Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 110
November 23, 2017
Theater Review: The Band's Visit & Phantom of the Opera
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Just a few quick notes or they'll get lost in the vacation/holiday shuffle.
The Band's Visit is a layered, poignant, and sometimes funny show (taken originally from a real-life episode) of an Egyptian police department's traditional orchestra making a trip to give a goodwill concert in the Israeli city of Petah Tikva, but through a missed travel connection and linguistic confusion end up in the tiny desert village of Bet Hatikva instead. The bulk of the show takes place in Bet Hatikva as the orchestra members are offered hospitality while waiting for the next available bus and various personal encounters highlight both cultural differences and a sense of underlying unity. This isn't a story where anyone's life is dramatically changed or turned around. It's more about how the various encounters enable people to understand their own lives more deeply. I really enjoyed how the multilingual setting was presented, with both Arabic and Hebrew used conversationally (made understandable by context and the acting) while English was used both as an in-story lingua franca as well as the access point for the audience. It's easy to see why this has become a very popular show, both among critics and general audience.
I jumped at the chance to see Phantom of the Opera where Lauri has been subbing recently as house manager--so much for a relaxing retirement!. We got a personal backstage tour before the performance, which I always enjoy. I really enjoy the mechanics of spectacle productions like this, so it was fun to see how all the traps and sets worked. It was also interesting to see the differences in presentation from my previous experience in Las Vegas. (Of course, one of the big differences is that the Las Vegas dedicated theater was designed around the dramatic chandalier action, but it was still impressive in the smaller space.) The Broadway show is a bit longer, which seemed to come mostly from extended ensemble songs. (I love the structural concept of the ensemble counterpoint songs, but I can never actually understand what's being sung, so some of the effect is lost on me.) One dramatic difference--and I don't think it was a difference in the songs/lines themselves, but only in the performace--was that in the final confrontation there seemed less of an implication that Christine was genuinely torn between Raoul and the Phantom, and much more of a sense that she was putting on an act for Raoul's life. (And I still dislike Raoul using her as a pawn in the Don Juan gambit. I think she deserved to go on to a great career as an operatic soprano rather than ending up as a rescued damsel.)
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Live Performance
November 18, 2017
The Relationship between Language and Opinion
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
I’ve interleaved a fair amount of criticism and corrections inside my summary of this article, simply because I feel that the material involves so many gaps and oversights that it moves from “flawed” to “misleading”.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #181 Bonnet 1997 Sappho, or the Importance of Culture in the Language of Love
About LHMP
Full citation:
Bonnet, Marie-Jo. 1997. “Sappho, or the Importance of Culture in the Language of Love” in Queerly Phrased: Language Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia & Kira Hall. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510471-4
Publication summary:
A collection of linguistics papers relating to queer and feminist theory. From a historic context, the coverage is somewhat shallow and oddly focused (most likely due to having been written by linguists rather than historians). In particular there are regular gaps in knowledge about this history of terminology, or confusion about linguistic transmission and equivalence across languages. I have only included the three papers with relevance to the Project.
Bonnet, Marie-Jo “Sappho, or the Importance of Culture in the Language of Love”
This article looks at French historical terminology for women who loved women to consider whether changes in the prevalent terminology reflected social shifts in attitudes toward such women, on the basis that “naming grants recognition”. Unfortunately the article is deeply flawed by unfamiliarity with earlier examples of some terms, and by overlooking terms that were as common as the ones considered (if not more so). This results in conclusions based on faulty premises.
For example, the author fails to consider Brantôme’s 16th century use of “lesbienne” in the modern sense and identifies only “tribade” as being in pre-modern use in French, dating it only to the mid 16th century. She entirely ignores the distribution of “fricatrice” and “fricarelle”.
When considering language deriving from Sappho and Lesbos, she mistakes iconicity with causation, calling Sappho “the founder of lesbian love”. She considers the early absence of terminology derived from Sappho to be due to patriarchal suppression of the idea of egalitarian female same-sex love.
The author is also unfamiliar with the complex semantic history of “sodomy” and related terms and erroneously claims that there is “no specific term for women’s [same-sex] sexual practice in the Middle Ages”. She views the medieval church as uninterested in women’s same-sex behavior unless there is appropriation of male attributes (ignoring penitential evidence for that interest).
She attributes to Henri Estienne the first use in French of “tribade” and see this as a consequence of the revival of interest in Greek and Latin texts (as opposed to reflecting a shift from Latin to French for the types of records discussing such topics). She seems to accept at face value the claims by writers such as Estienne that displaced lesbian relationships into the classical era, asserting that such behavior in the 16th century was novel and unheared of. Rather than tracing the continued use of derivations of Greek/Latin “tribade” through the ages, she considers it a Latin invention (from Greek roots) with no Greek antecedent. And--noting that all the classical citations of the word “tribade” are from male authors, in combination with the absence of Sappho-based terminology, interprets this as a specific preference for male antecedents for sexual models. While a preference for male sources is quite possibly true, she overlooks medieval and Renaissance references to Sappho in the context of same-sex love, which would contradict this interpretation. This curious blindness also appears when she quotes Brantôme extensively while failing to note that he contradicts her claim that “lesbienne” was a later invention.
