Among the political propaganda published during the French Revolution against Queen Marie-Antoinette (MA, for convenience) was a prominent theme of her sexual profligacy, and in particular the charge that she engaged in lesbian sex (as well as other sexual charges). In this context, her lesbian relations were depicted, not an accompaniment or “appetizer” to heterosexual acts (as often presented in pornography of the time), but as a preference.
18th c
LHMP entry
Following a long tradition of framing f/f sex as “something newly prominent,” the French Mémoires Secrets of 1784 asserted it had “never been flaunted with as much scandal and show as today.” But while male homosexuals were arrested by the hundreds, far less attention was given to women, leaving fewer traces for historians to reconstruct. One notable exception is the actress Mademoiselle de Raucourt.
In 18th century France, philosophy and pornography intersected to a degree such that “philosophical texts” became a euphemism for sexual content, including a regular interest in same-sex relations. Among critiques of society and politics, enlightenment philosophers debated traditional understandings and condemnation of homosexuality. This included the radical idea that all sexuality was natural and morally neutral, and that the state should not regulate it.
The title of this anthology is a call-back to Donoghue’s non-fiction work Passions Between Women. In contrast to the previous blog on The Defiant Muse, pretty much the entire contents of this collection are relevant in some degree to the Project. So I won’t be citing specific poems. (Several have been included in various of the poetry podcast episodes.) This book makes a nice compare-and-contrast to The Defiant Muse. It is entirely Anglophone authors and specifically focused on poems about relationships between women—erotic, romantic, and platonic.
The introduction reviews the history of feminist literary criticism and notes that it has tended to focus on prose. Multiple filters and gatekeeping mechanisms stand in the way of presenting non-Anglophone feminist poetry to a larger audience. Feminine stereotypes have pressured women poets into restrictive genres: domesticity, romance, religion, etc. This collection seeks out pets and poems that operate against this restriction.
[Content note: This article and the text it discusses use the word “hermaphrodite” in contexts where it may be applied to people with ambiguous genitalia, as well as applied to people with queer sexuality. My use of the word in discussing the article is not endorsement of these uses and I recognize that this word is considered offensive (as well as inaccurate) by many.]
It might seem odd to cover this article after covering Turton’s book (Before the Word Was Queer) that functionally includes material about Anne Lister, but “The Lexicographical Lesbian” goes into a bit more detail. And besides which, I’m a completist.
This chapter compares the dearth of entries for f/f sexuality in general dictionaries in the 1750-1850 period with the wealth of discussion on those topics in medical dictionaries. The appearance of medical dictionaries as a genre aligned with an explosion of vernacular publishing in the health field in the 16-17th centuries. These were aimed not only at non-specialists, but at health workers outside the academic elite—people who didn’t have access to Latin literature. The publishing establishment operated as gatekeepers in terms of what material got published and how it was presented.
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.
This chapter begins exploring the assertion that languages bear an essential relationship to the nature of their speakers, and that deviations of the language from this essential quality can be attributed to foreign influences. This idea appears in the introduction to a 1676 dictionary. The naturalization of words is paralleled to the naturalization of citizens and must be a strongly policed. Ethnic stereotypes are ascribed to languages along with the people who speak them. English, of course, is assumed to be neutral, moderate, and free from excess.
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