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LHMP #450d Turton 2024 Before the Word Was Queer Chapter 3 – Silencing Sex


Full citation: 

Turton, Stephen. 2024. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary 1600-1930. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51873-1

Publication summary: 

A study of the handling of transgressive sexuality in English dictionaries over the centuries.

Chapter 3 – Silencing Sex

* * *

This chapter opens discussing how dictionaries explicitly presented themselves as censoring inappropriate language when aimed at an audience that included women. This sort of comment shows up as early as the later 18th century. Even the nature of what was being censored is censored, with explanations that it is aimed at “inelegant” words, rather than objectionable or obscene ones.

One can trace the fate of censored vocabulary when dictionary authors incorporated existing source material but filtered out specific topics and words that are identifiable by their absence in the resulting output. This can be seen especially when Latin-English dictionary contents that included words for f/f sex such as “fricatrix” or “tribas” are incorporated. E.g., a Latin supplement to a late 16th century dictionary includes “fricatrix” glossed vaguely as “she that useth unlawful venery” and more explicitly “tribas” as “such filthy women as abused their bodies one with another against kind.” The source material was incorporated into various 17th century works with similarly informative glosses. But later dictionaries derived from this material begin to omit these terms.

Tribade and fricatrix had already naturalized in French and English by the early 17th century, along with the calque “rubster” and the variant “confricatrix.” But when citation contexts are given for these terms, they emphasize distance in time (classical references) or space (e.g., Turkish examples). The attempt to distance sapphic terms from the English usage of the era of the publications is contradicted by use of the same words in poetry and theater from the early 17th century on.

As dictionaries became aimed at a more general readership in the 18th century, the significance of the f/f acts referred to is undermined, using phrases like “in imitation of intercourse,” or the words are excluded entirely.

There is a comparison of the f/f vocabulary recorded in Anne Lister’s diaries with the vocabulary admitted into dictionaries of her era. Similarly, the writings of diarist Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi are noted as a source for the use of explicitly sapphic terms (in a documentary context) in the late 18th century.

One more general cause of the exclusion of sexual language during the later 18th century and after was a shift in libel laws that discouraged publication of more explicit language, especially when applied to specific individuals. Libel laws could also be used against the publication of “obscene” books, even when the language was not describing specific individuals. Thus, for nearly a century from the mid 18th to the mid 19th centuries, the inclusion of entries for same-sex topics fell to almost nothing. One dictionary of 1775 runs counter to this trend, with a large number of entries for sex-related topics, including same-sex ones. [Note: Turton doesn’t point out that this dictionary contains only m/m terms, based on my review of the listings in the appendix.] Despite this relative wealth of word entries, their definitions obscure the nature of the acts they reference.

Around the 1870s, there is a return to inclusion of m/m-related words in general dictionaries, but no similar return of f/f entries. When words such as “fricatrice” do make an appearance in general dictionaries, their glosses erase the same-sex aspect and simply define them as indicating a sexually loose woman.

During the period of absence, such words continued to be included in specialized medical dictionaries, and this was an era when same-sex attraction began to be medicalized.

Medical dictionaries were much more interested in tribades and fricatrices than any general reference works had been.

Discourse of the 18th century reflected the general dictionaries’ aversion to specifics, claiming that there was no vocabulary available for female same-sex acts, and using circumlocutions such as “liking her own sex in a criminal way.” [Note: Keep in mind that “criminal” in this case is being used by analogy to illegal m/f and m/m sex acts, while there is no indication that law courts considered f/f sex to be criminal. See Derry 2020 on this topic.]

Some of this lack of same-sex terminology in general dictionaries was made up for in a new genre: glossaries of cant and slang terms, which became popular in the 18-19th centuries as transgressive entertainment aimed at a male readership. While cant terms for m/m sex and its participants were frequent and imaginative in these books, vocabulary for f/f relations is virtually absent from them. Even at a time when “female husbands” were a stock topic of popular media, language for them is not included in cant/slang dictionaries, except to the extent that one might read it into words attributing masculinity to specific women. But mannishness is not directly associated with f/f sexuality in the definitions. The closest that slang dictionaries come to directly addressing f/f sex may be in entries referring to boarding schools and dildoes that hint at f/f possibilities.

This doesn’t mean that slang terms for lesbianism were absent from the historic record entirely. The later 18th century is when we have clear attestation of terms such as sapphic, sapphist, tommy, and (game of) flats in clearly sexual senses. (These are collected in some modern slang dictionaries, but were not included in slang dictionaries at that time.)

This deliberate omission can be seen, for example, in the revision notes for one 18th century slang dictionary that references “game at flats,” but then omits the phrase in the actual published version of the revised dictionary.

[Note: there is a discussion of a variety of slang terms for various sexual practices where the dictionary entries  do not adequately indicate what the acts were – which makes me think of some of Anne Lister’s terminology, such as “grubbling” – suggesting that there may well have been a rich slang vocabulary for f/f sex that is entirely lost to us.]

In the 19th century, slang that originally had been presented as belonging to criminals and the lower classes shifted to being framed as associated with fashionable elite men. In this context, terms for f/f sexuality are not only not embraced, but those tangential references previously found (such as dildo) are flagged as obsolete, or even as entirely spurious. Even when included, we are told that the words refer to non-existent things.

Only finally in 1890 did a slang dictionary finally admit such terms as “cunnilingist,” “fuck-finger,” and “lesbian.”

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