Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 35c - Book Appreciation with Anna Clutterbuck-Cook (part 2)
Saturday, June 15, 2019 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 110 (previously 35c( - Book Appreciation with Anna Clutterbuck-Cook (part 2)
(Originally aired 2019/06/15 - 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. This time we had so much to talk about we split it into two episodes.
In this episode we talk about:
- What is Anna looking for in f/f historical romances?
- Rich backstories and complex social networks
- The default assumption that women’s lives can only exist in relation to men, and how this affects even f/f fiction
- What were the shapes of women’s lives in history and how could f/f stories fit into those spaces
- The ways in which many popular m/f and m/m historical fiction tropes don’t fit f/f lives and relationships
- Constructing a “ladder of intimacy” for female characters that feels true to women’s lives
- How do historic definitions of “sex” affect how we imagine f/f sexuality in historical fiction?
- Why is actual sex so often absent in f/f fan fiction?
- Embedding sex scenes in the particularity of the characters’ lives and experience
- The conflicting tensions in reader reactions around sex scenes--is it “romance novels without sex” or “non-romance novels with romantic elements”?
- Embedding queer historic characters in a community of marginalized identities
- K.J. Charles and Cat Sebastian as authors creating series of connected novels that build queer community over time
- The misperception that queer “happily ever after” is unhistorical
- Writing characters as part of an existing queer historical continuum--the example of Charlotte Cushman
- Looking for stories with feminism and intersectional identities: non-white characters, disabled characters, non-privileged characters *
- Promoting diversity as readers and identifying our own biases
- Are women inherently uninteresting? The problem of “himpathy”.
- Books mentioned
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
Links to Heather Online
Links to Anna Clutterbuck-Cook Online