LHMP

I'm testing the limits of what you can post by teathering a laptop to a spotty phone connection, because that's what you get on Amtrak crossing the vastness of Colorado...

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 312 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 17: The Governess - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/04/20 - listen here)

The Project has very fuzzy boundaries, but I'll admit this falls outside them. Sometimes a publication is just too interesting to skip.

There's a whole genre of "a general history of lesbians/homosexuality in Britain" with approaches ranging from lighthearted (and often inaccurate) pop history to very serious academic studies and sourcebooks. (This genre may also exist for other countries -- I've collected a smaller set for the USA -- but I haven't run across them as often.) This one falls in the mid-range, probably intended as a textbook for a non-specialist social history course.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 310 – A Falling Star and a Flying Bird by Rhiannon Grant - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/03/29 - listen here)

I'm not quite sure why I keep forgetting that I have blogs all written up and ready to post. (This is why I plan to have a posted work schedule in retirement: so everything gets pushed along the path at regular intervals.)

I've had the several relevant articles in this collection written up for a couple weeks, but somehow kept not getting around to uploading them to the blog. But I have a "free" day today, so it was on my to-do list. The other main thing on my to-do list today is to contact the financial services company that has my 401K and start getting things arranged for my retirement income. It is not a comfortable time for this process. The instability of the markets mean that the balance in my 401K has been fluctuating wildly.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 307 – Our F/Favorite Tropes: Sword-Lesbians and Horse-Girls - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/02/15 - listen here)

Next to last article from this collection and then we move on to Early Modern France.

The contracts have been sent out and returned, so it’s time to announce the 2025 Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast fiction line-up! Thank you to everyone who submitted.

When I had my choices narrowed down to the top six, I realized that I could take them all. Two stories were short enough that, when combined, they still met the 5000 word limit of my budget. And when I checked the calendar, I realized that I also needed a story for January 2026 (a 3-shows month).

So here is the line-up, in alphabetical order by title. (Release schedule has yet to be determined.)

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.

So...um...I almost forgot I had this all written up but hadn't posted it yet. Then I was drawing up the script for the February "On the Shelf" podcast and when I came to discuss the publications on the blog, I panicked, thinking that I'd managed to delete my notes on the book. No, the blog was already written, but just waiting in queue. Whew. So here it is (slightly out of numerical order).

I love doing the podcast poetry episodes, but I need to catch up on blogging the sources I used!

Sometimes I choose publications to blog based on a topic I'm currently working on, sometimes it's just a matter of picking the next title that I have loaded into my iPad to read. This is the latter case.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 304 - On the Shelf for January 2025 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2025/01/04 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2025.

While the purpose of this book is not entirely to lead up to how the OED became the thing that it is, this chapter feels like everything was leading to this moment. Without understanding the long history of editorial moral anxiety over the content of dictionaries, the specific choices made in compiling what was intended to be a neutral "scientific" record of the English language might seem more sinister than they were. And yet here we are: a work that purports to objectivity and yet systematically and deliberately erases, obscures, and vilifies f/f sexuality.

When Turton lays out the details of how vocabulary for f/f sex was deliberately omitted, obscured, and removed from dictionaries -- especially in comparison to how vocabulary for m/m sex was handled -- it becomes clear how badly queer historians have stumbled in relying on dictionary entries as evidence that "they didn't even have a word for it." One of the things I'm working on for my Sapphic Sourcebook is a collection of these vocabulary items, along with the dates, sources, and contexts, to help provide authors with a counter to the "common wisdom."

In reading about the history of how dictionary publishers deliberately obscured or silenced discussions of sex -- especially of non-normative sex -- I can't help but think of the current (and periodic) panics over controlling the access of children to information about sex and gender. The attitude prevalent in the early modern period that simply knowing about certain sex acts could "infect" someone with an urge to commit them is still an underlayer to current concerns.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 303 - Interview with Margaret Vandenburg - transcript

(Originally aired 2024/12/15 - listen here)