Brantôme’s discussions of lesbian love make it clear he considered it a “harmless game”, but she notes that women who made more transgressive life choices, such as marrying women in male disguise (see e.g., Montaigne) were punished more harshly. In this context, she considers that the focus on condemning only the “active” sexual partner and the alleged preference for the term “tribade” (which she sees as reinforcing an active/passive distinction) was a deliberate program to undermine a hypothetical egalitarian same-sex love associated with Sappho.
The author considers the changing dictionary definitions of “tribade” during the 18th century to reflect an ongoing philosophical debate around the meaning of the term and sees the driver of these changes as the rise of socially and culturally elite women who openly expressed their passion for othr women. [It seems odd to me that a linguist would treat dictionary entries as a reflection of contemporary usage and debate, rather than being conservative, prescriptive sources.] She considers expressions of passionate friendship in the 18th century as presumed to indicate sexual relationshps. She views the French revolution as constituting a cultural break between Renaissance culture and 19th century women who led a new wave of sexual openness that shifted into decadence and scandal. George Sand’s Lelia is presented as a turning point.
The author attributes the modern sense of “lesbienne” to Charles Baudelaire in the mid-19th century, suggesting that it was the association of the word with decadence and damnation that made it acceptable for general use (by men, presumably). Unfortunately this theory is undermined by the documented earlier use of the word as far back as the 16th century. She reviews lesbian terminology that has connotations focusing on the absence of men, such as “anti-homme” in L’Espion Anglais and “anandrine” in Revolutionary-era literature, and compares these terms to the root senses of “virgo” and “parthenos”. And finally, the author traces the rise of the word “homosexual” in parallel with the medicalization of sexuality in the early 20th century.
The article cites an early example of a prosecution for cross-dressing that I don’t think I’ve seen published elsewhere, so I thought I’d quote it here. It appears to refer to two separate events and there is no indication that there were sexual transgressions involved.
“In the thirteenth century, two women were burned at Péronne by Robert le Bougre for having porté l’habit d’homme (worn men’s cothing).” [Cited in the notes as: “These events ocurred between 1235 and 1238, notes Michèle Bordeaux, Professeur de Droit at the University of Nantes, to whom I am endebted for providing me with this information.”]
Time period: 16th c17th c18th c19th cPlace: FranceMisc tags: lesbiantribadeEvent / person: Henri EstienneJournal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany (Michel de Montaigne)Lives of Gallant Ladies (Pierre de Bourdeille seigneur de Brantôme)SapphoLélia (George Sand)Les Fleurs du Mal (Les Lesbiennes) (Charles Baudelaire)L’Espion Anglois (Mathieu François Mairobert)Anandrine Sect
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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 16c: Book Appreciation with Farah Mendlesohn
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 16c - Book Appreciation with Farah Mendlesohn
(Originally aired 2017/11/18 - listen here)
Farah talks about two novels by Ellen Galford that she really enjoys for their historic elements. (And incidentally inspired me to add Moll Cutpurse to the topic list for the podcast.)
Unfortunately no transcript is available for the interview episodes at this time.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
November 17, 2017
Book DNF: Barbary Station by R.E. Stearns
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I bought Barbary Station by R.E. Stearns based on the response of various advance reviewers that boiled down to “lesbian space pirates; what more could you want?” Well, evidently I want more. Barbary Station appears to be a competently written space opera involving pirates, malevolent AIs, and bionically-enhanced cyber-hacking engineers. The central protagonists are a same-sex couple in a pre-existing and utterly taken for granted relationship. But having gotten four chapters in, I have yet to find myself caring what happens to them or whether they succeed. The story simply hasn’t grabbed me. Space opera isn’t one of my top ten genres, but there have been many books in that general subgenre that I’ve loved, when the characters caught my interest. So I’m going to have to leave this one at Did Not Finish and forgo a rating. If you generally enjoy space pirates and plots that revolve around engineering problem-solving, you may well have a very different experience.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
November 14, 2017
What the Frankentastic Podcast is Reminding Me about Lesbian Historical Fiction
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Last week I talked about how manipulation of point-of-view can change the entire flavor of what I’m writing. This week, rather than talking about my own writing, I’d like to bring together three things that have passed through my brain recently about understanding and portraying romantic relationships between women in historical settings.
