This section describes the nature of the Shibden Hall archives and their history. It covers the history of the several times the cipher has been assailed, from John Lister and Arthur Burrell’s initial cracking of the code, through several researchers who chose to exclude the references to sexuality from their deciphered transcripts, up through Whitbread’s publication of that previously censored material. The nature of Lister’s sexuality was known as early as 1892 but was suppressed for almost a century after that, with each new researcher re-discovering and re-erasing it.
19th c
LHMP entry
The introduction begins with an overview of Lister’s life and a brief explanation of her importance to various aspects of history. [Note: I’ll skip the background details, as I assume readers are familiar with the general history.]
This is not so much an article about Anne Lister history as it is Anne Lister historiography. It traces the awareness of her life and diaries, both scholarly and popular. The article begins with a very brief biography that situates her life in time and space.
The main point of this article is how, in the course of a Victorian divorce trial that was a ostensibly about heterosexual adultery, lesbianism became the ghost at the banquet–present largely in the refusal of any of the participants to name it. The situation shows the overlapping dynamic between the image of female romantic friendships as acceptable and unproblematic, and the anxiety around friendships that appeared to infringe on marriage imperatives.
This article addresses the ticklish topic of the “sapphic incest motif” in erotic art and drama around the turn of the 20th century. Multiple themes braid together within this general context. The rhetorical use of “sisterhood” in support of feminist and sapphic communities. (It isn’t too far a stretch to assert the existence of sapphic communities at this point.) The use of actual or fictional family ties to defuse potential sapphic readings, as with actress Charlotte Cushman’s Romeo playing opposite her real-life sister’s Juliet.
This is a historiography article, reviewing a variety of general histories of sexuality and homosexuality and evaluating them. The author sets out a principle that “the most useful sexual histories are those that provide depth of context without either assuming sexual identity or anticipating its complete absence.” The focus is specifically on the 19th and 20th centuries.
Rekhti is a genre of Urdu erotic poetry, spinning off from the formal, classical ghazal poetic genre. Rekhti differs both in the point of view of the poetic persona, in the subject matter, and in the use of language. Within Urdu culture (a southern Indian Muslim culture whose language has a strong admixture of Persian in an Indic base), traditional ghazal poetry had two modes: “Persian” in which the poetic persona is male and the beloved can be male or female, and “Indic” in which the poetic persona is female and the beloved is male.
This study considers three categories of transgender experience. Although a variety of terms for these categories are noted, for convenience they are labeled erxing (two-shaped) corresponding roughly to intersex, nü hua nan (FTM), and nan hua nü (MTF). The period of study is primarily the Ming (1368-1644 CE) and Qing (1644-1911 CE) eras, though earlier material is also noted. The material is structured in five sections: an introduction discussing the source materials, a discussion of each of the three categories, and a brief summary of conclusions.
Introduction
The book covers the imperial era of China (221 BCE to 1912 CE) plus a few earlier texts. The subject is “socially defined expressions of same-sex erotic and sexual attraction, enacted or imagined.” This is not “homosexuality” as such. Some texts may depict same-sex acts that don’t derive from erotic desire.
Rather than investigating the original context of Sappho’s life and work, this article reviews the chronology of popular understandings and theories about that topic. The chronology jumps around a little in the article so bear with me. [Note: Also, I think the chronology misses some elements.]
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