Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 95
August 30, 2018
Book Review: Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher
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Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher (Red Wombat Tea Company, 2018)
T. Kingfisher has enough cred as an author with me that I will give anything she writes a try. But it’s not reasonable to expect that any one author will hit your target every single time. This is a perfectly good story, excellently written, with engaging characters. It just didn’t hit my personal sweet spots in terms of story and characters. Your experience will most likely be different.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Book Review: Thora: A Spartan Hoplite’s Slave by Red Hope
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Set in classical Greece, the plot of this novella is fairly straightforward: upper class woman who is Not Like The Other Girls is intrigued by the beauty and defiance of an exotic (in this case, Norse) slave and purchases her in order to tame her and (as we eventually find out) with the goal of some sort of interpersonal relationship. After a period of power play, assorted hurt-comfort scenes, and jealous pining, the slave runs away because...well, because, and her retrieval results in a rescue, a joyous reunion, and her being freed, concluded by a HEA with her former owner. I don’t recall there being any explicit sex scenes, though there is one attempted rape.
I was a little hesitant about this book because the blurb implied the trope of “slavery as a context for romance”, which is really tricky to do well. As it happened, I didn’t really get to the point of evaluating how well or badly the slavery aspect was handled because I simply found the story too clumsily written to enjoy.
The prose is awkward and full of info-dumps. Point of view is handled sloppily and shifts from head to head constantly, sometimes multiple times on a page. There is an excessive use of referring to people by roles and characteristics “the Spartan woman”, “the scraggly slave”, “her owner.” And there is a lot of misuse of vocabulary--choosing the wrong homophone or using the wrong grammatical form of a word--which, along with an inconsistent wavering between a formal historical style and the use of modern slang made it hard for me to immerse myself in the story.
I would like to praise the author for the depth and detail of historic research included in this book. Although I might quibble on the interpretation of certain details and found the incorporation of the world-building both info-dumpy and opaque, the author clearly took the challenge of historical fiction seriously and did her ground work.
I received a review copy of this work.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Audio fiction review: The Periling Hand by Justin Howe
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I'm trying to make a push to get caught up with some casual reviewing as well as my review commitments. Since I'm currently still dazed from having dental work (new crown) I'll go for the casual side and more recently consumed.
* * *
I often comment on how I'm a big fan of "throw 'em in the deep end of the worldbuilding pool and expect them to swim." When that style of story doesn't work for me, most often it's because in some essential way the story isn't for me. It not merely throws worldbuilding at me unexplained, but it assumes layers of knowledge that I simply don't bring to the story. Otherwise I'm happy to surf the wave of uncertainty and see where it takes me.
"The Periling Hand" by Justin Howe, presented on the Beneath Ceaseless Skies podcast takes that type of worldbuilding approach, but failed for me not so much in taking it too far, but in offering me very little story to go with the worldbuilding. The main character has recently suffered an accidental amputation, but fitted with a symbiotic artificial wooden arm that is somehow animated by some...substance?...applied to it. Investigates an unexpected death. And ends up sharing body space with...something...not sure what.
The story offers a wealth of unexplained terminology, concepts, entities, cultural practices, and backstory but none of it ever seems to come together to form a coherent whole. Or even an intelligible whole. One gets the impression that there is definitely a larger story structure into which this work fits, but it fails to stand on its own, not merely in terms of information but even in terms of plot. It's as if the game-play manual for an RPG were presented with a thin veneer of narrative rather than being structured in encyclopedic form.
Maybe I'm being overly harsh, but given that I know that I'm well on the far end of the scale for enjoying deep-end SFF settings, I suspect there are many people for whom this story will work even less well.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: audio
August 27, 2018
Some Articles Do Not Age Well
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
If the last 30 years have seen a blossoming in academic research on homosexuality in history, they have seen an even more drastic shift in the academic approach to transgender topics in history. It's one thing to take a hard, dispassionate look at attitudes towards transgender topics within the historic context itself. It's a bit more painful to read the work of "modern" academics and recognize how their work is tainted by the application of frameworks that themselves are products of a specific historic and social context. I continue to cover articles like this one for three solid reasons: They often have references to historic sources that others may find valuable. I have a responsibility to my readers to provide guidance regarding the content of publications so that they can determine whether they would find them useful. And once I get to the point of actually reading and evaluating a work, it's already on the schedule to be covered. Blogging is not necessarily advocacy.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #210 Bullough 1982a Transvestism in the Middle Ages
About LHMP
Full citation:
Bullough, Vern L. 1982. “Transvestism in the Middle Ages” in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage eds. Prometheus Books, Buffalo. ISBN 0-87975-141-X
Bullough "Transvestism in the Middle Ages"
Vern L. Bullough wrote a number of articles in the 1970s through 1990s on topics relating to crossdressing and “transvestism” in the middle ages. They are all thoroughly outdated, especially with respect to contextualizing gender presentation as it relates to gender identity and sexual orientation. I’m going to summarize the article using more current terminology (that would not have been available to Bullough at the time this was written).
