Downing comes through after all
I guess I quit too early in Christine Downing's Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, because this article basically recapitulates a couple of chapters from it. On the other hand, by waiting to summarize this version of the content, I didn't have to wade through the Freudian psychoanalysis.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #511 Downing 1994 Lesbian Mythology About LHMP Full citation:Downing, Christine. 1994. “Lesbian Mythology” in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 20, No. 2, Lesbian Histories: 169-199.
I’m now going to walk back my claim that Downing 1989 had no relevant content, because Downing 1994 is a slight re-working of several chapters in that book, mostly restricting itself to laying out the mythological and historic material that she analyzed in the earlier publication. In this article, she omits the psychoanalysis and focuses on the texts, interpreting them in the context of a broadly-defined “woman-centered-woman” definition of “lesbian.”
All of this content is more rigorously analyzed in Boehringer 2021, so this is going to be a very superficial catalog of what Downing covers.
Downing begins with Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe, noting how it illustrates “how isolating, confusing and terrifying lesbian desire can be when there are no myths, no models, to follow.” [Note: But since Iphis is a fictional character, written by a male author, within a culture that has other examples of the existence of female same-sex desire—as illustrated by some of the other material presented in this paper—the reading that it represents actual female experience is poetic projection.]
The article continues with a recognition of the variety of understandings of “lesbian” in contemporary culture, and how that informs her decision to include a fairly wide scope of material within this article, not simply texts overtly touching on romantic or erotic relationships.
The next example is the “seeking one’s other half” myth from Plato’s Symposium, compared to Greek attitudes about the moral imperative to avoid “excess” in one’s sexual appetite and how that related to the strictly ritualized aspects of pederastic culture (for men). The texts provide no similar moral or ritual codes for female same-sex relations (omitting to note that since these texts were transmitted via male authors, they reflect masculine interests and concerns).
The next section discusses myths of Amazons and Maenads, discussing how they reflect male anxiety about female independence and power, while ascribing perhaps a greater aspect of lesbian sexuality to them than the evidence warrants. Rituals of girlhood transition associated with Artemis are discussed, with speculation about the possible existence of female rites of passage (separate from marriage rituals) associated with Artemis.
The myth of Kallisto and Artemis is solidly offered as evidence for beliefs in f/f relations within Artemis’s circle, which they moves on to a consideration of the evidence for attitudes toward the sexuality of Greek goddesses generally. [Note: Once again, we lack an explicit consideration of the transmission of these myths and how they are more likely to reflect fictionalized versions of femininity in the service of patriarchy.]
The final section of the article discusses Sappho’s poetry and its likely social context, including a chronology of historic framings of Sappho’s life and character across the centuries and how those framings reflect shifts in attitudes toward lesbian possibility. The article concludes by pointing out that the borrowing of language associated with Sappho as the basis for describing female homoeroticism reflects both the hunger for historic connections and Sappho’s unique position within the historic record of providing a positive image.
Time period: Classical EraPlace: GreeceMisc tags: amazonsEvent / person: Metamorphoses: Iphis and Ianthe (Ovid)PlatoMetamorphoses: Callisto (Ovid)Callisto & ArtemisSappho View comments (0)
