Sapphic Representation: Why is it so hard to find?

Lesbian is not a dirty word. Sapphic is not a dirty word.

But somehow, it is still much more acceptable to be a gay man than it is to be a queer* woman, and this is represented in literature; it is much easier to find well-written books about gay men than it is to find their sapphic counterparts.

In recent years, though, sapphic literature has become more popular and been better received, and hopefully one day soon this will no longer be true.

I think a lot of the issue goes back to one that stands at the core of gender studies, queer studies, and cultural studies, among many other literary disciplines. For much of literary history, female characters have simply not been as fleshed out as male characters. Virginia Woolf wrote about this phenomenon in A Room Of One's Own, back in 1929, and Alison Bechdel drew our collective attention to it again in the creation of the Bechdel test in 1985.

Both authors, interestingly, can be considered sapphic writers. Virginia Woolf's same-sex relationship with Vita Sackville-West is well known, now, and Alison Bechdel is a self-identified lesbian.

Due to the lack of representation (and truly, the history of the criminalization and repression of sexuality), there is relatively little good sapphic literature to be compared to, and therefore some authors can get away with writing extremely surface-level, poorly structured, and stereotypical books. I have seen multiple people online, recently, say that they want to read more sapphic books but cannot find many well-written works. They say they would rather not read any sapphic literature at all than keep reading the same poorly done plots and shallow characters, which I totally understand.

Who wants to read about their identity in a way that is poorly done, and just makes the divide between a minority identity and a majority identity even more clear?

Thankfully, more and more sapphic media is created every year, and I have hope that one day the genre will be full of amazing books that can rival any other genre. And of course, so many fantastic sapphic books do exist. Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:

1. This is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar