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.
LHMP
Blog entry
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)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 302 - On the Shelf for December 2024 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2024/12/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for December 2024.
I’m formatting this guest blog as an LHMP entry so that it can be picked up by search tags.
This is the last article I had flagged to finish before writing the "Lesbians and the Law" episode for the podcast, though of course there are many more publications relevant to the topic that I haven't yet read. One of the eternal truths of this project is that I can never wait to know "everything" before writing on a topic. That's going to be a real pain point when I work on my sourcebook--there will always be "one more thing" I want to research.
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