Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 112
October 28, 2017
Book Review: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss
A historic fantasy featuring an ensemble of fascinating female characters--the "daughters" (in various senses) of various classics horror fiction protagonists. This is the sort of book that often leaps to the top of my to-be-read list. I liked it...but I didn’t love it, which always makes me sad. So first: why did I like it? The premise is full of promise. Mary Jeckyll (daughter of the late doctor) finds information after her mother’s death that results in her taking responsibility for a young woman named Diana Hyde, evidently the daughter of her late father’s assistant who disappeared after being charged with murder (the assistant, not the daughter). They stumble into participating in Sherlock Holmes' investigation of the gruesome murder of a prostitute, and soon clues are turning up to a mysterious “Society of Alchemists” that appears to tie all sorts of threads together, including several other rather unusual women whose fathers were similarly connected to the Society. For anyone familiar with weird literature of the 19th century, picking up on the hints and clues will be a large part of the fun of this story.
The writing is solidly competent and the characters of the various women are distinct and colorful. What didn’t work for me quite as well was the structure of the plot, which feels a great deal like working through the collective origin stories of a band of superheroes without quite getting to the adventure they tackle together. Each character narrates her history to the others which, while, it fills in essential information for the reader, results in a very slow build-up. The need to fit these expository chapters in where they don’t disrupt the flow of the action (which is quite dense and break-neck) can lead to some strange pacing, such as when Justine Frankenstein tells the others her story in the aftermath of the dramatic climax. To be sure, there is a climax and a natural conclusion to the book, as well as a clear opening for a sequel. But this book feels like the set-up for that sequel rather than a stand-alone story.
The other narrative technique that didn’t entirely work for me--and I feel like this is a bit petty--is the meta-fiction of the story’s structure. One of the women is writing up the adventure, deliberately in the style of a penny-dreadful and told from the points of view of the various participants. This narrative is interrupted at regular intervals by commentary among the women, criticizing the wording, their portrayals, and arguing with the choices of the writer. The meta-fiction is that the lot of them are, in essence, hanging over the shoulder of the writer as she works and having their interjections and comments recorded in real time. But the feel of it, to me, was more like an MST3K running commentary--more oral than written--which kept throwing me out of the meta-fictional context. (That is, I might not have been bothered if the side comments felt more like something set down originally in writing than transcribed from audio.) To be fair, it’s an imaginative technique and has the dual functions of turning what might otherwise be a somewhat flat narration into a more lively time-disrupted sequence, and of introducing us to the personalities of the entire group of women long before they enter the storyline, which in some cases comes fairly late in the game.
So, as I said, liked it but didn’t love it, primarily for structural reasons in the writing. But if you're intrigued by the female viewpoint on the consequences of classic horror stories, this will be right up your alley.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
October 27, 2017
Mini-Reviews of Historical Gay Flash Fiction by Elin Gregory
bookreview.jpg
One of the members of the Queer Sci Fi facebook group had a clever idea of trying to match up group members who wrote similar type of fiction for cross-promotion, on the premise that our readerships might enjoy each others’ work. I wasn’t so sure about the process because I have rather marginal interests relative to the group as a whole (which is somewhat dominated by people writing m/m, sci-fi, and works with an erotic focus). But I ended up matched with the delightful Elin Gregory whose work would be an absolutely perfect mirror for mine except that she focuses on male characters.
Elin is a museum curator in Cardiff, Wales (you can hear my heart going pitty-pat, can’t you?) and writes historical fiction set across the scope of European history, but including some works focusing on Wales. She blogs at elingregory.wordpress.com which also has information on her publications.
The site includes two free stories and a free excerpt from one of her novels, which I’ll be reviewing briefly below. Her novels include:
The Bones of Our Fathers - Contemporary. Malcolm Bright, a museum curator in a small Welsh border town finds romance in a rescue excavation while trying to save artifacts from treasure hunters.
Eleventh Hour - Espionage and disguise in post WWI London.
