Meanings
- uncountableA fetishistic fascination (typically in non-lesbians) with lesbians and erotic contact between women.
It is his lesbophilia that sets Proust's narrator apart from the author, that marks the novel as a novel rather than a perverse exercise in selective autobiography.
1999, Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust's Lesbianism, Cornell University Press, published 1999, →ISBN, page 1332 more examples
More broadly, we might ask to what extent French literature, with its twin associations of high culture and lesbophilia, came to be an oblique but acceptable signifier for lesbianism in the popular imagination of the twentieth century.
2001, Gretchen Schultz, “Daughters of Bilitis: Literary Genealogy and Lesbian Authenticity”, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 7, number 3Sweel Charity, like other backstage musicals, finds women in dressing rooms, sharing stockings and make-up, stories and sympathy in a setting that ideologically conveys rampant lesbophilia in the history of sexuality and offers spectatorial pleasures for feminist audiences.
2004, Stacy Wolf, "'Something Better than This': Sweet Charity and the Feminist Utopia of Broadway Musicals", Modern Drama, Volume 47, Number 2, Summer 2004
Origin
Cite this entry
lesbophilia. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/lesbophilia
“lesbophilia.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/lesbophilia. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “lesbophilia,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/lesbophilia.
Source: lesbophilia on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.