The one that really sparked this train of thought is a podcast titled Frankentastic being created by Tansy Rayner Roberts and put out by Twelfth Planet Press in fulfillment of a stretch goal for the kickstarter for the forthcoming anthology Mother of Invention. The premise of Frankentastic is a fairly straightforward re-gendering of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein read as a serial. All the male characters (which is the vast majority of the on-page characters) become female, while the female characters are converted either to male or non-binary characters. Other than names, pronouns, and gendered references (like mother/father/parent), the text remains completely as the original. But what seems like a simple little conceit makes some interesting differences in how the characters in their relationships read.
The biggest thing that struck me was how overwhelmingly homoerotic the language of the story is: not merely in the context of Victor(ia) Frankenstein and friends, but also in the context of the initial framing story of Robert(a) Walton’s sea voyage and the interactions with associates and crew. The language these characters use is effusively and overwhelmingly romantic and even sensual with regard to same-gender friends and associates. I don’t know whether it is striking me more in this audio version than it did back when I read the book due to the immediacy of the medium, or whether I notice it more when those exchanging the sentiments are women for personal reasons, or whether I’m more likely to discount such effusive sentiments as literary convention when spoken between men, or some other reason. But the take-away observation here is that an early 19th century writer, of good birth if unconventional lifestyle, considered it normal, natural, and unremarkable to put expressions of same-sex devotion and love in the mouth of her characters that—if written today—would be interpreted unambiguously as expressing homosexual desire.
And although Shelley’s work placed this language in the mouths of male characters, I know from the research I’ve studied for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project that similar language was considered normal, natural, and unremarkable between actual women in everyday life. We know this from correspondence and diaries and reported conversations, as well as from the depictions of emotionally intense female friendships in literature of the time. It’s one thing to read books are articles discussing this phenomenon, but somehow it’s a viscerally different matter to listen to it being expressed in audio, and particularly in a context where gender-swapping has highlighted the import of the conventions.
So, there’s that.
The second stream feeding into these thoughts is having just read Farah Mendlesohn’s Spring Flowering (set in the same era) and seeing how noticeable the contrast is between how her characters express and enact the spectrum of same-sex emotional (and sensual) relationships, reflecting the same conventions we seen in Frankenstein, as compared to the depiction of historic characters more commonly found in lesbian historical fiction that attributes a very modern-feeling guilty self-consciousness around experiencing and expressing same-sex romantic desire. The characters in Frankenstein feel no need to reassure themselves or their companions of the purely platonic “no-homo” nature of their relationship, just as their real life sisters felt no embarrassment or guilt at the most effusive expression of emotional bonds with each other. Because that was how close friends were expected to act with each other.
Now, you may protest that close friends may have felt free and unselfconscious to act in that way precisely because there was no actual erotic component to their relationship. But we know that isn’t the key, because we know that some early 19th century persons who wrapped the enactment of their romantic friendship in this effusive passionate language and behavior also had erotic relationships. Not all of them. Perhaps not even most of them. But some of them. And we know—from our admittedly scanty scraps of direct evidence—that they did not consider their feelings to be a separate species of relationship from non-erotic romantic friendship. And I must acknowledge that the differences between male and female sexuality may make the two experiences diverge somewhat on this point. But the point is that you can write an early 19th century story in which two women proclaim their love for each other publicly, express themselves in the most passionate terms in correspondence, writing of the desire for kisses and embraces and the longing to sleep together and the dream of sharing their lives together, have these desires and expressions be known to all their associates, and have them be free of both internal and external condemnation and suspicion for those expressions. (Which isn’t to say that there weren’t occasions when women’s passionate friendships did rouse suspicion and censure, but only that it was a far from universal consequence.)
The third stream of thought on this comes from editing an author interview for my podcast where the author is talking about honoring how brave and daring and ground-breaking woman-loving-women in history were. And this is where I long to immerse people more in the historical context—the ways that actual women in history expressed and enacted their same-sex relationships. Because they weren’t all lonely, daring radicals—not necessarily and not generally. Not until the 20th century, that is. For the most part, they were finding ways to express their love and desire for each other in ordinary and conventional ways that their society considered not merely acceptable but, in many cases, praiseworthy. To be sure, the ways they found generally did not involve making public proclamations of the sexual nature of their relationships, or of political agitation for legal equality (hard to do when women as a class did not have legal equality!). But the depiction of pre-20th century women who loved women as having the same sort of tormented and conflicted internal life that we see depicted for early 20th century women is simply flat-out historically inaccurate. And I’d love to see more historical fiction that reflected that. Perhaps what we need is more familiarity with literature of the times that depicts intense same-sex emotional relationships—and if we can’t find them with women, then gender-flip the men and enjoy the ride!
Major category: ThinkingTags: PhilosophyLHMPwriting
November 11, 2017
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 16d - When did we become Lesbians?
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 16d - When did we become Lesbians? - transcript
(Originally aired 2017/11/25 - listen here)
For all that we’ve had a generation of hearing queer people say, “I don’t like labels,” the power of names and labels is hard to deny. One of the arguments we hear from people who say that lesbians didn’t exist until the late 19th century sexologists invented the concept, is that no one identified as a lesbian before the 19th century and how can something exist without a name?