On a Lee Shore - Regency-era Lt. Christopher Penrose needs work after losing his ship, but when chance throws him into the hands of pirates he struggles with whether this is the sort of work...and romance...he is willing to accept.
Alike as Two Bees - Historical romance in Classical Greece between a sculptor and a scarred and brusque soldier.
The two complete free stories are both very short and more in the way of character studies. Elin’s prose style and descriptions are exquisite and she has a solid sense of place and time. The excerpts of her work that I’ve read include sensual and homoerotic elements but no explicit sex.
“The Wanderer”, inspired by the Anglo-Saxon poem of the same title, is an evocative and haunting description of a man seeking his past. Has he found it? Or is the thing he seeks lost beyond recall?
“Frost on the Thorn” is an unexpected seasonal tale set in Roman Gaul where Quintus, on the verge of taking up a post in far Britannia, hears a tale of a wondrous thorn tree from the British slave he acquired to teach him the language.
If you enjoy the sort of historic fiction I write, and like reading about male protagonists just as much as female ones, I think you’d enjoy Elin Gregory’s work.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
October 24, 2017
The LHMP is Becoming a Publisher
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
I've been playing around with ideas for how to use the occasional "fifth week" in the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast schedule, and the idea that keeps coming back to me with the tenacity of an affectionate cat at feeding time is to publish audio short stories that fit the theme of the Project. I bounced the idea off a few people and other than the occasional reaction of, "You know...this means you have to read a slushpile," no one tried to dissuade me.
So I'm making it official. This announcement should give enough time for inspiration, writing, and polishing, while providing a close enough deadline to keep people focused. (For those of you who find NaNoWriMo too daunting, maybe it would make a good project?) The one thing that I was absolutely certain of the moment the idea came to me was that I would be offering professional rates. I want to provide incentive for writers to submit great stories. Stories that fulfill the goal of the LHMP of encouraging the writing and enjoyment of truly great lesbian historic fiction.
Details on how to submit will be available closer to the submissions window. For now, fire up those keyboards and start writing!
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcastsubmissions
Call for Submissions: Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Fiction Special
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will be open for submissions during January 2018 for short stories in the lesbian historic fiction genre, to be produced in audio format for the podcast, as well as published in text on the website.
Technical Details
We will accept short fiction of any length up to 5000 words, which is a hard limit. We will be buying at least two stories, possibly more, depending on length (if we get some really great shorter works). If the experiment is successful, it may be repeated in the future.
We will be paying professional rates: US$0.06/word.
The contract will be for first publication rights in audio and print (i.e., the story must not have appeared in either format previously) with an exclusive one year license. (Exceptions can be arranged by mutual consent for “best of” collections within that term.)
Instructions on how to submit will be made available on this site closer to the submission period. NO SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED OUTSIDE THE SUBMISSION PERIOD OF JANUARY 2018.
What We’re Looking For
Stories must be set in an actual historic culture--i.e., a specific time and place in history--and the plot and characters should be firmly rooted in that time and place. (No time-travel or past memories, please. And no supernatural elements, just ordinary history.)
Stories must be set before 1900. We’d love to see stories that reach beyond the popular settings of 19th century America and England unless you do something new and interesting in them.
Romance is optional--by which I mean story lines focusing on the establishment of a new romantic relationship--and romance stories should have some other strong element in addition to the romance.
We are not looking for erotica. Sex may be implied but not described.
Stories should feature lesbian themes. What do I mean by that? Especially given the emphasis the LHMP puts on how people in history understood sexuality differently than we do? This is where we get into “I know it when I see it” territory. The story should feature protagonist(s) whose primary emotional orientation within the scope of the story is toward other women. This is not meant to exclude characters who might identify today as bisexual or gender-queer, or who have had relationships with men outside the scope of the story. But the story itself should focus on lesbian themes expressed authentically within a historic context.
Stories need not be all rainbows and unicorns, but should not be tragic. Angst and peril are ok as long as they don’t end in tragedy.
Authors of all genders and orientations are welcome to submit. Authors from traditionally marginalized cultures are strongly encouraged to submit, regardless of whether you are writing about your own cultural background.
