community.

This article examines the ways that sexual and gendered identities are played out in space. By tracing a journey from London to Brighton and back taken during ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that that the complicated ways in which gendered and sexual identities unfold in space reveal the tensions and contradictions in both the real and imagined spaces of lesbian and gay urbanism. Through focusing on the tensions that arose in this journey, this article explores the imaginary of the queer city and the visual regimes and material and embodied practices that construct and occupy these spaces. By drawing on both Judith Butler's and Pierre Bourdieu's work on performativity, embodiment, and cultural capital, this article offers the concept of the lesbian habitus to make sense of the visual and embodied cultures of lesbian identity spaces.