Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 332 - On the Shelf for January 2026 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2026/01/03)
Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2026.
LHMP
Blog entry
This poetic genre looks fascinating, with complex social dynamics in its composition and reception. I really do need to track down the book by Ruth Vanita that's evidently the main source for this article.
It's hard to tell whether the content in this article is thin because there isn't much to say or because of the overall superficiality of the work. I'm guessing the latter, as other articles and books I've found on India have been richer.
Fiction isn't necessarily a good guide to how a culture thinks about sex and gender--indeed, in some cases social anxieties are worked out in fiction in ways that would not be tolerated in real life--but it can be a space where we see the culture thinking about the subject. This medieval Japanese tale gets even more convoluted than the most extreme of Shakespeare's cross-gender plots.
I can't say I'm disappointed in how skimpy this article was on f/f issues, but only because I had very low expectations to begin with.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 331 – Jane Austen Birthday Celebration - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/12/20)
Given that most academic work on same-sex sexuality comes out of a western framework, it made sense to include this article in my focus group on non-western cultures. Rupp asks some incisive questions that problematize the question of whether there can ever be a unified filed of "same-sex sexuality."
If you wanted a great, compact one-stop overview of lesbian-relevant history in Early Modern Europe, I don't know that I could improve on this article. In an odd way, that makes it very hard to summarize because it is, itself, a summary. There's no content in this article that I haven't already blogged in the context of more focused articles, so I won't even try. But I wanted to give it a shout-out as doing an excellent job of what it set out to do.
This article is taken from a collection of survey works of variable utility. The next item I blog is also from the collection but digresses briefly from the current cluster of Asia-relevant articles in order to keep the two together.
Nothing of interest to see here from a sapphic point of view, but there is an interesting discussion of apparent alignment in global social trends and how to think about coincidences and whether the trends are genuinely "similar."
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