It's often the case that my bibliography includes not only substantial books on queer history, but the articles written by the same author as they developed the material--sometimes across decades. I have a couple articles by Turton in my list, and this one seemed like a good chaser.
LHMP
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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 304 - On the Shelf for January 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/01/04 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2025.
It feels very tidy to finish up this book on the last day of the year. While 2024 didn't achieve my theoretical goal of posting a blog once a week, I did come closer than I expected, thanks to several bursts of productivity when reading for specific podcast topics.
2025, of course, is going to see a lot of change due to my retirement. I hope to plunge deeply into getting more material read and blogged, filling in the gaps in the table of contents for my sourcebook project, and of course getting back to writing the fiction that all this research is (theoretically) supporting.
While the purpose of this book is not entirely to lead up to how the OED became the thing that it is, this chapter feels like everything was leading to this moment. Without understanding the long history of editorial moral anxiety over the content of dictionaries, the specific choices made in compiling what was intended to be a neutral "scientific" record of the English language might seem more sinister than they were. And yet here we are: a work that purports to objectivity and yet systematically and deliberately erases, obscures, and vilifies f/f sexuality.
Genre turns out to be a key factor in whether lesbians are documented in dictionaries.
When Turton lays out the details of how vocabulary for f/f sex was deliberately omitted, obscured, and removed from dictionaries -- especially in comparison to how vocabulary for m/m sex was handled -- it becomes clear how badly queer historians have stumbled in relying on dictionary entries as evidence that "they didn't even have a word for it." One of the things I'm working on for my Sapphic Sourcebook is a collection of these vocabulary items, along with the dates, sources, and contexts, to help provide authors with a counter to the "common wisdom."
This chapter picks up a theme we've seen regularly across time and geography, where everyone attributes the origins of same-sex sexuality to "foreigners" and as something that only happened long ago (or at least, has only recently arrived in the speaker's home territory).
In reading about the history of how dictionary publishers deliberately obscured or silenced discussions of sex -- especially of non-normative sex -- I can't help but think of the current (and periodic) panics over controlling the access of children to information about sex and gender. The attitude prevalent in the early modern period that simply knowing about certain sex acts could "infect" someone with an urge to commit them is still an underlayer to current concerns.
If someone told you there was a sustained conspiracy to suppress lesbian history, would you believe it? Or would you consider the idea a bit paranoid? When you look at the history of how words for f/f sexuality were handled across the long history of dictionaries of the English language, it's hard to find a more accurate word than "conspiracy" to describe the systematic obscuring, suppression, and censorship involved.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 303 - Interview with Margaret Vandenburg - transcript
(Originally aired 2024/12/15 - listen here)
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