As the 18th century progressed toward the "sex panic" that presaged a massive shift in attitudes towards women's sexuality, we see how images of sexual license--both heterosexual and homosexual--came to be viewed as signs of the decay and collapse of civil society itself. In France, these images got caught up in the larger upheavals that led to the Revolution.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 81 (previously 28)d - Anne Damer - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/11/24 - listen here)
I couldn't do better for a blog title than the title of the article in this case. This article might seem an odd choice for a project focusing on women’s homoerotic relationships, given that it is concerned almost entirely with heterosexual adultery. The relevance comes in side consequences of the shift in attitudes towards women’s sexuality centered around the end of the 18th century.
Serendipity has once again set up a series of related entries on this blog. When sorting through the recent journal article haul from the Journal of the History of Sexuality, this one jumped out at me as relating to the topic of classical Greek romance novels. I think it reads well as a pairing with the summary of the Babyloniaka from last week. Gorman takes a complex look at the various messages--both intentional and inadvertent--sent by using the Greek romance as a template for early Christian "adventure stories" um...that is...apocrypha.
With the help of several online friends (yay twitter!) I tracked down various versions of this text in time to discuss in in my podcast on women loving women in classical Rome, so it only made sense to add it to my occasional series of LHMP entries with primary sources. I can't say that I was happy to find that the evidence in the story for women's same-sex marriage in ancient Egypt was not quite as solid as some authors (like Brooten) imply.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 77 (previously 27d) - Woman Plus Woman in Classical Rome - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/10/27 - listen here)
Introduction
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 28a - On the Shelf for November 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/11/03 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for November 2018.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 80 (previously 28)c - Book Appreciation: Reading Outside Your Comfort Zone - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/11/17 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 28b - Interview with Elizabeth Tammi
(Originally aired 2018/11/10 - listen here)
Show Notes
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
This brings us near the conclusion of my mini-series on classical Roman sexuality and the bits and scraps it tells us about relationships between women. (Although I think I'll add another of my occasional primary source entries, with Iamblichos' Babylonaika and it's story of Berenike and Mesopotamia.) If you like the challenge of trying to reconstruct possible social systems from fragments, then there's both enough material to work from and enough empty canvas to paint on.
Pages
