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sexual/romantic desire

This tag is used broadly when there is discussion of erotic or romantic desire between women, whether or not specific activities are mentioned.

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LHMP entry

LHMP #465 Oram & Turnbull 2001 The Lesbian History Sourcebook

Introduction: Who is the Lesbian?

For the purposes of this book, “British lesbian history” begins in the late 18th century. It was unclear to me if this was simply a chosen scope based on the source material they wanted to present, or if the authors believe there is no lesbian history prior to that date. They assert that “lesbian identity” is a late 20th century concept. “Women…did not necessarily have a language to describe themselves as lovers of women.” [Note: we can take it as given that I disagree with that position.]

LHMP #457 Blackmore 1999 The Poets of Sodom

This article discusses genres of poetry that reference homosexuality, especially “songs of scorn and malediction,” though these are sometimes more teasing in tone than slanderous. The article discusses 36 poems, of which 3 make brief passing references to the potential female same-sex encounters of prostitutes in military camps.

LHMP #454 Donoghue 1997 Poems Between Women

The title of this anthology is a call-back to Donoghue’s non-fiction work Passions Between Women.  In contrast to the previous blog on The Defiant Muse, pretty much the entire contents of this collection are relevant in some degree to the Project. So I won’t be citing specific poems. (Several have been included in various of the poetry podcast episodes.) This book makes a nice compare-and-contrast to The Defiant Muse. It is entirely Anglophone authors and specifically focused on poems about relationships between women—erotic, romantic, and platonic.

LHMP #453 Stanton 1986 The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems

The introduction reviews the history of feminist literary criticism and notes that it has tended to focus on prose. Multiple filters and gatekeeping mechanisms stand in the way of presenting non-Anglophone feminist poetry to a larger audience. Feminine stereotypes have pressured women poets into restrictive genres: domesticity, romance, religion, etc. This collection seeks out pets and poems that operate against this restriction.

LHMP #452 Braunschneider 1999 The Macroclitoride, the Tribade, and the Woman

[Content note: This article and the text it discusses use the word “hermaphrodite” in contexts where it may be applied to people with ambiguous genitalia, as well as applied to people with queer sexuality. My use of the word in discussing the article is not endorsement of these uses and I recognize that this word is considered offensive (as well as inaccurate) by many.]

LHMP #416 Montagu 1763 Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague

Mary Wortley Montagu was the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early 18th century and spent two years accompanying him to Constantinople. During those travels, she corresponded regularly with a number of people, describing her experiences and observations.

LHMP #400 Velasco 2014 How to Spot a Lesbian in the Early Modern Spanish World

This chapter begins with a discussion of historic terminologies for women who loved women and the eternal problem of whether to use the label “lesbian”. Should the historian look for specific acts, or for evidence of emotional intimacy? And as a literary historian, should one distinguish between literary, artistic, or dramatic depictions, and “non-fictional” content in the fields of law, medicine, and theology?

LHMP #340 Frangos 2009 The Woman in Man’s Clothes and the Pleasures of Delarivier Manley’s ‘New Cabal’

Frangos looks at representations of female same-sex desire in Delarivier Manley’s “New Cabal” in the satire The New Atalantis, specifically focusing on female masculinity (to use Halberstam’s terminology). [Note: I’m afraid this article got off on the wrong foot for me because it stakes a claim that desire for “the representation of men in women” is the primary form that desire takes in this depiction, but leans heavily on one passage that I believe Frangos has drastically misinterpreted.]

LHMP #334d Boehringer 2021 Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome Chapter 2a: Classical and Hellenistic Greece – Plato’s Symposium

One of the more intriguing classical Greek texts that includes f/f erotics is the mythological narrative included in Plato’s Symposium about divided beings and eros being “seeking one’s other half.” Following Boehriner’s standard approach, she begins by examining the historic and literary context of the work and discussing what the purpose of the passage is within that larger context.

LHMP #334c Boehringer 2021 Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome Chapter 1b: Myth and Archaic Lyric Poetry – Other Media

We now turn to the non-poetic sources from the Archaic era. We start with a painted plate from circa 620 BCE from the island of Thera. It shows two female figures facing each other, each holding a garland. One is touching the other’s chin, otherwise the figures are symmetric and show an equal interaction in their postures and gazes. This contrasts with the use of the same tropes for m/f or m/m couples where there is an asymmetry (in m/m couples, the person doing the chin-touching is always an older man and the one being touched is younger).

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