One of the serendipitiously enjoyable things about deep dives into history is discovering personal connections between unexpected people. When I did my podcast on actress Charlotte Cushman, I was stunned by how she fit into an enormous network of literary, political, and artistic women of the mid 19th century, operating across Europe and America. My imagined "girl gang" here is purely one of the imagination.
LHMP
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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 61 (previously 24a) - On the Shelf for July 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/07/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for July 2018.
I’d like to give a shout-out to all the listeners currently at the Golden Crown Literary Society conference, even though I doubt any of them will be listening to this podcast until later. It’s a pretty jam-packed event.
This article, written in 1993 (which I will remind readers is 25 years ago) feels rather outdated with regard to both the language and views of the topic. This article was published two years before Donoghue’s masterwork Passions Between Women and no doubt represents some of the contributory research and thought that appears there. But given that the topic would be best considered through multiple lenses--not only a lesbian lens, but a transgender one and and intersex one--it should be considered an introduction to a topic that deserves deeper interrogation.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 60 (previously 23e) - Inscribed by V. M. Agab - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/06/30 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 59 (previously 23d) - The Ladies of Llangollen - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/06/23 - listen here)
Information about the everyday experiences of queer women in history comes in snips and scraps. Given that, it's easy for general histories of women's experiences to ignore or omit them entirely. The publication I'm drawing from today took the course of including such data among it's overall survey of primary source materials--an approach that helps provide the general reader with clues that there's more going on in history than a focus on "typical lives" often communicates.
Life and work have been so chaotic this past week that I somehow managed to space out on Monday's usual go-live for the LHMP blog! So here it is on a Wednesday instead. (Making a lie of my reference in this week's podcast that it was published on Monday, of course. Such is the life of a poster of pre-scheduled material.)
Since I created an "accidental mini-theme" of primary source documents in the current series of assorted journal articles and book excerpts, I thought I'd toss in a fascinating--if regularly offensive--source that is referenced in many works on the history of lesbianism. Brantôme's treatise is not intended to be a sober sociological study of women's same-sex relationships among his contemporaries in later 16th century France. The work is steeped in the male gaze and riddled through with patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes.
Mostly this project has drawn on scholarly studies of historical data, but I've decided to include a few original source texts, especially when the relevant material is in a fairly manageable excerpt. This text providing the story of 16th century lesbian Greta von Möskirch is interesting enough on its own.
This study of legal records from London that mention women cross-dressing as men is an interesting comparison with the article from last month about how cross-dressing in medieval Baghdad revolved around men's sexual tastes. Nearly all of the women discussed in this article came to the attention of the law due to engaging in "ungoverned" sexual activity, that is, any sort of sex outside of marriage.
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