This article operates within a Freudian worldview but tries to challenge a purely psychological approach to understanding historic attitudes towards crossdressing by examining the differential attitudes towards masculine and feminine presentations and how they related to assumed status differences between the sexes.
Bullough does not reject the Freudian view of transgender presentation, but rather discusses variation in the reception to the phenomenon depending on the assigned gender of the person in question and the context in which the transgender presentation occurred.
For example, transmasculine presentation by AFAB (assigned female at birth) persons could be tolerated and even encouraged because masculinity was more highly valued and it was considered admirable for a woman to aspire to it. In contrast, the negative value assigned to femininity made it difficult for medieval societies to understand why an AMAB (assigned male at birth) person would perform femininity--and thus a decrease in status--unless for some ulterior purpose such as illicit sexual access to women.
Temporary cross-gender performance was tolerated in the context of specific events such as carnival or Halloween, or as part of overt masquerades. The Biblical reference cited for opposition to cross-dressing (“The women shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment”) does not explain this situational allowance or the differential attitude towards masculine and feminine presentation.
Bullough explores how these differential attitudes played out in the biographies of “transvestite saints”. Women who “became male for Christ,” by setting aside not only their female presentation but their sexuality were viewed as praiseworthy, though it’s uncertain to what extent actual women were accepted and praised for doing so (as opposed to the safely legendary saints). But there are no legends of male transvestite saints (that is AMAB saints presenting as female), not only because this would be a loss of status, but also because trans-femininity was viewed as inherently associated with eroticism. The handful of anecdotes about AMAB persons living in convents as women invariably involved the suspicion or fact of heterosexual fornication.
An assortment of the most archytypal “transvestite saint” biographies are presented and discussed, including several more plausibly historic anecdotes from the medieval period proper, plus mention of Joan of Arc and the legend of Pope Joan.
This is followed by contexts where male crossdressing (i.e., AMAB persons with female presentation) were permitted, such as dramatic performance in contexts where all performers were male, or during Carnival, which in some regions was strongly associated with cross-gender performance.
Bullough concludes that Western hostility to cross-gender performance is far more rooted in issues of change of social status than in Biblical prohibition.
Time period: Post-Roman/Early MedievalMedieval (general)Place: EuropeMisc tags: transgender identitytransvestite saintscross-dressinggender disguise f>mgender disguise m>f
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August 26, 2018
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26c: Book Appreciation with K Aten
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26c - Book Appreciation with K. Aten
(Originally aired 2018/09/15 - listen here)
In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.
In this episode Kelly Aten recommends some favorite queer historical novels:
Other Girls by Diane Ayres
Alma Mater by Rita Mae Brown
Cinder and the Smoke by Geonn Cannon [Note: in discussing the book, there is an assertion that having a female Pinkerton agent in the 19th century made the story non-historic, but see for example Pinkerton agent Kate Warne one of the first women hired by Pinkerton in the 1850s]
Stormby Kim Pritekel
Cobb Island by Blayne Cooper
Balance of Forces: Toujours ici by Ali Vali
When Women Were Warriors by Catherine M. Wilson
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26b: Interview with K. Aten
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26b - Interview with K. Aten
(Originally aired 2018/09/08 - listen here)
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about
The setting and characters of The Arrows of Artemis
Moving from fanfic to original historical fiction
The joys and frustrations of researching ancient Greece
Publications mentioned:
The Fletcher by K Aten (Regal Crest)
The Archer by K Aten (Regal Crest)
The Saggitarius by K Aten (Regal Crest)
More info
Website:
http://www.katen-author.com
Twitter:
@WORDNRD68
https://www.facebook.com/katenauthor/
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 26a - On the Shelf for September 2018
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26a - On the Shelf for September 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/09/01 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for September 2018.
Last month was a bit of a crunch and I’m scrambling a bit to get material lined up for the blog and the podcast for the remainder of the year. I now have a due date for turning in my current novel, the fourth book in the Alpennia series, which adds a bit of extra pressure, but I’ve just sent a novella out on submission, which is the sort of thing that always makes me feel accomplished, even if I don’t have any idea when or to whom it might sell. Last month was also busy with attending Worldcon, the annual World Science Fiction Convention, although at least this year it was practically in my back yard rather than involving international travel. I was hoping to maybe pick up some interviews for the podcast while I was there, but when I matched a shopping list of people writing queer women in historic fantasy to the list of attending authors, nobody jumped out as a good candidate. At least, nobody that I haven’t already interviewed! But I’ve made some additions to my author shopping list and we’ll see what turns up.
Fiction Series
It’s hard to believe that we’ve coming up to the third installment of our new fiction series this month! This time the story is “Peaceweaver” by Jennifer Nestojko. It’s a tale inspired by the era of Beowulf, a bittersweet story of mature women finding peace and comfort after sacrificing their youth for the sake of family honor.