Please feel free to publicize this call for submissions. If you have questions of general interest, submit them in the comments.
The Alpennia Gazette is Live!
Alpennia Logo
I'm officially signing people up for my new monthly newsletter. You can sign up here. (You may notice that the sign-up form is hosted on my other website. I'm still working on integrating it with the code on this one. It won't matter for the sign-up process.)
The newsletter is planned to go out monthly, with only the occasional special notification for limited sale prices, unexpected opportunities, and other time-sensitive news. I pledge to you not to annoy you in the sign-up process with pop-up overlays, annoying recapchas or other nonsense. There is an e-mail confirmation process to make sure you really want to sign up and that's all.
Although I'll be sending out an "Issue 0" at the beginning of November to test-drive the system, the major newsletter launch period will be throughout the month of November when I'll be coordinating it with a give-away to celebrate the one year anniversary of Mother of Souls being released. So everyone who signs up before I put the December newsletter to bed will be entered for a chance to win. I promise that no matter how many of my books you've already read, there will be options among the prizes for something you don't have.
Contents
What will I be including? The regular features will be:
Recent and upcoming publications
Upcoming convention appearances and readings
News and excerpts of my current writing projects (no spoilers!)
Discussions of my writing process
Background information on Alpennia (history, geography, linguistics, sociology, recipes) - both new content and material I've published on my blog previously
Fan art (as available, and with permission, of course)
And perhaps the most exciting thing of all, you'll get exclusive access to new Alpennia short fiction when I have stories that fill in background events for the series but I don't have a commercial market for them. These stories will eventually be published in a collection, but only subscribers will get access to them at the time of writing. I don't have any ready to go yet, but there are a number of planned short works that I want to release "in timeline" as the novels come out. And my newsletter subscribers will be the first readers to see them!
If any of that sounds exciting, click the link above and sign up!
Major category: PromotionTags: promotionnewsletterAlpennia
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 16a - On the Shelf for November 2017
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 16a - On the Shelf for November 2017 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2017/11/04 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for November 2017.
Sometimes it’s easy to tell that when it comes to history, my heart lives in the middle ages. Last week’s episode on women knights in shining armor was a lot of fun to put together. But the middle ages isn’t just about pageantry and castles. The Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog has been covering a number of publications that look closely at how medieval people thought about sex and gender. The essays in the collection Premodern Sexualities ask questions like “what does it mean when homosexuality is not considered an identity but being a prostitute is?” Or “what was the relationship between gender identity and sexual orientation, and how did that affect how medieval law treated people with ambiguous bodies?” It can be easy to acknowledge today that gender and sexuality are social constructs, but it can be harder to accept that people in the past used such different constructs that it can be hard to draw clear parallels between our lives and those of our ancestors. When we encounter hints of homoerotic sentiment in the writings of women like Margery Kempe, do we work too hard to try to fit them into our modern identity boxes?
When I finish up the papers from the Premodern Sexualities volume, I look at the original text of Knighton’s Chronicle that I talked about in last week’s episode--the one about the gang of cross-dressed women showing up at a 14th century tournament. I don’t usually include primary sources in the blog, but sometimes it’s fun to let a text speak for itself. After that I cover an article on an unusual joint memorial brass to two women from 15th century England. Memorials like this gave me an idea for a future essay, so hold on to that thought.
After that, the blog is going to plunge deep into the pool of historiography and theory with Valerie Traub’s book Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. This book was a lot more dense than what I usually choose to cover and talks more about talking about history, than looking at the past itself. I’ll be continuing on a similar theme of historic theory for much of the rest of the year, covering the articles in a collection titled The Lesbian Premodern, which includes a lot of essays on what it means to think about lesbian history as a field of study, and the academic conflicts between various ways of approaching the study of the past. I’m finding the debates intensely interesting and it makes me want to find people to discuss the parallels between the study of lesbian history and the creation of lesbian historic fiction.
