I sometimes make joking reference to the "industry of Anne Lister studies" but it's hard to exaggerate the value of Lister's candid diaries for disrupting theory-based understandings of 18-19th century female homosexuality. We need to be careful not to assume that Lister's experience is universal, nor to treat it as unique. Many women, no doubt, wrote candid private diaries and correspondence that may have expressed their negotiation of homoerotic desires.
LHMP
Blog entry
One of the articles I covered last year was a study by Remke Kruk on the genre of "warrior women" epics in medieval Arabic litterature. In that 1998 piece, Kruk laments the lack of accessible translations of this fascinating corpus.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 100 (previously 33a) - The 100th Episode - Where My Heart Goes - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/04/06 - listen here)
I'm happy to announce the 2019 fiction line-up for the podcast! I haven't sorted out the appearance schedule yet, but in alphabetical order of story title, we have:
One of the consequences of lining up a set of all relevant articles from a single source is that I end up covering articles that are marginal to my personal interests--and keep in mind that this project is largely diven by what I personally find interesting. (If people want me to focus on things I find boring, they'd have to pay me a lot of money to do so.) In the case of the Journal of the History of Sexuality this means a group of articles about the field of sexology, as it developed in the late 19th century.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 93 (previously 31c) - Reprise: Ordinary Women - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/02/16 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 92 (previously 31b) - 10 Lesbian Historical Books and Movies I Loved in 2018 - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/02/09 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 31a - On the Shelf for February 2019 - Transcript
Note: Enough story submissions came in on the very last day that I will be doing the fiction series this year.
(Originally aired 2019/02/02 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for February 2019.
As I mention in the discussion below, given how very little information this article has relating to women's same-sex relations, one might wonder why I bothered to include it. And the answer is, because often negative information is as important to understanding the context of people's lives in history as the positive information is. We often have an impression that women in sexual relationships were in constant danger of persecution and repression. That they must have lived in constant fear of discovery and the consequences thereof.
What was the social purpose of the motif of women wearing men's clothing in early modern England? What did the cross-dressed woman mean to men and what did she mean for women? How was the reception different for cross-dressed women in literary or theatrical contexts as opposed to ordinary women in real life? Lucas's article looks at the association between female cross-dressing, disorderly conduct in general, sexual misconduct, and anxiety about the disruption of all social categories, not just gender categories.
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