It has come up to the time for making a decision about whether to try the fiction experiment again next year. It can be hard to judge the success of a project in its first run. I hope that you’ve been enjoying these stories as much as I’ve enjoyed bringing them to you. I also hope that some of you listeners have been inspired to start thinking about the stories you might want to tell. And so I will definitely be doing another fiction series in 2019. I’ll be posting an official description and call for submissions a bit later, but you can get a sense of what I’m looking for by checking out last year’s call. It isn’t too soon to start noodling with a plot and characters. Like last year, I’ll be accepting submissions in January so you have plenty of time to get writing.
Essay
This month’s essay topic comes from one of my listener polls. Of the several historic figures I offered, I got a lot of positive response for 17th century gender outlaw Mary Frith, also known as Moll Cutpurse. So I’ll be looking at her life as presented not only in contemporary records, but as purported to be told in her own memoirs, and as fictionalized on stage. Frith is a fascinating and transgressive figure, with a number of different faces depending on how you’re looking at her. In many ways, she stands as an icon for the disruptions around gender performance that England was dealing with around 1600.
Publications on the Blog
For this month’s blog, I start by finishing up the last of the remaining short journal articles with a look at discussions of sexuality in medieval Latin scientific literature. Then I’m plunging into the material on Moll Cutpurse, including her purported memoir. I have another couple of texts discussing her that I want to cover, including Charles Whibley’s A Book of Scoundrels and two plays in which she features as a character: Amends for Ladies by Nathan Field, and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. But I’m not sure exactly how I’ll be divvying them up between the blog and the podcast.
If I have space left in the month, I’ll be spinning off of the theme of gender-queer presentations, and looking at the biography of a member of Mary Shelley’s circle in the early 19th century, one Mary Diana Dodds, also known as David Lyndsay, also known as Walter Sholto Douglas--at least according to the investigative research of scholar Betty T. Bennett. The book, originally written in 1991, is not as nuanced in considering the ambiguous territory around transgender themes as we might wish for today. But it presents an interesting tale of gender-crossing, not within the working class examples that we more typically see in that era, but among literary and diplomatic circles, which certainly opens up new horizons in the logistics of story inspiration.
Book Shopping!
And now for a new podcast feature: the book shopping report! In the past, on my blog, I’ve done periodic posts of research book acquisitions and I thought you might enjoy hearing about things I’ve picked up for the Project, even if I may not get around to covering them for a while.
Several of my recent purchases are in support of the poetry series that I’m planning. This includes Emma Donoghue’s collection Poems Between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship, and Desire, Domna C. Stanton’s bilingual collection The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present, and the slightly less useful Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing, by Ian McCormick, which alas is heavily focused on male-oriented material, though it collects up some interesting texts about women that get referenced regularly by the articles I cover.
Inspired by my coverage of publication number 200 on my blog, I decided to actually buy a copy of Queer Wales: The History, Culture, and Politics of Queer Life in Wales edited by Huw Osborne, and I used it to track down the published source of the possibly-lesbian medieval Welsh poem it mentions, which is published in the collection Beirdd Ceridwen: Blodeugerdd Barddas o Ganu Menywod hyd tua 1800, that is, Ceridwen’s Bards: a Bardic Collection of Women’s Poems to Around 1800, edited by Cathryn A. Charnell-White. As the book and its contents are entirely in Welsh, it may take me a bit of time to translate the poem sufficiently to include it in a future poetic podcast. Prose is fairly easy to translate, poetry is hard.
The last book I picked up recently is Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London by Randolph Trumbach. This appears to be an expanded version of the article by Trumbach that I covered in the blog back in April. I was hoping that it might include additional material relevant to women, but it looks like I’m going to be disapointed.
I think I have another couple of books on order currently, but I’ll save them for when they arrive. As usual, I’m picking up new books faster than I have any hope of blogging them!
Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction
In contrast to the non-fiction, I’m feeling a bit desperate at this month’s list of new and forthcoming novels. I’ve scraped up four titles, which I consider my minimum goal, but some of them are stretching the definitions a little. Plus a fifth novel where I’m having to trust the queer content based solely on rumor. If you know of any upcoming books with historic or historically-based settings, drop me a note to make sure I don’t overlook them.
Somehow I missed Alex Westmore’s Dead Man’s Chest when it came out back in July. This is the 5th book in her Plundered Chronicles, featuring piracy in the later 16th century. The series starts in Ireland but wanders over a broad scope of geography. Here’s the blurb:
“If the Croatoans on Roanoke don’t kill her, one of the many women in Captain Quinn Callaghan’s life will. Heading to the New World to bring a mysterious box to Lady Killigrew’s sister, Quinn and her pirate shipmates face dangers unlike any they have ever encountered. The journey alone is fraught with perils, but what they find when they land in Roanoke is enough to chill even a hardened pirate’s bones. But this delivery is barely less dangerous than the women in Quinn’s life--a couple of whom wish to see her dead while another reunites with her. As Quinn is forced to recognize the eventual collapse of Ireland as well as the end of some of her deepest friendships, she makes a decision that will alter the fate of both her life and her crew’s. In this fifth installment of the Plundered Series, you will be taken on a ride that will leave you breathless with every turn of the page as Quinn struggles to keep her men, her women, and herself alive.”
