I’m taking a different approach with this collection than my usual. Rather than either blogging all the articles or only blogging the relevant ones, I’m going to do a very brief summary of all the “less relevant” material in this book and then blog the four articles of specific historic interest separately. My very brief skim through the articles summarized below means that I’m likely oversimplifying or misrepresenting some of the details. But it seemed like a good compromise.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 231 - On the Shelf for June 2022 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2022/06/05 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for June 2022.
News of the Field
Several years ago, I ran into references to this book as an in-process project and have been waiting eagerly for its publication. Blogging it as a LHMP entry is a bit meta: a blog in support of lesbian historical fiction looking at a study of lesbian historical fiction as a genre. Garber is looking at a number of questions that have been simmering in the back of my mind over the years of looking at LHF as a field. Why do we write historical fiction? In particular, why do we write queer historical fiction? And what does it mean to write specifically lesbian historical fiction?
I'm off at WisCon at the moment, so nothing brilliant to sum up here. I have the next LHMP entry already read,, written up, and ready to post. I figure I start off June with that one -- it's a really interesting academic look at the state of lesbian historical fiction, so you know it's right up my alley.
What it says in the subject line. This article doesn't directly address topics relevant to the Project, but Lanyer is definitely relevant in general for her interest in proto-feminist ideas and the complex intersections of her identity. There's a wonderful, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek play about her that I got to see an online performance of.
There are some really interesting thoughts in this paper (which I gave up on summarizing in detail, since they don't relate directly to the Project). I confess that I'm also skimping on detail a bit in the last couple papers in this collection because I want to make sure I finish by the end of the month. Also, it's bleeping hot at the moment (36C) and my brain is melting.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 230 – The Long History of the Lavender Menace - transcript
(Originally aired 2022/05/21 - listen here)
This is the second of the articles that drove me to track down this collection (though, as it happens, I suspect the last two articles will also be of interest). Andreadis has written on this theme before and you can see the concept develop accross several publications. (But, of course, I'm not reading them in the order they were produced, so I get some of the ideas out of order.) While it's dangerous to try to understand historic attitudes by analogy to modern ones, it might be useful to consider the wide range of approaches to "respectability" within modern LGBTQ communities.
One of the most fraught endeavors of literary analysis is the attempt to suss out the gender of an anonymous or pseudonymous author. Everything we assume, believe, and project about gendered writing gets applied in ways that cannot help but confirm our biases, absent a "reveal" from the living author, or from previously unknown evidence.
There is a long association of women-run girls's schools with homosocial bonding (among both students and faculty) that often shades over into romance. Although this article isn't examining the romantic potential of Mary Ward's organization, there are some interesting symbolic parallels in the "closeted" nature of their work in 17th c England as a Catholic organization.
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