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sexual/romantic desire

This tag is used broadly when there is discussion of erotic or romantic desire between women, whether or not specific activities are mentioned.

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LHMP entry

LHMP #504 Wagner 2013 Pathological Bodies

This book as a whole looks at connections between medical theories and political culture, in 18-19th century Britain and France. Only one chapter has any relevance to the Project and this summary will be confined to that material.

Chapter 1: The Case of Marie Antoinette: Revolutionary Politics and the Biologically Suspect Woman

Like a number of other publications, this focuses on the political propaganda that depicted Marie Antoinette as an extreme sexual deviant along several axes, with a special interest in tying those themes to deviant anatomy.

LHMP #470 Katz 1978 Gay American History

This is a collection of excerpts from historic sources related to homosexuality in America. As with other publications of this sort, I’m mostly going to be cataloging the items of interest. Although it’s a very thick little paperback, the lesbian content is sparse. In fact, Katz notes, “In the present volume, Lesbian-related material is dispersed unequally within the parts, and not always readily identifiable by title—thus difficult to locate at a glance.

LHMP #477 Klein 2021b Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers

This article is something of a cross-genre, cross-temporal look at the representation of Anne Bonny and Mary Read as “sapphic pirates” and what part their stories have played within the constructed image of 18th century piracy and colonialism.

LHMP #476 Braunschneider 2004 Acting the Lover

Narratives of the lives and “adventures” of passing women were popular in 18th century British culture, purporting to provide biographies of women who lived as a man for some period of time, including: Hannah Snell, Christian Davies, Jenny Cameron, Anne Bonny & Mary Read, Charlotte Charke, Elizabeth Ogden, an unnamed “apothecary’s wife” whose story is appended to the English translation of the life of Catharine Vizzani, and Mary Hamilton whose story inspired the label “female husband” for those passing women who engaged in relationships with other women.

LHMP #465 Oram & Turnbull 2001 The Lesbian History Sourcebook

Introduction: Who is the Lesbian?

For the purposes of this book, “British lesbian history” begins in the late 18th century. It was unclear to me if this was simply a chosen scope based on the source material they wanted to present, or if the authors believe there is no lesbian history prior to that date. They assert that “lesbian identity” is a late 20th century concept. “Women…did not necessarily have a language to describe themselves as lovers of women.” [Note: we can take it as given that I disagree with that position.]

LHMP #457 Blackmore 1999 The Poets of Sodom

This article discusses genres of poetry that reference homosexuality, especially “songs of scorn and malediction,” though these are sometimes more teasing in tone than slanderous. The article discusses 36 poems, of which 3 make brief passing references to the potential female same-sex encounters of prostitutes in military camps.

LHMP #454 Donoghue 1997 Poems Between Women

The title of this anthology is a call-back to Donoghue’s non-fiction work Passions Between Women.  In contrast to the previous blog on The Defiant Muse, pretty much the entire contents of this collection are relevant in some degree to the Project. So I won’t be citing specific poems. (Several have been included in various of the poetry podcast episodes.) This book makes a nice compare-and-contrast to The Defiant Muse. It is entirely Anglophone authors and specifically focused on poems about relationships between women—erotic, romantic, and platonic.

LHMP #453 Stanton 1986 The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems

The introduction reviews the history of feminist literary criticism and notes that it has tended to focus on prose. Multiple filters and gatekeeping mechanisms stand in the way of presenting non-Anglophone feminist poetry to a larger audience. Feminine stereotypes have pressured women poets into restrictive genres: domesticity, romance, religion, etc. This collection seeks out pets and poems that operate against this restriction.

LHMP #452 Braunschneider 1999 The Macroclitoride, the Tribade, and the Woman

[Content note: This article and the text it discusses use the word “hermaphrodite” in contexts where it may be applied to people with ambiguous genitalia, as well as applied to people with queer sexuality. My use of the word in discussing the article is not endorsement of these uses and I recognize that this word is considered offensive (as well as inaccurate) by many.]

LHMP #416 Montagu 1763 Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague

Mary Wortley Montagu was the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early 18th century and spent two years accompanying him to Constantinople. During those travels, she corresponded regularly with a number of people, describing her experiences and observations.

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