There are several arguments against that position. One of them is that the word “lesbian”, used in the sense of a woman who had homoerotic desires, came into use much earlier than that. Another argument is that there were other words in use throughout history to refer to women who had sex with other women. But it’s also true that words change in meaning over time, and that the ideas represented by the word “lesbian” today may be different from what people in other eras meant when they used the word. And it’s true that the specific shades of meaning implied by various labels don’t correspond precisely to our current meaning of “lesbian.” But then, there are ongoing debates today about just what exactly the category of lesbian encompasses.
Today’s podcast is going to take a tour through some of the vocabulary used in European history for women who loved or desired other women. I’m also going to touch briefly on some Arabic terms, but I don’t have the resources available at the moment to cover the rest of the world. I’m looking specifically at words for persons. There was a parallel vocabulary of adjectives and verbs, and different forms of the language evolved at different times. For example, “lesbian” as an adjective, talking about desires and acts, seems to have emerged earlier than the widespread use of the word as a noun, referring to a person. Similarly, the word “Sapphic” used as an adjective to describe feelings and activities seems to show up earlier than “Sapphist” as a word for a person. Some words were in widespread use across cultures, showing up in forms specific to the various languages. We can see the evolution of the Latin word “fricatrix” as it begins showing up in vernacular languages across Europe. Other words, especially slang terms, were found only in a single language, like the Dutch word “lollepot.”
It might be useful to think of these words as having three types of origins. There are words that have their primary meaning as describing what it is that lesbians do. We’ll see that most of these descriptive terms have to do with the act of rubbing, referring to that action in the context of sexual activity. Second are the metonymic words that refer to someone or something that has come to be associated with lesbians but had some other original meaning. The most obvious example of this group is the word lesbian itself, which originally meant simply a person from the island of Lesbos and acquired its sexual sense by a roundabout path because Sappho lived on Lesbos. The third set of words can be slippery to identify. These are slang terms, which derive their meaning from an indirect allusion or from some coincidence of reference. Finding their origins can be tricky because the word or phrase may mean something else on the surface and you have to find contexts where the sexual sense is unambiguous. A great example of this type of word is “gay”, though it won’t be one of the ones discussed here. It’s hard to figure out when the word “gay” first started to be used to mean homosexual because most of the time the interpretation is ambiguous. Often that’s exactly why slang terms come into use: because they can be used discretely.
So let’s follow the histories of some of these words and see where it leads us.
Hetairistriai
One of the most tantalizing words I’ll discuss is the Greek hetairistriai. It is perhaps the oldest clear reference for a woman who desires women and appears in a relatively positive context, but it is a hapax legomenon--a word that appears only once in surviving records, other than later sources quoting that source--therefore it’s hard to think of it as a term in common use. It’s also awkward that we only have the word in the plural and it isn’t entirely certain what the singular form would be, though hetairistria is perhaps a good guess. Hetairistriai is used in Plato’s Symposium in a mythic tale of how human sexual attraction came into being. All people, so the story goes, were originally double-bodied beings that split into two. Those who descended from double-bodied creatures that were both male and female have heterosexual desires (although obviously Plato doesn’t use that term), while those who descended from double male bodied creatures are men who desire men, and those descended from double female bodied creatures are “hetairistriai”, who have no interest in men but are attracted to other women. The word has the same root as “heteira” or courtesan, but with no additional context it’s hard to know the exact relationship between the two words, whether hetairistriai means “women who love courtesans” or has some other sense.
The word appears rarely in later writings, and the examples that people cite are from dictionaries or from commentaries where it’s being used to discuss and define other words. A 5th century Byzantine dictionary considers dihetaristria to be equivalent to the word tribas (which we’ll discuss next), and glosses it as meaning “women who, like men, are oriented towards female companions for sex.” And similarly, a 10th century commentary of the 2nd century Roman author Lucian equates hetairistria and tribades. Another 10th century commentary, this time on the 2nd century Christian writer Clement of Alexandria, lists tribades, hetairistriai, and Lesbiai as all being equivalent in meaning.
One thing to notice in the definitions and explanations for these early terms is that there is often an implication that the label applies specifically to a woman who actively pursues other women, but with the implication that her female partner may not fit under the same definition if she merely passively allows herself to be pursued.
Tribas, Tribade
Chronologically, the next word that comes into use is tribas, from the Greek verb tribein meaning “to rub or wear down”. Tribas is used by classical Greek writers for women who have sex with women. The Greek plural, tribades, gave us the later use in various languages as tribade. We can find this term used in Greek astrological texts of the 1st and 2nd century to describe a woman whose stars result in her being a lover of women. The context and discussion implies that this is due to masculinizing factors in her horoscope. Like the classical Romans, the Greeks viewed sexual roles in terms of active and passive, rather than in terms of the gender of the sex partner. A woman who took the active role was considered to be taking on a male sexual role and therefore was expected to desire women.