This month’s author guest is someone I can imagine having those discussions with. Farah Mendlesohn is publishing her first novel: a lesbian regency romance titled Spring Flowering. Farah is an academic with a background in history and literature and has a lot of interesting things to say about the social dynamics of gender and sexuality in the early modern era. And I can’t wait to read her novel, which should be on my iPad by the time you’re listening to this.
This month’s essay is going to be on the vocabulary of women who love women, looking at the words used in various languages and cultures across the ages, both technical language and everyday slang. You can tell a lot about how people perceived lesbian sexuality by the root meanings of the words that were used. But you can also learn a lot from the simple fact that such vocabulary existed and by noticing how and when it was used.
This month’s Ask Sappho question touches on the question of how women have communicated their desires in the past. Rose Herman-Pall asks “How did women in history signal to each other that they were Sapphically inclined, especially if they were in marriages to men?”
The question doesn’t specify a particular era or culture, but I’ll focus in the last several centuries in England and America, since that’s the context most listeners are likely to be familiar with. And this is going to be a lot more off-the-cuff than usual, so there’ll be no footnotes in the show notes.
In the past, when I’ve done research for historic re-enactment, or answered research questions for authors, I’ve always found it a useful exercise to take a question that starts out “How did they...?” and back up a step to ask, “Did they...?” I remember once someone asked, “How did medieval people get going in the morning when they didn’t have coffee yet?” That started a conversation on the history of breakfast as a concept, and the other changes in society that happened around the time that stimulating beverages like coffee and tea entered Western society, and the ways in which rituals around those beverages have become so ingrained in our lives that it’s hard to imagine life without them.
So let’s think about what underlies that question: “How did women in history signal to each other that they were Sapphically inclined, especially if they were in marriages to men?” There are at least three important assumptions here that we need to unpack before thinking about an answer. The first is that women needed some special way of signaling their desires to each other. The second is that women have always had a specific concept of lesbian desire as something different from the default. The third is that women would have viewed heterosexual marriage as a barrier to expressing those desires.
For those of us who grew up in the latter part of the 20th century--and that’s pretty much all of us at this point--it can be just as hard to imagine a world in which same-sex desire is not considered a separate, fixed, inborn orientation as it is to imagine a world in which people have never encountered coffee or tea. But when you look at women’s literature around romance, affection, and passionate expression during the last several centuries (and earlier as well, but I’m focusing on maybe the 17th through 19th centuries) it becomes clear that passionate and romantic feelings between women weren’t considered some special separate aberration, but were considered normal, natural, and desirable. It was women who didn’t experience sentimental attachments to female friends who were considered odd.
In a world where women are expected to call each other beloved, to speak of their undying devotion to each other, and to long for each other’s presence and embraces, in a world where it is utterly normal to exchange kisses, caresses, and embraces, both in public and in private, in a world where it is completely expected that people of the same sex will sleep in the same bed as a sign of their close emotional relationship--or simply for the sake of convenience--it can be hard to figure out what sort of special signal a woman would need to use to express romantic interest in her special friend.
I emphasize the word “special” because this isn’t to say that women didn’t have ways to indicate that they wanted to shift the intensity of the friendship. We can see some methods in the diaries of Anne Lister because she talks about them explicitly. She talks about mentioning certain works of literature that discuss same-sex desire to see if the other woman is familiar with them. Or maybe she kisses the object of her interest in a more lingering way than she would kiss an ordinary friend. But the fact that she kissed her would have been considered normal.
Another thing to consider is how geographically circumscribed most lives were before the 20th century. The vast majority of people you interacted with would be people you’d known all your life. People who lived in the same town as you--or if you were part of the minority who lived in a large city, people who lived in the same neighborhood or who were part of your family’s social circle. If you wanted to delicately hint that you wanted a deeper relationship with someone, you weren’t likely to be dealing with a stranger. It would be someone you’d known for some time. Someone whose opinions and responses you were already familiar with.
