I know I keep repeating myself, but the thing I find most impressive about Boehringer's work (and the thing most often lacking in general studies of classical homosexuality) is the meticulousness with which she sets up the cultural, literary, and textual context of each piece of evidence she examines. She points out how many previous interpretations of references to f/f relations like this one have taken them at face value, or as a genuine personal opinion of the author, or presented them without the context of the author's overall work.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 214 – Moon River by Mandy Mongkolyuth - transcript
(Originally aired 2021/10/31 - listen here)
No clever intro today, gotta run for Sirens programming.
Although Boehringer doesn't touch on the question directly, I wonder how badly our image of f/f eroticism in Classical Greece is skewed by having two significant textual references filtered through one specific author (Plato)? There is a brief advisory in one discussion that Plato's opinions on the topic may not have been representative of the general public. But I also wonder to what extent Plato's opinions on anything were representative of his contemporaries.
This chapter divides nicely for blogging into the four main topics: Plato’s Symposium, Plato’s Laws, the presence and absense of specific erotic motifs in different kinds of material, and f/f erotics in humorous literature. We really see the power of a work of this depth in how it can tease out meaning by extensive comparison among themes and sources.
The most delicious thing about Boehringer's approach to this material -- and what I hoped I would get -- is a very detailed presentation not only of the cultural and historic context of the small scraps of hard data, but an analytical comparison of all the variant material related to each motif, with a discussion of how the variations speak to the central themes and how they can guide understanding of the accreted layers of interpretation and elaboration. The dive into the Calliso myth that forms the majority of what today's blog covers is a great example.
This post covers perhaps the first half of Chapter 1. (Plus a tiny bit of the front matter that I overlooked previously.) I debated over how to break up the content of this book. There are only three chapters, so doing a whole chapter in each blog post would be far too much, given the level of detail I"m interested in. But within each chapter there are a number of much shorter titled sections, which are shorter than it makes sense to cover separately. So I figure I'll break the coverage in what feel like natural places (or when I need a break).
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 213 – All-Woman Societies in History and Fiction - transcript
(Originally aired 2021/10/17 - listen here)
When I blogged Dover (1978) Greek Homosexuality, I started off by quoting the author's own assessment: “That female homosexuality and the attitude of women to male homosexuality can both be discussed within one part of one chapter reflects the paucity of women writers and artists in the Greek world and the virtual silence of male writers and artists on those topics.” But the "paucity" of material isn't the only factor at play here.
This concludes my coverage of Skidmore's book, and of my recent mini-sequence of books on transmasculine history. I have to say that my own understanding of trans possibilities in the early 20th century was greatly broadened by Skidmore's detailed and extensive research. I knew about a few well-known biographies, like Billy Tipton, but not the utter normalness that could be the experience of many (though not all) trans men. And the surprising glimpses of acceptance, both by communities and families, in some cases.
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