The other July book I’m including is the one where I have to rely entirely on rumor for the queer content. When I read the first book in Theordora Goss’s historical fantasy series The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club, titled The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, it felt like it was a book that by rights ought to have some lesbian themes somewhere in it, and I was a little disappointed that none appeared. I have been assured--though I can’t remember by whom--that this second book does have some queer female characters, though you certainly couldn’t guess that from the blurb, which is a perennial problem with books from the big publishers. The underlying conceit of this series is that the daughters of an array of characters from turn-of-the-century Gothic literature come together to solve the mystery of their origins and stop a sinister plot that their fathers were involved in. Here’s the blurb:
“In the sequel to the critically acclaimed The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Mary Jekyll and the rest of the daughters of literature’s mad scientists embark on a madcap adventure across Europe to rescue another monstrous girl and stop the Alchemical Society’s nefarious plans once and for all. Mary Jekyll’s life has been peaceful since she helped Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solve the Whitechapel Murders. Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, Justine Frankenstein, and Mary’s sister Diana Hyde have settled into the Jekyll household in London, and although they sometimes quarrel, the members of the Athena Club get along as well as any five young women with very different personalities. At least they can always rely on Mrs. Poole. But when Mary receives a telegram that Lucinda Van Helsing has been kidnapped, the Athena Club must travel to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to rescue yet another young woman who has been subjected to horrific experimentation. Where is Lucinda, and what has Professor Van Helsing been doing to his daughter? Can Mary, Diana, Beatrice, and Justine reach her in time? Racing against the clock to save Lucinda from certain doom, the Athena Club embarks on a madcap journey across Europe. From Paris to Vienna to Budapest, Mary and her friends must make new allies, face old enemies, and finally confront the fearsome, secretive Alchemical Society. It’s time for these monstrous gentlewomen to overcome the past and create their own destinies.”
As I say, I’m having to take the queer content on trust at this point, but if it sounds like something you might enjoy, check it out.
It took me a bit of following up on a chance reference to confirm that Like a Book by Bette Hawkins, which came out last month, has a historic connection by way of a character who is researching themes of Romantic Friendship in 19th century literature, although the story itself is a contemporary romance. But that connection between the present and the past makes it a natural fit for the shape of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. Here’s the blurb:
“Trish Carter has found the other side of an unsatisfying relationship and is now ready to embrace a new job and a new life. She isn’t expecting to test the limits of her fresh start on her first day at work though. The striking young author, June Williams, grabs her attention from their first conversation and Trish can’t seem to stay away from her. When the two women form a pact to test the theories June is researching for her book, they quickly discover that romantic friendships are easier on paper. Their contract clearly stipulates which types of intimacy are allowed and which aren’t. Holding hands is okay—but kissing certainly is not. At first the deal seems perfect. They can be close to one another without risking too much. But what happens when they cross the line and the boundaries of the contract conflict with real life?”
The two books that I’ve found that are new for September are both fantasies that weave in themes and settings from history. Julia Ember’s The Navigator’s Touch is out and out fantasy if you focus on the mermaids, but the setting draws strongly on early medieval Scandinavian history and mythology. This book is a sequel to her earlier work The Seafarer’s Kiss. Here’s the blurb:
“After invaders destroyed her village, murdered her family, and took her prisoner, shield-maiden Ragna is hungry for revenge. A trained warrior, she is ready to fight for her home, but with only a mermaid and a crew of disloyal mercenaries to aid her, Ragna knows she needs new allies. Guided by the magical maps on her skin, battling storms and mutiny, Ragna sets sail across the Northern Sea. She petitions the Jarl in Skjordal for aid, but despite Ragna's rank and fighting ability, the Jarl sees only a young girl, too inexperienced to lead, unworthy of help. To prove herself to the Jarl and win her crew's respect, Ragna undertakes a dangerous expedition. But when forced to decide between her own freedom and the fate of her crew, what will she sacrifice to save what’s left of her home?”
A similar blend of history and fantasy is found in K. Aten’s The Saggitarius, the third book in her Arrows of Artemis series which blends mythic Amazons with classical history. Here’s the blurb:
“What is life if not the sum of all things that occur before we die? Kyri has known her share of loss in the two decades that she has been alive. She never expected to find herself a slave in Roman lands, nor did she think she had the heart to become a gladiatrix. Soul shattered, she must fight to see her way back home again. Will she win her freedom and return to all that she has known, or will she become another kind of slave to the killer that has taken over her mind? The only thing that is certain through it all is her love and devotion to Queen Orianna. Then again, certainty can only be found in those that control their own destiny.”
Author Guest
And not at all by coincidence, Kelly Aten will also be our author guest this month, so look forward to hearing all about the Arrows of Artemis series and how it came to be written.
Ask Sappho
This month’s Ask Sappho question is from a previously featured author, Jeannelle M. Ferreira on Twitter, who asks, “Tell us about the Daughters of Bilitis.”
The story of Bilitis fits in very nicely with the theme of lesbian historical fiction because she’s an excellent example of a purely fictional figure who has become part of the historic lore and mythology of women who love women.