When considering the lives of pre-20th century women, it’s also important to understand that the dividing lines between sex and affection were drawn in different places at different times. Activities that we consider sex acts might have been considered ordinary expressions of very close friendship. A woman might want to make sure that the object of her affection felt the same degree and intensity of attachment that she did before committing herself wholeheartedly, but it wasn’t necessarily a negotiation that either of them would have felt needed to be done covertly. And they wouldn’t have considered the degree of attachment and affection between them to be something separate and apart from what other female friends felt for each other.
But--you ask me--what about the historic records we can find in which women that we would consider lesbians are criticized or punished? This gets back to the question of how society is drawing lines between concepts and behaviors. You will find women being criticized if they claim male social prerogatives. If they cross-dress. If they marry a woman in the guise of a man. You will find women being criticized if they explicitly resist the expected forms of society. If their attachment to a female friend leads them to reject what would be considered a desirable marriage. In some eras, if they are open about genital sexual activity of any type--with a woman or a man--this will be cause for censure. And in some eras, public discourse around stereotypes of female same-sex sexuality is used to communicate expectations and limits, and to create social divisions that prevent women as a class from advancing women’s causes. In eras when outspoken, socially active women were accused of lesbianism, the point wasn’t to control women’s sexual activity, but to control women’s social and political agency. Sex itself wasn’t the point, it was the weapon.
So getting back to our third assumption--that women who desired other women would have considered marriage to a man to be a bar to those relationships or to expressing those feelings. This takes a very modern position on the optionality of marriage. For most of history, marriage was not about making an individual, voluntary choice based on erotic desire or even on romantic attraction, even in eras when romantic attraction was held up as an ideal. Marriage was primarily an economic transaction--at the very least a major influence on one’s economic and social status. As a parallel, consider how absurd we would consider it to think that one’s employment should be based primarily on personal bonds of affection with the employer. Sure, in some cases you may be offered a job because of personal connections. And sure, in some cases you may end up having a personal friendship with your boss. But those things aren’t considered expected. A woman opting out of marriage because she didn’t have a pre-existing erotic attraction to the man she was marrying would have been considered as silly as we would consider refusing a job because you didn’t think your future boss was hot.
Another aspect of pre-20th century society that we sometimes have a hard time imagining is how strongly gender-segregated people’s lives were. (Think about that awful politician who said he had a rule never to be alone in a room with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Now imagine everyone in society thinking that way.) In a society that considers a woman suspect for any sort of emotional attachment to a non-related man, it’s not only expected that your close emotional bonds will be with other women, but that is considered desirable. Friendship, as the theory went, was only possible between equals, and men and women could rarely be equal. Women were expected to rely on other women to fulfill their emotional and affectionate needs. (Just as men were expected to rely on men for those needs.) In that context, the dividing line between affection and romantic love was functionally non-existent. The dividing line between ordinary physical expressions of that love and something that went beyond the norm was exceedingly fuzzy. And that dividing line would be negotiated between two women who already had established an emotional bond and engaged in a lot of physical expression of that bond already.
So, to a large extent, the original question presumes a universality to our 21st century experiences of desire, our expressions of desire, and our social expectations. We won’t find 18th century women secretly signally their erotic desires to complete strangers by using carefully color-coded handkerchiefs, because they had no need to do so. They would be walking side by side in the park, with arms twined about each other’s waist, leaning in for a kiss the way that good friends were expected to do, and then maybe lingering over that kiss just a few moments longer than they ever had before, to see how the other woman would respond.
Call for Submissions
And now for a special announcement. I’ve been pondering what to do with the occasional fifth show when there are five Saturdays in a month. And the idea that kept coming back, as persistently as a cat at feeding time, was to include some original lesbian historic fiction audio short stories. So I’ve posted a call for submissions on my website. You can find the link in the show notes. In January 2018 I’ll be accepting submissions of original, unpublished short stories of up to 5000 words and choosing two to record for the show. The text will also be published on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project website. I’ll be paying professional rates because the purpose of the Project is to encourage people to write and enjoy really great lesbian historic fiction, and you only get the best by letting authors know you value it. There are some content specifications, so be sure to read the call for submissions if you’d like to submit a story for consideration. Instructions on how to submit will be posted closer to the submissions window, but this gives you two months to get writing.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
October 23, 2017
Forbidden Desire, But Forbidden for What Reason?