The word tribas was taken directly into Classical Latin and is used by authors such as Seneca and Martial to refer to a woman who has sex with other women, not only by rubbing but also by penetration. Given the way that classical Romans understood sexuality, they made a distinction in considering only the active partner--the top, if you will--to be a tribas.
Medical manuals of the early Christian era are another early source of examples of tribade to discuss women with homoerotic desires.
Tribade continued in regular use during the medieval period and later, well into the modern era. As noted previously, there are 10th century writings that specifically comment on it meaning the same thing as hetairistriai and lesbia.
In the later 16th century, the scandalous French writer Brantôme included a long discussion of women who loved women in his book The Lives of Gallant Ladies. He uses the terms tribade and fricatrix, or in French, fricatrice, as well as using lesbian as a noun, clearly in the modern sense as being equivalent to those terms. Finding writers who use sets of different terms together like this help us be certain of which of the possible senses is being included.
In the 16th century, in addition to France, tribade is found in use in Italy and England. Spanish had its own version at this time, as tribada. In English, it continued in use as late as the 18th century, although it was falling out of popularity by then. By the Renaissance, the term tribade was starting to acquire a more specific meaning of a very sexually aggressive lesbian, and became particularly associated with the myth that lesbians were associated with an enlarged clitoris capable of penetrative sex.
Lesbian
One of the difficulties in tracing the use of the words lesbia and lesbian to mean women who desire women is the word’s basic meaning of “a woman from the island of Lesbos” in combination with the somewhat fuzzy reputation in early Greek and Latin writings that the women of Lesbos had for various atypical sexual practices. Despite the clearly homoerotic content of her poetry, Sappho of Lesbos became a figure associated with excessive heterosexual desire in satirical Greek plays of the 4th century BC. It isn’t clear whether the more generic sexual meanings of Lesbian in early sources were due to an entirely independent reputation that the women of Lesbos had, or whether all the various sexual implications derive from the various incarnations of Sappho’s reputation.
The Greek playwright Aristophanes, in the 5th century BC, used a verb with the same root as lesbian to mean “to practice oral sex” in a heterosexual context, and this meaning was one of the senses the word had through late Antiquity. But eventually Lesbos also became associated with women who loved women, and again it’s unclear whether this was specifically due to an association with Sappho or whether there were independent reasons for it. In the 2nd century, the Roman writer Lucian has one of the characters in his “Dialogues of the Courtesans” say, “They say there are women in Lesbos with faces like men, and unwilling to consort with men, but only with women as though they themselves were men.” This is in his dialogue about Megilla, who comes across either as an extremely butch woman or as a trans man (if I may be forgiven for using modern categories). And Megilla is, literally, a woman from Lesbos. But in the context of the dialogue, the courtesan relates how she was hired to entertain Megilla and Megilla’s female partner. The ambiguity is there, but there’s a clear implication that the phrase “a woman from Lesbos” was meant to suggest sexual attraction to women.
In post-classical use, the first fairly unambiguous example we have of lesbiai (the plural) to mean homosexual women comes from the previously mentioned 10th century commentary on Clement of Alexandria that groups tribades, hetairistriai, and Lesbiai together. While any one of the terms might sometimes be ambiguous, setting all three together in this way is strongly suggestive.
As mentioned above, the 16th century French writer Brantôme used the word lesbian clearly in the sense of a female homosexual. And in English, the earliest example found to date is in an early 18th century satirical poem, which uses lesbian several times as an adjective, but concludes with proclaiming a woman “chief of the tribades or lesbians” which is unarguably the modern sense.
Sapphist
It might be surprising that the term sapphist is fairly late to arrive to the party. The earliest known use in English is in a late 18th century diary entry by society gossip-monger Hester Thrale who, in contradiction to the popular image of Ponsonby and Butler--the Ladies of Llangollen--as the epitome of chaste romantic friendship, refers to them as “damned sapphists”. The adjective sapphic was in fairly common use in English in the 18th century, so it’s likely that this was not an isolated invention on Thrale’s part. By the early 20th century, sapphist came to be a somewhat upscale term, used by the literati with full awareness of its classical associations.
Fricatrix
Like the Greek word tribas, the Latin word fricatrix or frictrix derives from a root meaning “to rub”--the same root we get “friction” from. The early Christian writer Tertullian uses frictrix in a sexual sense, possibly implying a woman who performs oral sex, but it isn’t entirely clear that he intended homosexual activity.