The story begins with the history of Sappho’s poetry, its loss, and the rediscovery of some fragments. As I discussed in my podcast on Sappho, we have reason to believe that complete manuscript copies of Sappho’s works continued to be produced up through the 6th or 7th century AD, but sometime around the 9th century, the majority of her work was lost. A few fragments and two complete works survived as quotations in other texts, but it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that archaeological excavations in Egypt, especially at Oxyrhynchus, began turning up scraps of papyrus with substantial additional material from Sappho. New fragments and poems continue to be identified even to this day.
But the relevant point is that in the late 19th century, the literati were familiar with the idea that previously unknown works of ancient Greek poets might suddenly turn up. Enter a French decadent poet named Pierre Louÿs.
The decadent movement in 19th century France had a number of preoccupations, but one of the things they were obsessed with was lesbian sexuality. And the reviewed interest in Sappho generated by the discoveries in Egypt meant that she and the circle of women mentioned in her poetry were popular subjects for the decadent writers and artists.
Louÿs had a fascination with ancient Greek culture and began writing erotic literature at the age of 18. He helped to found a literary review only a few years later that served as a venue for publishing some of his work. He hung out with famous men in homosexual circles such as André Gide and Oscar Wilde. And in 1894, at the age of 24, he published a volume of 143 poems under the title Chansons de Bilitis (Songs of Bilitis), presenting them as his translations of the work of a contemporary of Sappho, recently discovered inscribed in a newly excavated tomb in Cyprus. The volume also included a brief biographical sketch of Bilitis, telling of her youth in Pamphylia, her life in Mitylene on Lesbos with her lover Mnasidika, and then her career as a courtesan on Cyprus. The poems were arranged in three groups reflecting these periods and featuring themes and emotions reflecting different life stages. To digress for a moment, Mnasidika is a name that actually occurs in Sappho’s poetry, and so the reference added some verisimilitude to the story. The name Bilitis, however, is otherwise unknown, although it does a good job of being “made up to sound Greek.”
Louÿs was a classicist and famliar not only with ancient Greek literary styles but with the cultural references appropriate to the era and the Chansons were initially--if briefly--taken for the real deal: an actual newly-discovered corpus of ancient lesbian poetry. When the truth of Louÿs’ direct authorship came out, the work was still hailed as a literary masterpiece, reprinted numerous times with sensual illustrations including the most famous edition by Willy Pogany. Selections of the poems were set to music by composers such as Debussy.
Somewhere in here, you might be noticing the startling lack of any actual women--to say nothing of actual lesbians--anywhere in this story. The French decadent artists were obsessed with their invented image of what lesbians were like. Actual women? Not so much.
But given the thematic connection to Sappho, and the tragically fragmentary condition of Sappho’s own corpus of poetry, lesbians of the early 20th century may be forgiven for latching onto this French voyeur’s writings as being better than nothing.
In 1955, when lesbian activists for civil and political rights wanted to form an organization that offered an alternative meeting space to bars but could fly under the radar of public attention, they chose Bilitis as a namesake because she combined a clear sapphic connection to those “in the know” with almost complete obscurity for the general public. Even founding members Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were unfamiliar with her name when the organization they founded proposed “Daughters of Bilitis” for the group, riffing off of the names of such established organizations as the Daughters of the American Revolution to fend off curiosity. Martin and Lyon were later quoted as saying, “If anyone asked us, we could always say we belong to a poetry club.”
The Daughters of Bilitis quickly spread from its origins in San Francisco to have branches in several major cities in the U.S., and in 1956 began publishing a newsletter called The Ladder which continued in publication through 1972. From a modern point of view, the society’s early goals may have seemed quaintly conservative and focused on assimmilation. One of their stated goals was “Promoting the Integration of the Homosexual into Society” and their suggestions for achieving this end included discouraging women from dressing in gender-transgressive ways and encouraging lesbians to participate in medical and psychiatric studies to establish their “normalacy”. With the rise of wider civil rights activism in the 1960s, the Daughters of Bilitis began breaking away from its assimilationist origins, but at the same time, much of their prospective membership began identifying more with the rising feminist movement and feeling less identification with the tradition of unified homosexual activism, as represented by the Mattachine Society, believing that concerns specific to queer women were being ignored by the male-dominated gay rights community.
The Daughters of Bilitis more or less folded as a national organization in 1970 when internal disputes over the direction of the newletter The Ladder resulted in a separation of the two functions. The Ladder itself folded shortly after.
Bilitis as an icon is an interesting example of the popular mythologizing that often occurs in communities that feel disconnected from historic roots--or feel they have no historic roots to connect with. And I’m of two minds about the psychological usefulness of fastening your identity to a fictional invention.
