This article was cross-referenced in another of Susan Lanser's articles I blogged recently, so I took that as a cue to move it up in the queue. I'll follow it with yet another Lanser take on the long 18th century.
LHMP
Blog entry
Happy Big Round Number to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project!
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 320 - On the Shelf for August 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/08/03 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for August 2025.
I have a busy month or so coming up. In about a week I’ll be heading off to the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle. Then a couple weeks after that, I’m headed off to New Zealand for my official, if belated, retirement celebration trip.
A look at female relations within Bluestocking circles and what sorts of evidence exist that some relations were queerer than others.
I've blogged several articles on sapphic aspects of Bluestocking culture over the years. Since I was blogging a different article in this special issue on Bluestockings, I figured I'd include this general introduction to their history as well. (I confess that I have something of a "thing" for brainy women in women-centered historic contexts.)
This publication is wildly out of order in the numbering system for logistical reasons. Specifically: It had a lot of primary source quotations which I was mining for my vocabulary project, which took quite a while to process. It didn't make sense to read through it to create a blog entry then come back to process the vocabulary. But in order to create the entries in the vocabulary database, I needed to assign it a LHMP publication number. So I've been posting a bunch of later numbers while working my way thorugh the data entry for this one. More details than you wanted to know!
Part chance and part strategy, I'm in the middle of a sequence of pairs of related articles: 2 on linguistics, 2 on Eliza Haywood, 2 on bluestockings, 2 on anatomical issues.
I've been trying to figure out how to write a podcast on Eliza Haywood without actually having to read a bunch of 18th century novels.
Debate over the question of whether you can have "lesbian identity" without the use of the word "lesbian" as a type of person sucks a lot of oxygen out of the discussion of queer history. After all, a number of other words were clearly in use for a long time to describe women who have sex with women. But because the specific word "lesbian" is so iconic and is often a theoretical sticking point for questions of continuity, this one specific text bears a disproportionate amount of weight.
Because I enjoy doing clusters of related publications, here's the first of two talking about the semantics of the word "lesbian."
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