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
One of the fascinating and frustrating things about the genre of "transvestite saints," i.e., women (mostly in the early Christian era) who disguised themselves as men in order to participate in monastic devotion, is how thoroughly the stories center and elevate masculinity. One of the repeated motifs is that these gender-disguised women are approved because of the Biblical injunction to "become a man for Christ". That is, they became a more perfect type of Christian by "becoming male". Other female figures in these legends generally play the role of (attempted) seductive temptress or scorned would-be admirer. The saint in question is typically removed from the context of femininity once the change of clothes has signally a category change. So in the legend discussed in this article, there's a valid confusion over whether the forbidden desire that the abbot is trying to prevent with Eurphrosine's seclusion is heterosexual desire for the disguised woman or the equally forbidden homosexual desire for the eunuch she presents herself as.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #157 Gaunt 1996 Straight Minds/’Queer’ Wishes in Old French Hagiography: La Vie de Sainte Euprosine
About LHMP
Full citation:
Gaunt, Simon. 1996. “Straight Minds/’Queer’ Wishes in Old French Hagiography: La Vie de Sainte Euprosine” in Premodern Sexualities ed. by Louise Fradenburg & Carla Freccero. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-91258-X
Publication summary:
This is a collection of papers looking at issues in the historiography of sexuality, that is: how to study sexuality in historic contexts with consideration of the theoretical frameworks being used. In general, the approach is to dismantle the concepts of universals and essences, by which “history” has been used to define and persecute “others.” The papers are very theory-focused around how the study of the “other” points out the narrow and distorted picture of history in the mainstream tradition. One feature that these papers challenge is a clear dichotomy between a pre-modern understanding of sexuality as “acts” versus a modern understanding as “identity”. The papers cover not only queer sexuality by a broader variety of sexualized themes in history. As usual with general collections like this, I’ve selected the papers that speak to lesbian-like themes, but in this case I’ve included on with a male focus that provides an interesting counterpoint on issues of gender identity.
Gaunt 1996 “Straight Minds/’Queer’ Wishes in Old French Hagiography: La Vie de Sainte Euprosine”
This is an examination of gender and sexuality in a “transvestite saint” legend from France. Saint Euphrosine wanted to remain a virgin and so ran away from home. To help avoid being tracked down by her father, rather than entering a convent, she disguised herself as a man and claimed to be a eunuch to enter a monastery. Sight of her inflames the lusts of the monks such that the head of the monastery requires her to live secluded to prevent sexual temptation. The article focuses both on Euphrosine’s “erotic” relationships with Jesus and the potentially homoerotic reaction of the monks to the disguised Euphrosine. The question is left open whether this desire is forbidden heterosexual desire (because Euphrosine is “really a woman”) or forbidden homosexual desire, based on surface appearances. One of the conclusions is that even when not overtly female, female saints are still sexualized in medieval literature.
Time period: 13th cPlace: FranceMisc tags: cross-dressingcross-gender roles/behaviorgender disguise f>mtransvestite saintsEvent / person: Saint Euphrosyne
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October 21, 2017
The Newsletter is Knocking on the Door
Alpennia Logo
My brain is about to explode with the learning curve for both Hootsuite (for scheduling routine promotional postings on social media) and Mailchimp (for my new monthly author newsletter). The eventual goal will be to have a widget for subscribing to the newsletter embedded in the website structure itself, but for now, I'm testing out the html code for embedding it on a page. So go ahead and sign up if you want to -- it'll help me test how it works.
I'll post about more detailed plans and incentives for the newsletter later, but my plan is to send out a regular monthly newsletter with writing updates, information on convention appearances, reminders of forthcoming publications, and bits of "bonus content" about worldbuilding, how the series developed, things that didn't make it into the published books, and so forth. So...[I take a deep breath]...let's see how this works.
ETA: OK, that was so clearly not going to work I just deleted it. Sorry about any confusion.
