Sexual activity has a long and creative history of being described and referred to by slang and euphemism. But when the source domain of the euphemism--the "literal" meaning--is an equally ordinary everyday action, the ambiguity creates problems of interpretation. And in a field like the study of historic same-sex relations, where there is a long tradition of going to some contortions to deny even the scraps of available evidence, euphemism has long been interpreted selectively depending on the genders of the participants.
LHMP
Blog entry
The submssions period for the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast closed last night. When I woke up, my in-box contained one last item. (Being in California, I could set the cut-off as "when I wake up on the 1st" and know that I'd included all time zones up through midnight.)
I'll start reading submissions this weekend, but in the mean time, here are some interesting stats on what came in. Since I asked people to include the time and place of the setting in the header information, I can survey those topics before reading.
Today's the last day to submit your lesbian historical short stories for consideration for the podcast. It's probably a little late to decide to write one from scratch, but if you've been working on something, make sure you don't miss the deadline. (In practical terms, anything I've received by the time I wake up tomorrow will be accepted -- that way I cover all possible time-zones -- but don't push it!) Submissions have been picking up a little as the deadline nears: a quarter of what I've received has come in within the last few days.
The next three LHMP entries are all taken from the collection Queerly Phrased: Language Gender, and Sexuality, which focuses on linguistic data and analysis. I'd picked the book up back in my linguistics grad school days, so it wasn't shelved with my gender and sexuality books and I hadn't realized it had relevant articles until I saw the title in a bibliography I was mining and said, "Hey, wait, I think I own that book!" The first two of the articles definitely show some limitations from the authors not having a deep historical background.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 39 (previously 19a) - On the Shelf for February 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/02/03 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for February 2018.
This post brings to a close my doubled schedule of posts covering The Lesbian Premodern. Next week we go back to one post per week and publications that address people and events more directly, rather than examining the theoretical work of "doing history". I hope that this digression into theoretical concerns has added to my readers' understanding of the complex dynamics that lie behind "just the facts, ma'am." I've certainly enjoyed this tour through the landscape of historiography.
The cyclicity of both history and theories of history has been one of the themes in this collection. Vicinus looks at examples of those cycles through the lens of a Victorian writer she's been studying.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 37 (previously 18c) - Book Appreciation with Kathleen Knowles - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/01/20 - listen here)
Heather Rose Jones: This week we welcome Kathleen Knowles back to talk about historic fiction that she really has enjoyed reading. Welcome!
Kathleen Knowles: Hello!
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 38 (previously 18d) - (Un)Conventional Women - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/01/27 - listen here)
Another summing-up article that looks at the contents of the volume from a number of different angles. Although there is a great deal of repetition in this section of the collection, I like the focus on a deep understanding of the progression of theoretical frameworks that affected both what was studied and how it was interpreted.
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