If I can digress into personal history for a moment, I remember a similar thing happening when queer members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval hobbyist club, formed a social and activist group around 1990. When brainstorming for a name and symbol for the group, someone came up with a story that queer women in Renaissance Italy...or maybe among medieval French troubadours, or maybe some other time and place, it varied...had used a blue feather as a secret signal to each other. At one point the origins of this story were attributed to lesbian poet Judy Grahn but no one could ever produce any actual source. And yet for years people passed around the alleged “fact” that a blue feather had been used as a recognition symbol for homosexuals in pre-modern Europe. As if there were some monolithic unified homosexual culture at that time. In theory, the Society for Creative Anachronism was supposed to be based on re-creating actual historic research. So some of us felt a bit odd about using this piece of utter fiction as the symbol of queer history. But if you ever challenged the veracity of this “blue feather” story, and asked for some sort of proof that it had existed, you got accused of being anti-gay. I recall this myself at the time, because I was one of the people asking for evidence and never actually being offered anything.
We love having attractive symbols and common icons and a sense of shared history, but I’ve always found that the messy, fragmentary, ambiguous realities of history are even more fun than invented mythology. Bilitis was a fiction--a useful fiction, perhaps--and one invented by a man who viewed lesbians primarily as a topic of objectified titillation. I can understand why the Daughters of Bilitis found her to be a useful namesake, but I hope I can interest my listeners in the lives of actual queer women in history as well.
Links
Dead Man's Chest (Plundered Chronicles 5) by Alex Westmore (Amazon Digital Services)
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club #2) by Theodora Goss (Saga Press)
Like a Book by Bette Hawkins (Bella Books)
The Navigator's Touch by Julia Ember (Duet)
The Saggitarius (Arrows of Artemis #3) by K. Aten (Regal Crest)
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
August 11, 2018
What Little We Know
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
As I have found on previous occasions, there are a good number of survey articles on women's sexuality or even specifically on women's homoeroticism published in the 1980s and 1990s that--at this point--are mostly useful to include in the LHMP for the purpose of saying "don't bother with this, it's thoroughly outdated." So why do I include them? Several reasons. One is as a service to you, dear reader. One is so I can keep track of the fact that I have looked at them so I don't keep adding them to "to do" lists. And one is to show how much and how rapidly the state of the field has changed in the last several decades. I know that when I talk to authors of my generation, they often aren't aware of that shift. (Talking about fiction authors here, not academic authors.) There have been any number of times when I've talked to people about how they research historic sexuality for their novels and gotten the response, "There's nothing to research. There's nothing there. It's all been suppressed and erased. We have to invent women's sexuality from scratch." That simply isn't the case, but for people whose understanding of the field was formed back when articles like this one were published, try to understand where that attitude comes from.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #209 Green 1990 Female Sexuality in the Medieval West
About LHMP
Full citation:
Green, Monica H. 1990. “Female Sexuality in the Medieval West” in Trends in History 4:127-58..
This is a long summary article on ideas, attitudes, social structures, and legal principles relating to women’s sexuality in medieval Europe. Only a very small section is at all relevant to same-sex sexuality, and that is in a section entitled “Continued Silences” so you can already guess how scanty it’s likely to be, especially given that the “silence” it refers to is women’s own writings about sexuality in general, not specifically same-sex experiences. (It’s always useful to take note of the publication date of articles like this. There has been an explosion of interest and new research in same-sex history since 1990.)
Green notes that the genres of data most useful for women’s sexual attitudes in more recent centuries are lacking for the medieval period: diaries, newspapers, personal correspondence, and female-authored literary works. (Lacking, but not entirely absent.)
The evidence that does exist on women’s same-sex behavior has been subject to conflicting interpretations. The scarcity of references to female homoeroticism in medieval medical literature (as by William of Saliceto) could indicate that doctors didn’t take it seriously...or that it was discussed only when considered a medical (rather than a behavioral) issue. The references to women’s homoerotic activity in penitential manuals suggests an awareness of the practice...or at least offical concern about it. But differential attitudes toward various practices suggest that it wasn’t the same-sex aspect that was concerning so much as gender transgression in its performance, as with the use of artificial penises.
Women’s own voices are frustratingly rare on the topic. In other contexts, as in the lives of female saints, there is evidence that the dominant male attitudes about women’s lives may have had very little in common with how women viewed their own lives. The fundamental asymmetries between men’s and women’s concerns may mean that male preoccupations with sex have been erroneously assumed to be relevant for women as well. Looking at the writings that we do have from women, female religious writings are far less concerned with lust than male writers attribute to them. (That is, medieval men believed that women were just as preoccupied with sex as they were, but the women’s own writings don’t bear that out.)
Green concludes with the question of whether historians have been coming at this question from the wrong angle and have been constructing a history of how female sexuality was viewed by men, rather than a history of how sexuality was experienced by women.
Time period: Post-Roman/Early MedievalMedieval (general)Place: EuropeMisc tags: penitentialsmedical treatisesEvent / person: William of Saliceto
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You Must Remember This
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
In the words of the sage, "You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss..." But that's never been true in western culture. A kiss is never "just" a kiss. And all the various meanings that kissing can have create what we might think of as "Schroedinger's intimacy" where observers decide whether a kiss is a sign of erotic intimacy based on their assumptions about the relationship of the people involved.