But in an astrological text dating to some time between the 2nd and 7th century and associated with the name of Hermes Trismegistos, we find fricatrix used to describe a woman with a horoscope that inclines her to love women, and it describes her partners also using fricatrix. This suggests a more egalitarian sense than sometimes found for tribade, which often seemed to imply an active-passive distinction. In early modern English the word is found as fricatrice, and a sense of mutual activity is emphasized in the less common alternate form confricatrice.
Italian turned the original Latin word into fregatore, which we encounter by the 16th century. In French, we find frigarelle in the same era, and a few decades later frigarelle turns in English too.
Sodomite
It can be difficult to untangle the contexts in which the word sodomite and its derivatives indicate female homosexuals. The history of what types of activities were considered sodomy is complicated and it changed greatly over the centuries. In the early medieval period, sodomite meant someone who performed any sort of sex act that was considered to be counter to nature, including same-sex acts but by no means confined to them. During the high medieval era, there was more of a tendency for it to mean homosexual acts specifically, and we find references to “female sodomites”, as well as to the Latin sodomita with a female sense. There is a 13th century Italian record where a woman who boasts of giving her female lovers pleasure using a strap-on dildo is called sodomita, but it’s possible that the word more narrowly referred to penetrative sex between women as opposed to any same-sex act. There is a rare example in English around 1600 of the form sodomitesse.
Bugger
Another set of words that overlap with the nomenclature of male homosexuality derive from the word “bugger”. Bugger itself has a rather convoluted origin, deriving from Bulgar that is, a Bulgarian, it picked up the meaning of “religious heretic” due to attitudes by western Catholic Europeans toward the Eastern Orthodox religion that was common in Bulgaria. But there was a long association of religious heresy with forbidden sexual practices, and in medieval France the word shifted in meaning to a purely sexual sense with a similar meaning to sodomite. In the 16th century, we find the Spanish word bujarrona and the Italian buzerone both used specifically for women who had sex with women.
Hermaphrodite
Another term that was sometimes applied to women who had sex with women, but where the specific meaning was somewhat different is hermaphrodite. This derives from a premodern understanding of sexual desire that tried to fit everything into a heterosexual mould. So if a woman desired other women, this was considered to indicate a masculine personality. The combination of a male personality in a female body was labeled hermaphrodite, and similarly people with male bodies who were considered to behave in a feminine manner were similarly labeled. It’s also likely that some of the people identified as hermaphrodites may have had ambiguous genitalia. I’d hesitate to say that hermaphrodite was in any way a label for women who desired women because its use was based on entirely different models of gender and sexuality than we have today. But it was definitely a term that such a woman might be called by her contemporaries who were trying to understand her behavior. In general, the heyday of the hermaphrodite model was around the 15th through 17th centuries and the term doesn’t seem to have been used for same-sex desire outside that period.
Virago
There are some early texts that use the Latin term virago--literally a masculine woman--in a context that equates it with tribas. One example comes from a 4th century astrology manual by Julius Firmicus Maternus. But I’d be hesitant to consider virago to have an unambiguously sexual sense, since it is commonly used to talk about social behavior where a woman is considered to be usurping what was considered to be a masculine role in general. This is a general issue with a number of terms in cultural contexts where the desire for women was considered to be inherently masculine.
Miscellaneous
In addition to words that were in use across a number of different cultures, though often adapted into those languages in local forms, there are words that came into use in specific languages, either as new descriptive coinages or as slang terms.
Rubster
The popularity of words meaning “one who rubs” to describe those who engaged in lesbian sex was not just a legacy of Greek and Latin words with that meaning. In the 17th century, a medical manual by Bartholin gives rubster as an equivalent for the more learned confricatrice.
Lollepot
In 17th century Dutch, we begin to find the word lollepot used for women who have sex with women, a narrowing of meaning from earlier use where it simply meant “an immodest woman.” I don’t know what the literal meaning of the word was originally.
Tommy
Readers of Sarah Waters’ novels about lesbians in the Victorian era are familiar with the English slang term tommy. Slang terms like this can be hard to pin down in origin unless the context of use is quite specific. In this case, we have a clear example from a late 18th century English poem that reads in part:
“Woman with Woman act the Manly Part,
And kiss and press each other to the heart.
Unnat'ral Crimes like these my Satire vex;
I know a thousand Tommies 'mongst the Sex:”
This sense of tommy is reminiscent of the modern use of tomboy to mean a girl who rejects gender stereotypes and behaves in ways associated with boys. But rather than tomboy being a watered down derivation from the sexual sense of tommy, the origin may go in the other direction. Tomboy begins showing up in the mid 16th century to mean a particularly rude or boisterous boy, but by the end of the 16th century it had been transferred to meaning a “bold or immodest woman” or a woman who behaved in ways considered masculine. Tom, short for Thomas, was at that time considered to be a name for a generic man, with maybe a connotation of being rude or ill-mannered. Consider the word tom-foolery, but also the use of “tom” in tomcat to signify a male cat. So tommy to mean a lesbian most likely was derived from the more general gender-transgressive sense of tomboy.
