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Queer Iberia - Yet another queer history collection

Sunday, February 2, 2025 - 10:00

Because I don't have enough distractions at the moment, I'm working on a couple of retrospective tasks related to the Project. One is an editorial review of all previous publication blogs to make sure that my commentary that is directly related to the publication is located in a field that will always be viewable in conjunction with the publication. When designing the back end of the Project, we...um...sort of overcomplicated things. (Something for which my web consultants may not have forgiven me yet.) The thing is, when migrating the original publications over from LiveJournal, I noticed that there were often three types of content in a Project post: the summary of the publication itself, my meta-commentary about the publication, and unrelated information that I just happened to post on the same day. I wanted to keep that structure, to some extent, so when we created the data structure for this website, there's the main publication summary, and introduction field intended to be my meta-commentary, and then each Project post has an "envelope" that's the actual blog post, which should contain any non-Project information--that is, any information that isn't relevant to understanding the Project post.

Well, I haven't always been consistent in sorting out the data that way. In part, this is because I don't always have any "unrelated" information to post, but I abhor a blank blog text (even though it never actually displays as blank -- the blog always "contains" the LHMP content). In part, my meta-commentary tends to have a very fuzzy relationship to the Project content and there isn't always a clear answer to "which field should this go in."

So, knowing that I've had meta-commentary that ended up in the blog field (and therefore doesn't display if you're reading a publication post from the LHMP search functions), I decided to go through it all and pull out any Project-related commentary and copy it over into the "introduction" field associated withe the publication entry. (The fact that this ends up duplicating some content between the blog "envelope" and the publication post doesn't matter, because I doubt anyone is going to be reading old blog posts as blog posts.)

The other task is less of a housekeeping project. I've long had notes towards a glossary of vocabulary and terminology from primary sources that related to sexuality and same-sex topics, but I haven't been collecting it systematically from the publications I've blogged. Since this will be important for the sourcebook, I'm now going back and pulling material from publications I've already read. The idea is to provide a sense of how women in history would have described or expressed same-sex desire and erotics, or how those around them might talk about it. Due to the nature of the sources, very little of this will be candid "own voices" data from women who desired women, but it will be the closest approximation I can manage. So as part of my workflow for new publication posts, I'm including pulling this sort of data. And I'll start going through the 400+ previous publications to pull from them as well. This isn't as daunting as it might seem because many books and articles don't include quotations from primary sources, and I'm restricting the scope narrowly.

Just a few things I figured I could add to my non-existent spare time, rather than waiting the 87 remaining days until retirement.

Major category: 
Full citation: 

Blackmore, Josiah and Gregory S. Hutcheson. 1999. “Introduction” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 9780822323495

Introduction

The introduction reviews the background and thematic connections of the papers in this volume. The focus is overwhelmingly on masculinity and sodomy, although several articles in the section “The Body and the State” focus on women (or female-coded figures). There are a total of 15 articles of which four have at least marginal relevance to the Project. However the two that have the strongest focus on female-coded individuals both concern transmasculinity.

This collection evolved out of a set of thematic sessions at the International Medieval Congress (Kalamazoo) and the contents point to the hazards of how scholarly networks silently constrain the scope of interest for such projects. If particular areas of interest are not included within a scholarly network, it becomes difficult to solicit work on those areas—or even to notice that they are not covered.

historical