LHMP

A regular experience in the random nature of how I encounter and summarize articles is the sense of whiplash when I think, “Wait, haven’t we already dealt with this question?” And, of course, I’m thinking of other publications that came after the one I’m reading. Diggs’ analysis is in correspondence with some of the early challenges to Faderman’s view of romantic friendship. I have to keep reminding myself that it was published a quarter of a century ago, and the ideas being presented here were fairly new at the time.

This is a fascinating article and I only skim through the concrete examples it touches on. What is the relationship of pain to pleasure? And why is that relationship specifically focused around women's same-sex encounters? Is there a logical connection or are they simply tools in defining "normative" sexuality in contrast?

Is the study of history concerned with discussing concepts, and only secondarily the people who embody them? Or is it the study of people and their institutions, with ideas and theories emerging secondarily from those lives? Both approaches have their value. They answer different questions. In this very brief essay, Boyd stakes a claim for studying ideas and then relating people's lives to those ideas. And from the point of view of "does it make sense to study the history of the idea of lesbianism?" I'm not going to argue against that approach.

Vicinus points out (or at least implies) a contrast that I hadn't thought much about before: the contrast between a teleological lesbian history that works to explain "how did we get to where we are now?" and a more descriptive history that asks, "what are the ways in which female same-sex desire was expressed in the past?" Any number of publications have made me twitch when they viewed "the modern lesbian" as some sort of holy grail that women in the past must surely have been ignorantly groping toward.