When You See It, You Can't Unsee It
There's an entire genre of articles on the theme "why is it so hard to find historic evidence for female same-sex relations?" It covers everything from the types of erasures and displacements that Faderman talks about in this article, to the deliberate and selective exclusion of f/f vocabulary from the Oxford English DIctionary (which continues the process of erasure to this day, as people relying on it to be complete and detailed). Time after time you get slapped in the face with the understanding that f/f relations were erased because people considered them shameful and embarrassing. Not even necessarily the people engaged in them! But their biographers, their descendents (who controled their legacy), and most historians up through the late 20th century. If a woman was considered otherwise admirable and praiseworthy, it was important to make sure that nothing "stained" that. And, of course, we can't ignore the contribution of general misogyny, because as we all know a woman must be perfect and of unstained reputation to avoid getting torn down for daring to be a woman in public. But one of the things that Faderman's work points out, is that much of the overt erasure is specifically a product of the post-sexological world.
This is an error that creeps into a great deal of sapphic historical fiction: characters are concerned about aspects of their relationships that actual people of the period would not have blinked at. Sharing a bed? No biggie. Kissing, embracing, and holding hands in public? Utterly normal. Writing love poetry and effusive declarations of affection? But of course! And yet so many current sapphic historicals have characters freaking out over things that their historic counterparts would have taken for granted as, not simply acceptable, but expected behavior. A romance novel requires conflict and roadblocks, but they should be ones that are true to the era, not ones borrowed from the 20th century.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #474 Faderman 1979 Who Hid Lesbian History? About LHMP Full citation:Faderman, Lillian. 1979. “Who Hid Lesbian History?” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Autumn 1979, Vol. 4, No 3. 74-76. Also appears 1982 in Lesbian Studies; Present and Future ed. Margaret Cruikshank. Feminist Press, Old Westbury.
This article is essentially a teaser for Surpassing the Love of Men (which she explicitly says in the author’s note at the end). Given that, I’m not sure how much value there is to blogging it in detail.
The article starts by reviewing how lesbian aspects of history were being treated before the 1970s, with those aspects either ignored, discussed in coded language, or arbitrarily assigned to some random man. Biographies of women in homoerotic relationships were a particular subject of historical gatekeeping, with even explicit romantic and erotic expressions directed toward other women being forcibly re-interpreted as actually meant to be understood as heterosexual, even if some unnamed hypothetical man needed to be invented to assign the role to.
Another technique was the careful editing of quotations (as was done in Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s edition of Emily Dickinson’s papers) to soften or redirect homoerotic language. Or the relabeling of romantic partners as “companions,” sometimes explicitly for the purpose of “saving” their reputation, even in contexts where illicit affairs with men were acknowledged blatantly. When unavoidable, same-sex relationships may be shrunk down to a brief mention while any possible scrap of evidence for heterosexual relations is elaborated in detail.
Anyway, this is basically a well-deserved rant against the historical erasure of lesbianism which may feel obvious and unnecessary 45 years later.
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