This can create problems for interpreting artistic depictions or textual descriptions of women kissing other women. A kiss can be a salutation between close friends or kinswomen (as in the iconic image of Saint Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary greeting each other with a kiss and embrace). It can be an act sealing a bargain or contract. But it can also be a sensual or erotic act, and in literature that directly acknowledges the erotic potential between women, this ambiguity is often a "testing ground" or invitation to see if further intimacy would be welcome (or at least tolerated).
In hunting for evidence of women's same-sex eroticism in history, kissing cannot be assumed to be primary evidence of erotic feelings in every case. But neither can kissing be dismissed as never indicating erotic interactions, simply because non-erotic interpretations existed in parallel. This provides the author of historical fiction both a dilemma and an opportunity. It can be vitally important to know under what circumstances your characters would be able to kiss without it provoking public suspicion or condemnation, but you also need to manage your readers' expectations so they will understand all the layers of meaning those kisses will have.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #208 Berry 2005 Lawful Kisses? Sexual Ambiguity and Platonic Friendship in England, c. 1660-1720
About LHMP
Full citation:
Berry, Helen. 2005. “Lawful Kisses? Sexual Ambiguity and Platonic Friendship in England, c. 1660-1720” in The Kiss in History, ed. Karen Harvey, 62-79. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-6594-1
Throughout western history, the act of kissing--of touching the lips either to another person’s lips or to another part of their anatomy--has had a wide variety of meanings and messages, as well as being a physical experience on its own. The essential ambiguity of what a kiss means in any particular context has been a part of its powerful symbolism and its use as a social tool, for good or ill. The physical act of kissing is an inherently intimate gesture (not necessarily in the sexual sense of “intimate”) in a way that actions like a handshake are not. Discussions of the meaning of kissing (and such analyses can be found as early as the 1660s) focus on that ambiguity and on the kiss as a shorthand for a range of feelings and emotions ranging from platonic friendship to status difference to erotic love.
This article looks at the meaning and use of kisses within cheap, easily available, popular literature of the later 17th century, including texts specifically intended to instruct and guide people on proper social behavior. They explore the distinction between a “lawful kiss”--one that was appropriate to the relationship of the two individuals and approprite to the social context--and an “unlawful kiss” that expressed an inappropriate relationship or was itself an inappropriate act.
At one extreme, the most “lawful” version was the “kiss of peace” used within Christian ceremonies to express harmony and community within the church. This approved religious use meant that the use of a “kiss of peace” as a form of greeting between friends (regardless of gender) was an accepted and unmarked practice in some cultures, though not universally. Visitors to 16th century England commented on the frequency of kisses being exchanged as a casual greeting, suggesting that non-English people found it a bit odd.
[Note: It must be emphasized that this created a context where men could kiss each other on the lips without it being considered sexual, and similarly for women kissing women. This has consequences for interpreting same-sex kisses depicted in literature, art, and drama of the era. Such a kiss could be non-sexual, but it also could be sexual. And identifying ways to distinguish them is part of the purpose of this article. One could similarly consider how actions such as hand-holding have been sexualized in modern culture.]
Berry points out that filtering out modern post-Freudian interpretations of such activities is important for understanding the meanings of behaviors in the past. The kiss was “a physical embodiment of an ongoing negotiation of power between individuals that could inicate an unspoken range of feelings and intentions.” A kiss can indicate submission or domination, relative status, sexual desire, friendship, or as a physical signifier of agreement to a contract such as an agreement to marry or even a truce. In 13th century England, villages might hold a “love day” where people involved in disputes would reconcile, symbolized with a kiss which was blessed by a priest and witnessed by their neighbors.
Even into the early modern era, one can find references to this type of “kiss of peace” between individuals who were neither married nor blood kin, used to signify a contract or agreement. In a business letter of 1727, a businessman describes concluding somewhat fraught business and legal talks with a former rival, Lady Clavering, with “a hearty kiss.” The kiss was a formal acknowledgement of the resolution of their former animosity and, despite being performed between an unrelated man and woman, had no sexual connotations.
But such social kisses occupied an ambiguous territory, and conduct literature noted that inappropriate kissing could result in embarrassment, public censure, or suggest an illicit relationship. The problem was that the genre of conduct literature rarely gave practical advice on what the rules were. Religiously-based advice manuals tended to the conservative and focused on the appearance of sexual impropriety, suggesting that all forms of bodily contact should be kept only within marriage. Unmarried women, it was suggested, shouldn’t have to worry about the boundaries for appropriate kissing, because if it got to the point where she needed to deny a kiss, she had already allowed a man to get too close. And the advice directed at young people also railed against other forms of personal indulgence and “light” behavior, such as whispering, laughing loudly, wanton glances, and the like.
The lawyer Henry Swinburne offered advice in 1686 regarding kissing in the context of marriage promises. A promise of marriage was binding if accompanied by certain performative acts such as lying together, embracing, kissing, or exchanging gifts. In such a case, a promise of marriage was taken as a binding contract, and therefore such actions should not be done lightly.