Major category: PromotionTags: promotionnewsletter
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 15c: Book Appreciation with Caren Werlinger
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
October 17, 2017
The Newsletter Cometh
Alpennia Logo
Having listened to the promotional strategy advice of a wide variety of people, I'm planning to accomplish two things this weekend. One will be to set up Hootsuite (or some equivalent social media manager, but that's the one people seem to prefer) to handle automated promotional reminders that I rarely have the emotional energy to do manually. The other will be to set up an opt-in (of course!) newsletter for fans and readers to provide both a direct way to communicate announcements and other information, and to provide special content in exchange for access to attention. I figure to aim for absolutely not more often than once a month except for things like unexpected special sales (which I never know about in advance). Maybe less often than once a month, we'll see. I have a hard time planning these things because I'm not a newsletter reader myself, so I have to figure out what works for people who are.
So what sort of content will the newsletter provide? A lot of it will be just basic information:
Upcoming/New publication information
Upcoming appearances
Current projects
But I'll also be offering some special content not available to people who don't subscribe to the newsletter. And that's where you come in. Here are some ideas of my own, plus suggestions people have made online. Which of these would entice you to sign up for and read a newsletter? What other content would entice you?
Worldbuilding information (Alpennian language, geography, history, etc.)
Snippets of work in progress (no spoilers!)
Exclusive previews of Alpennian short fiction (stories that will eventually be released either free or as a collection, but that I'm not trying to sell individually)
Discussions of my writing process (for example, I kept a diary of how the plot of Daughter of Mystery developed as I was drafting it)
Alpennia fan art (with the artists' permissions, of course!)
Access to Alpennia swag (there is none yet, but I have some ideas percolating -- what would you be interested in?)
Let me know what you think. I'm still trying to get my mind around the psychological aspects of doing a newsletter and how it would differ from my blog, other than providing me with a list of people who have expressed a particular level of commitment and interest to following my writing.
Major category: PromotionTags: promotionnewsletter
October 16, 2017
Hermaphrodite Panic in the Renaissance
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
This article only scratches the surface of the peculiar fascination that emerged in the Renaissance around physiological ambiguity and gender identity. If one picks through the dubious concepts of anatomy and the strong binarist and heteronormative positions of both medicine and the law, there are some interesting developments in attitudes toward subjective gender identity.
Major category: LHMP
LHMP #156 Daston & Park 1996 The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France
About LHMP
Full citation:
Daston, Lorraine & Katharine Park. 1996. “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France” in Premodern Sexualities ed. by Louise Fradenburg & Carla Freccero. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-91258-X
Publication summary:
This is a collection of papers looking at issues in the historiography of sexuality, that is: how to study sexuality in historic contexts with consideration of the theoretical frameworks being used. In general, the approach is to dismantle the concepts of universals and essences, by which “history” has been used to define and persecute “others.” The papers are very theory-focused around how the study of the “other” points out the narrow and distorted picture of history in the mainstream tradition. One feature that these papers challenge is a clear dichotomy between a pre-modern understanding of sexuality as “acts” versus a modern understanding as “identity”. The papers cover not only queer sexuality by a broader variety of sexualized themes in history. As usual with general collections like this, I’ve selected the papers that speak to lesbian-like themes, but in this case I’ve included on with a male focus that provides an interesting counterpoint on issues of gender identity.
Daston & Park 1996 “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France “
The late 16th and 17th century fascination with hermaphrodites would give the impression that such persons were common. As well as the volume of discourse on the topic, the nature is different from previous medieval discussions and later early modern ones. The opinions and positions are contradictory, even when limited to the medical community, and include both formal and informal expertise (e.g., surgeons versus midwives). The focus of this article is specifically on the discussions of learned physicians, in order to narrow the range of variables.
Classical opinions fell in two general camps. Followers of Hippocrates and Galen considered hermaphrodites to be truly intermediate in sex, neither male nor female, although a spectrum was recognized that included effeminate males and masculine females. The Aristotelian view was that hermaphrodites had both male and female genitals but that the “true gender” of the individual would be apparent from temperament and essential personality. (One might summarize these as the “neither” and the “both” models, with reference to binary gender.)