Arabic
Sahq
While most of this discussion has focused on European cultures, I promised to touch on some historic Arabic terms that show interesting parallels. I mentioned some early astrological texts that were a source of vocabulary about homoerotic relations. An Arabic translation of a 1st century Greek astrology manual by Dorotheos of Sidon discusses constellations that result in a woman desiring women and uses the word sahaqa for such a woman. This is the term found throughout Arabic literature of the medieval period, sometimes as suhaqiyya as the basic word for a woman who has sex with women. Like tribade and fricatrix, the root meaning of the word is “one who rubs”, generally implying a particular type of sexual technique. This term and associated words have been in use up to the modern era.
Zarifa/Tharifa
Another term found in Arabic literature falls more in the slang category and has intriguing connotations. This is zarifa or tharifa. (I believe these are variants of the same word but I haven’t been able to confirm it solidly.) In origin, this term means “someone elegant, witty, and charming” and is part of a medieval Arabic esthetic movement that prized sophistication and elegance. There are descriptions of how women who were sexually interested in women would use these terms as something of a code, saying that a woman was tharifa to indicate that she was a suhaqiyya and part of a subculture of women who loved women. But the word tharifa was never exclusive to this sexual sense. One might think of it as similar in implication to “gay” in that there were always non-sexual interpretations available as well.
Conclusions
So the answer to the question “when did we become lesbians?” depends to some extent on whether you’re speaking specifically of the word lesbian used as a noun to denote a woman whose primary sexual and romantic orientation is to other women, or whether the question is when did people have a vocabulary available to talk about homoerotic relations between women, or whether you’re being a stickler for some particular shade of meaning equivalent to the modern understanding of the word.
But is there a single modern understanding of the word lesbian? Think about all the arguments people have over what degree of commitment and experience is required to bestow the title of lesbian on a woman. Is it appropriate to speak of a bisexual woman as being in a lesbian relationship if she happens to be with a woman? Is someone allowed to claim the identity of lesbian if--for reasons that seem convincing to her--she chooses to be in a relationship with a man, despite feeling a primary orientation towards women? One could argue that some far future historian studying the use of the word lesbian in the 20th and 21st century would have a hard time coming to a clear definition of exactly what the boundaries of the category were.
Let us keep that in mind when we’re studying the vocabulary of the past and trying to sort out exactly when a woman might first have called herself a lesbian to claim an understanding of herself that we would recognize today under that banner.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcasttranscript
Book Review: Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn
Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn is a gentle, domestic Regency romance, more in the vein of Jane Austen with its parson’s daughters and the family dynamics of middle class families “in trade”, than in the vein of Georgette Heyer’s dashing aristocrats and gothic perils. Ann Gray’s life is disrupted by the death of her father, the village parson, and she joins the bustling household of her cousins in Birmingham where the family business manufacturing buttons, jewelry, and other small metal accessories becomes the framework of her new social life. Until her father’s illness and death, Ann’s life had been taken up by the responsibilities of ministering to the needs of her father’s parish. Her future is open and unsettled now, with only the formalities of mourning to give her a breathing space to consider the options. Her loved ones--both the Birmingham family and her beloved special friend Jane, who has recently married--expect her to jump at the impending offer of marriage from the young curate who has taken her father’s place. But Ann thinks she doesn’t feel as she ought toward a man with whom she would spend the rest of her life, and an offer of a very different nature has arisen from the handsome widow, Mrs. King, soon to be a business partner of her uncle.
Mendlesohn’s novel is a refreshingly different sort of lesbian romance, depicting the attitudes and mores of the times with a social historian’s eye. The characters are neither anachronistically modern in their self-awareness of sexuality, nor anachronistically tormented and angsty about it. The physicality of Ann’s romantic friendship with her friend Jane is portrayed as completely ordinary for her times, but just as ordinary is Jane’s expectation that Ann will share her joy in her marriage. Through Ann’s explorations of new ties in Birmingham, we see how women who longed for same-sex friendships to be primary in their lives communicated and negotiated those feelings without needing to challenge social rules, as well as how families all too aware of the gender imbalance in the wake of the Napoleonic wars could encourage and approve of “surplus women” creating their own domestic arrangements. There are several very tasteful but explicit sex scenes that are well integrated into the overall emotional and self-realization arcs.
Although romance (with a few surprises) is the culmination of this novel, it is not the dominant theme throughout. Spring Flowering is a quiet tale of families and everyday life in Regency England, sweeping the reader into a world both familiar and intriguingly different in its details. There are a very few places where those details seemed to bog down the already leisurely pacing with a touch of “researcher’s syndrome,” but never in a way that derailed the story, as long as you approach the book as the story of a life rather than as a genre romance.
