This is a fascinatingly detailed article and quotes extensively from the original records. (This added a number of items to my growing database of f/f-related sexual vocabulary.) I'm always interested in evidence that the historic understanding of same-sex sexuality was varied and subject to challenge.
LHMP
Blog entry
Ouch! I hadn't meant to skip posting blogs while I was traveling, but somehow I got distracted, despite having everything lined up and ready to go. It might seem strange that I spend so much attention on research into historic intersex issues, given that my topic is lesbianism. I'll discuss the "why" in detail in my book, but the simple explanation is that ambiguous gender creates a context for understanding how people defined and reacted to gender anomaly. And one of the historic attitudes toward same-sex desire was that it was a gender anomaly, rather than a sexual orientation.
The current cluster of articles I'm blogging are on general topics around gender and sexuality. This one addresses both transgender and intersex themes while also looking at a range of gender non-conformity.
The current group of articles I'm blogging are more generally addressing gender and sexuality. As I read through them, I found a high proportion that didn't pan out as being of interest, though I think that has more to do with having cherry-picked the more interesting-looking titles in the past. This is more historiography than history, discussing current work on the history of sexuality and evaluating their approaches. Not sure whether I'm gratified or disappointed that it didn't turn up any reading that I didn't already know about.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 334 - Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 334 – Fiction Double-Header: Down By the Tumbling Stream by E C Hallewell & Where You Go by Jennifer Nestojko - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/01/31 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 333 - Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 19: Age Gap - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/01/17 - listen here)
I confess this is going to be a bit skimpier than my usual trope episodes. I had planned an entirely different topic for this month’s show, but it’s turning out to be far more involved and elaborate than originally intended. And on top of that I’m about to be traveling for a couple weeks, so I needed something I could put together quickly without a lot of background research.
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.
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.
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