In reading current sapphic historical romance, a common motif is for the central characters to provide an early clue to their sexuality by resisting or rejecting the idea of marriage to a man. (Goodness knows, I've used that motif myself in Daughter of Mystery!) But is that historically accurate?
LHMP
Blog entry
I started some comments to put in this blog section of the post, then realized they fit better into the "Introduction" part of the publication record. So I'm left with nothing of substance to say here. Some day I should post a blog showing the underlying data structure of the Project so that this sort of thing makes sense to readers. (Assuming anyone cares.)
Cleve's biography of Charity and Sylvia takes an approach that both makes the book more readable and requires the audience to read critically. In order to fill in the background and the silences of their lives, we get a lot of general historical details that help make sense of the decisions and actions of their families. But in order to try to contextualize their emotional lives, we also get a lot of interpolation from other lives.
I'm blogging a new book starting today, which will probably run for about ten days worth of posts.
Sometimes I envision a broad-scope historical understanding of the dynamics of gender and sexuality as being like a collage of scraps of colored paper. Each individual book or article has a specific take on the question, and they don't always align with each other, but as each is pasted in place, a larger picture develops that is independent of the precise nature of each piece of paper. And--of course--I must never lose sight of the fact that the person pasting them in place (that is, me) has a vision for the overall work that affects how the collage is put together.
How much do general social anxieties around demographics and sexuality interact with each other? I've seen a number of historians connect early 19th century concerns about falling birthrates with increasingly controlling attitudes towards non-procreative sex. But is there cause and effect? We could look around today's America and ask "is the nativist anxiety about white birthrates tied in any way to surges of hostility against marginalized genders and sexualities?
Psychoanalyzing the fiction of earlier ages has been a popular, if often misguided sport. In particular, when characters' intimate friendships are analyzed from contemporary angles, while ignoring the context when the work was written, we find out more about the literary critic's mind than the minds of the author or the characters.
I'm not completely allergic to "lit crit" articles (by which I make a fine-grained distinction from "literary criticism" but perhaps one that is idiosyncratic), but I confess I find them far less useful for the Project than articles written from a historian's angle. I guess it's because lit crit feels like it's more about the reception of the topic in question by a modern audience than it is about the historic context of the topic itself.
Yes, once again I'm blogging an article that largely duplicates material that was covered more extensively in a different publication. Sigh. The work of a historian is not always exciting.
Once again, I have an article on a topic covered much more extensively in a publication I already blogged. Though in this case, by a different author. Thomas/ine Hall reminds us of the ways in which historic fixation on binary gender complicate the question of categorizing interactions as "same-sex" or "opposite-sex". There are several topics that I'll be discussing in the book version of the Project where it's inaccurate to characterize the topic as "lesbian" but that shed useful light on how historic societies would have viewed lesbian activity.
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