While manuals overtly about conduct weren’t always helpful regarding kissing, this gap was filled by a new genre of popular literature that offered purportedly first-person narratives illustrating concerns of the emerging middle class. Social mobility was giving rise to anxiety, both about how to behave to social superiors but also how to avoid undesirable familiarity with one’s inferiors.
This new genre might appear in the form of “advice columns” in the ancestors of today’s tabloid periodicals. The questions posed included things like “Whether a Lady, at the first Interiew, may allow an humble Servant to kiss her hand,” or requests for advice on how to conduct a courtship and the part kissing might play in it. Too much kissing might turn a woman’s affections to aversion, but it might also weaken a man’s moral fiber and turn him effeminate. In exploring detailed and specific scenarios, these advice columnists found themselves arbitrating (sometimes humorously) the parameters of lawful kissing.
Though the discussions might be lighthearted, the goals were serious: knowing whom to kiss, in what circumstances, and when to refrain from kissing--all marks of “good breeding” that the emerging middle class was desperate to master. One exchange may have been intended to poke fun at a “country manners/city manners” divide when a man of rural origins noted that he had angered a wealthy citizen of London by kissing his wife--a woman to whom he was related--“with the usual Salutations of Kindness”. The matter was turned around in a letter from a country gentleman complaining that a “Town-Gentleman” newly arrived in the neighborhood substituted bows for kisses as a social salutation to women. This, the country gentleman complained, was taken for the more fashionable choice, “and there is no young Gentlewoman within several Miles of this Place has been kissed ever since his first Appearance among us.”
[Note: the satirical angle here is that, even though the Country Gentleman may be presenting such social kisses as a neutral form of saluation, it clearly appears that he resents the possibility that a less intimate form of greeting is edging it out. If kissing were truly neutral and non-erotic, the substitution should make no difference.]
Such discussions about social kissing were always also about ways of articulating and expressing sexual desire, even when they claimed to be policing such desire. Was it acceptable, a young man writes, to kiss a woman “in a Frolick,” suggesting a context where usual strictures might be loosened. Was it entirely too singular, another asks, for a woman to still refuse to kiss a suitor even after several years’ courtship? Was it ever lawful for a married man to kiss his neighbor’s wife “out of real respect and affection”? The answers given were rarely unexpected or daring, thus it seems the act of proposing the questions provided its own pleasure in exploring sexual topics.
Feminist literature of the era had its own considerations of the purposes of kissing in the face of misogynistic positions such as that published by the Athenian Society that husbands of outspoken wives should “stop her mouth with a kiss...if you can kiss her whether she will or no, ‘twill be a convincing argument atht you are still the stronger.”
Romantic relationships were not the only context in which appropriate kissing was discussed. The concept of platonic friendship between men and women was challenging the position that male-female relations were always necessarily sexual. Did kissing invariably introduce an erotic element to platonic friendship? Berry notes that the shift of “platonic” to mean a non-sexual relationship was a product of 15th century homophobic re-interpretations of Plato’s philosophy. It was no longer acceptable to believe that Plato’s love for boys was sexual, therefore a new, chaste definition of “platonic love” was constructed that then could be extended to relations between men and women as well.
Discussion and expressions of this new version of platonic love became popular in the court of Charles I in the early 17th century, and was revived later in the century after the Restoration. Within this context, the question of whether kisses could be acceptable within a platonic relationship was debated with varying levels of seriousness. Even writers who valorized the concept of platonic friendship as an ideal sometimes felt that kissing would invariably introduce an erotic dimension to the relationship, at least for male-female relations.
Within the realm of same-sex “platonic” friendships, public opinions seemed to avoid the suggestion that kissing added a sexual dimension. This can largely be ascribed to an assumption of compulsory heterosexuality, as there was a similar resistance to believing that male-female friendships could successfully be non-sexual. In addition to the basic assumption of unavoidble eroticism, the possibility that men and women could interact as social equals had potenatial consequences that many (men) wanted to avoid.
In terms of overall sociological trends, across the 18th century we see a decline in the acceptability of social kissing, driven by the manners and opinions of urban elites, and an increasing openness to discussing the social context of kissing, as well as an examination of the erotic and non-erotic dynamics of male-female relationships as signified by the presence and understanding of kissing within such relationshps.
[Note: Although this article spends very little time looking at the meaning of kissing within the context of women’s same-sex relationships, it provides a useful background to understanding the contexts that could signal an erotic or non-erotic interpretation to kisses, as well as contexts where “lawful kisses” could be a prelude to more intimate interactions.]
Time period: 17th c18th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: class issuesfriendshipkissingphysical affection (general)
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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 25b - Interview with Vanda
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 25b - Interview with Vanda - (no transcript available)
(Originally aired 2018/08/11 - listen here)
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about
The Juliana series and how it follows queer history across the latter half of the 20th century
Publications mentioned:
Juliana
Olympus Nights on the Square
Paris, Adrift
Vanda’s play about 17th century lesbian nun Benedetta Carlini: Vile Affections
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
