Lesbians Walk the Tightrope of Beauty

ABSTRACT

This research addressed how lesbians are influenced by and respond to beauty constructions of dominant culture while they simultaneously redefine and create their own meaning of beauty within lesbian communities. A sample of 181 lesbian and bisexual women from the Sacramento area completed a survey examining their reasons for exercising, amount and type of exercise, body image and satisfaction with weight, eating disorder symptoms, perceptions of lesbian health threats, degree of feminist identification, appearance as a form of lesbian identification, and change of appearance after coming out. Whereas feminism served as a buffer against negative body image, the body image results found lesbians to be bound to dominant culture's thinness expectations. Other findings, however, also suggest that lesbians define beauty in their own unique way. Moving beyond simply responding to traditional beauty pressures, lesbians in this study also used beauty markers as a creative strategy to find and identify each other, suggesting that one purpose of lesbian beauty is functional.