There are always at least two layers of historic information about non-normative sexuality: the normative, prescriptive narratives of authorities, whether religious, medical, legal, or other; and the individual, concrete, descriptive accounts of everyday experience. It can be enlightening to see where and how these come into conflict. The cases where records acknowledge that actual human beings often fail to follow the paradigms the experts have set out.
LHMP
Blog entry
It's a bit of an impulse thing. Evidently Patreon is changing it's contract structure in a few weeks to something a bit less beneficial to users, but people with an account set up prior to that are locked in to the current structure. Since I'd been toying with the idea of a Patreon for a couple of years, this information made me think it might make sense to set up an account, even if I didn't seriously intend to push it.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 102 (previously 33c) - Interview with Zen Cho
(Originally aired 2019/04/19 - listen here)
Transcript pending.
Show Notes
An interview with fantasy author Zen Cho.
NOTE: This month’s On the Shelf incorrectly announced this month’s guest as Molly Tanzer. The Molly Tanzer interview will appear at a future date.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 103 (previously 33d) - Policing Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/04/27 - listen here)
If I’d paid attention to the contents of this article before scheduling it, I might have saved it to cover after reading the book it’s commenting on: Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. And I’ve compounded the problem by scheduling it next to an item by Dinshaw, again talking about Getting Medieval. Given that this article is Hollywood’s personal reaction to reading Dinshaw, it’s going to be of somewhat less relevance and usefulness than covering Dinshaw’s book itself.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 101 (previously 33b) - On the Shelf for April 2019 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2019/04/13 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for April 2019.
No, you aren’t imagining things, this month’s On the Shelf episode is airing the second Saturday of the month, not the first Saturday. Horrors! It’s all due to the timing of our 100th episode special last week.
The main focus of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project is, of course, research on specific topics that fall within the historic scope of the Project. But the question of what gets studied, by whom, and in what context is affected by the trends, fashions, and politics of the modern academic community. Who is doing that primary research? Who are they in conversation with (or arguing against)? What topics will be accepted as appropriate to the scope of their academic careers and which ones can they only tackle if they have job security?
Horváth seems to have written extensively on this topic, with special attention to the ways in which early descriptions of the people and phenomenon were distorted by their own prejudices and social context. Horváth is careful to try to engage with questions of gender identity in a sensitive fashion without projecting modern categories into the past or onto other cultures, although readers who identify strongly with her subjects as trans men may find her pronoun usage disconcerting.
This article coincidentally touches on some of the topics that will be the subject of this month's podcast essay. What is the relationship between physiology, social performance and presentation, and legal status with respect to gender and sexuality? In tracing shifts in how these questions were asked and answered across time and space, we can begin to grasp a relativistic understanding of gender and sexuality categories.
Even when Sahar Amer is largely recycling topics that the Project has covered from her before, there's always enough new material to provide intriguing glimpses of what's out there in the field of medieval Arabic same-sex literature. One of these years, if I continue the fiction series on the podcast, I dream of getting an own-voices story drawing on this material. (Or lots of them! But I don't want to dream too high.) The topic of women's same-sex relations in the Islamicate world has too often been treated through an Orientalizing or male-gaze lens when depicted in fiction.
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