I'll save my overall summing up for after the third and final volume of this work next week. In the mean time, enjoy my parenthetical comments and notes.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 145 (previously 43c) - Book Appreciation with Stephanie Burgis
(Originally aired 2020/02/15 - listen here)
(transcript pending)
Show Notes
In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 144 (previously 43b) - Interview with Stephanie Burgis
(Originally aired 2020/02/08 - listen here)
(transcript pending)
Show Notes
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 143 (previously 43a) - On the Shelf for February 2020 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2020/02/01 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for February 2020.
While proofreading this entry before posting, I found myself thinking about the question of "what are identity categories anyway?" This also comes from the book that I was writing up an entry for last night (which won't post for quite some time), which talked a lot about the difference between "modern sexual identities" versus "pre-modern sexual tastes." Thinking from my own personal experience of "sexual identity," it sometimes feels like even "modern sexual identities" is an invented construct rather than an objective phenomenon.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 142 (previously 42d) - Iphis and Ianthe - transcript
(Originally aired 2020/01/25 - listen here)
Introduction
Articles that are not about history, but rather are about how we think about history don't have the same "zing" and "pop" as facts-on-the-ground articles, but especially once one gets past marveling at the incoherent wealth of primary evidence that historians are presenting to us, it becomes more and more important to think about how we think. This article is the sort of general talk that is typical of opening a conference roundtable.
Given that I'm posting this last installment on Boswell's Same-Sex Unions at the same time as I'm reading and writing up Foucault's History of Sexuality, I can't help but make some comparisons between the two presentations. In both cases, the authors are presenting a specific take on a field of historic study that is susceptible of widely varied interpretations. Boswell is a historian while Foucault is a philosopher, but both purport to be dealing with historic observations and practices in their analysis.
One of the fascinating aspects of the development of (western) marriage as a socio-religious-legal structure is the extent to which it derived legitimacy from symbolic performative acts by the parties to the marriage. (Those parties might be only the two people getting married, or their families might be considered "parties to the marriage" with required actions. It depended.) If the correct set of things were said and done (with "the correct set" altering over time and by local culture) then one was married.
In chapter 4, the polemical nature of this book becomes most evident. In tracing the development of Christian attitudes toward--and forms of--marriage, Boswell’s through-line is that there is no logical way to integrate Christian approaches to heterosexual marriage with a blanket prohibition on same-sex marriage. Some of the criticism of both this book and CST&H are that both books feel too much like a supplicant begging for acceptance, thinking that if only the right logical argument were offered, Christianity would suddenly realize, “OMG, we’ve been wrong all along! We’re so sorry!
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