Medieval Arabic medical manuals and the European texts derived from them discuss surgery to “treat” hermaphrodites, but this raised the question of identifying the “true” sex that was to be the output of the surgery. In general, medical literature of the medieval era avoided moral judgments, in contrast to medieval philosophical literature which viewed gender ambiguity more negatively.
Beginning around 1550, medical literature began addressing the theological and moral implications of gender ambiguity. For example, Paré whose discussion of hermaphrodites in the context of birth defects then slides sideways to discuss sex between women and then to examples of women transformed into men.
This shift in the moral tone of the discourse was accompanied by a focus on the Hippocratic model that saw hermaphrodites as a midpoint in a continuum of gender, situated between the effeminate man and the masculine woman. This positioning now linked hermaphrodites to discussions of sodomy and other sexual transgressions, as well as to transvestism. Like those topics, hermaphroditism represented a blurring or destruction of gender boundaries.
The shift to moralizing about hermaphrodites branched out into using biology for titillation. Paré was accused of obscenity by the Paris medical faculty due to his intentional inclusion of prurient material intended to appeal to the growing association of hermaphrodites with lesbians and thus with pornography. Thus, hermaphrodite anatomy became associated with a pointed focus on sex.
The law had no context for taking a neutral approach to the legal status of hermaphrodites. All interpretations required fitting into a strict gender binary. While medieval legal practice assumed there was an “innate” gender identity that could be determined by self-reporting of the individual hermaphrodite, Renaissance practice was deeply concerned with the possibility of deception and fraud and preferred to bring in outside experts to examine the supposed hermaphrodite and proclaim a gender assignment that the law would then impose.
The impact on individual lives of this approach is documented in any number of legal cases. Marie/Marin le Mercis was assigned female at birth but at 21 abandoned female dress, changed to using the masculine name Marin, and announced the intention of marrying a fellow maidservant, a widow named Jeane le Febvre. Marie/Marin was condemned to die for sodomy and cross-dressing, but an expert witness was brought in who testified that Marin had a penis that emerged from the vagina during arousal. The death penalty was avoided, but Marie/Marin was required to live as a woman and not have sex of any kind for two years to determine which gender nature would emerge.
Another case (which may demonstrate class privilege) was that of a lawyer’s daughter who was caught having sex with a woman but then was judged to be a hermaphrodite with a hidden penis. Having been judged to be officially male, the defendant was not only allowed to live as a man but to study philosophy at the university.
Reliance on outside testimony for legal questions of sexual performance (e.g., accusations of impotence relevant to divorce proceedings) was an established practice. However the use of expert testimony for questions of hermaphrodite gender was new and related to concerns about gender fraud. This concern intruded into the lives of physiologically ambiguous people even when no potential crime was involved. Such was the case in 1686 in France of Marguerite Malaure who was declared “predominantly male” and legally required to dress and live as a man (under the name Arnaud). Marguerite was strongly opposed to this judgment but had to petition the king to be allowed to return to a female life.
These are only some of the cases that illustrate this conflict between whether the “truth” of gender was to be found in physiology or subjective personal identity. But arguments from subjective gender identity were highly heteronormative and binary, often concluding that the object of sexual desire was a certain evidence for (heteronormative) gender identity. Physiognomy was also consulted to determine “true gender”, evaluating the subject in relation to gender ideals. Did the person have “feminine” or “masculine” features. But the primary emphasis was on the genitals. This was the context in which we see the evolution of the trope of an enlarged clitoris being associated with lesbianism.
Anxiety about hermaphrodites is also contemporaneous with general social anxiety about gender blurring, as exemplified by tracts such as Hic Mulier.
Time period: Renaissance (general)16th c17th cPlace: EnglandFranceMisc tags: enlarged clitoriscross-dressingcross-gender roles/behaviorhermaphroditismtransgender identitymedical treatisesEvent / person: Ambroise ParéMarie/Marin le Mercis & Jeane le FebvreMarguerite (Arnaud) Malaure
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