If you’ve longed to read stories of women loving women in history with happy endings that ground their love and their happiness in the spirit of the times, then Spring Flowering will be a breath of fresh air and a hope for a new wave of lesbian historical fiction.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 16b - Interview with Farah Mendlesohn
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 16b - Interview with Farah Mendlesohn
(Originally aired 2017/11/11 - listen here)
This month's author interview is with Hugo Award-winning academic writer of literary analysis Farah Mendlesohn, who is taking her first step into being a fiction author this month with her lesbian Regency romance Spring Flowering. We had a lovely discussion about the varying attitudes toward same-sex relationships in different eras and the challenges of writing historical fiction.
No transcript is currently available for this episode, for which I apologize.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
November 9, 2017
The Complicated World of Promotion
Daughter of Mystery
It's a regular feature of my life as an author to feel like I have to justify and excuse the fact that I pay attention to what the world is saying about my books. You see, authors aren't supposed to pay attention to reviews--whether to what they say or simply to their existence. Authors aren't supposed to mention that what readers do to help spread the word about a book is important, because that puts undue pressure on readers. But it does matter and we do care. And to balance out my occasional pleas (both silent and out loud) for people to help spread the word, I like to share examples of when you, my readers, have made a difference.
Yesterday when I was doing my routine name/title search in Google to see if there were any new reviews or mentions of my books, I turned up something exciting. (I'm not going to apologize for doing regular searches like this. Often it's the only way I ever learn about great reviews, and when I get great reviews, I add those reviewers to my list of people to suggest for review copies in the future.) The Barnes and Noble book blog included Daughter of Mystery in a list of "50 Magical Romances to Read Right Now". I think it's the only f/f romance included in the list, based on a quick skim of the summaries. And I am quite certain that it was included because of one of those twitter crowd-sourced requests for books with a particular theme.(*) And that means, that it was you, dear readers, who brought it to the blogger's attention and saw that it was included.
I don't know if you can imagine how great it feels to see my work side by side on a list put out by a major bookstore chain with authors like Nora Roberts, Mary Robinette Kowal, K.J. Charles, Zoraida Córdova, and Ilona Andrews. And you did that. You did it by telling the world how much you love my books and finding opportunities to recommend them to other people. It matters. And I love you for it.
(*) I'm pretty confident that Daughter of Mystery was included based on recommendations rather than the blogger having read the book, because the summary turns Margerit Sovitre into "Lady Margerit" which is a peculiar error to make if you've read it.
Major category: PromotionPublications: Daughter of MysteryTags: promotion
November 8, 2017
Movie Review (ok no it isn't a review at all): Thor: Ragnarok
bookreview.jpg
My friends are often frustrated at my resistance to their suggestions of books or movies they think I’d like. “This is just up your alley! You’ll love it! You liked X so you’re going to love Y! I think this is really your sort of thing!” When I don’t want to deal, I’ll point out that I have an enormous to-be-read list already and mumble something about adding it to the list, or I’ll leave my movie-going up to the chance of which movies my friends are getting a group up to see when I happen to be available. But sometimes I’ll push back and point out that my friends’ recommendations—not just of things they like, but of things they actively think I’ll like—have a success rate that isn’t much better than random. So bringing something to my attention is fine, but when I say it doesn’t grab me, just accept that it doesn’t grab me.
Comic book movies are one of my weak spots in this process. And just like Lucy and the football, I have a weakness for believing that maybe, just maybe, this time the movie that all my friends are saying is the best Marvel movie ever will actually recapture the things that I enjoy about graphic novels, and will spark that sense of wonder I felt back at the beginning of the long chain of big SFX budget features that gobsmacked me by putting my comic book fantasies up on the big screen.
Yeah…no.
The thing is, what the movie makers are taking away from the success of comic book movies is exactly what makes me swear every single time that I’ll never again let myself be fooled into giving them one more chance. Explosions and long lovingly-drawn-out sequences of extreme meaningless violence. Not merely not my thing, but something that a movie needs to actively overcome by being extremely (and I mean extremely) good at everything else.
Thor: Ragnarok did not overcome.
Honestly, except for that one heartbreaking flashback scene with Valkyrie where we are allowed to pretend that the companion she sees fall in battle was her girlfriend (and we aren’t actually told that, we’re just tossed the crumb of not having it outright contradicted), all I came out of Thor:Ragnarok with is the memory of constant non-stop fight and chase scenes. Boring. Unutterably and mind-numbingly boring. And if you edited out all the scenes of violence from the movie, you might possibly have ten minutes left of pratfalls and embarrassment humor.
And yet, everywhere I look, people are calling it the best Marvel movie ever. People whose taste and opinions I ordinarily find trustworthy. So if you’re ever in a position of raving to me about how wonderful something is and how I absolutely must read/watch/play/try it and I get this pained and evasive look on my face and mumble something about there only being so many hours in a day, just…take no for an answer. Ok?
Major category: ReviewsTags: reviews: movies
