Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) is commonly referenced as the "first" novel of lesbian identity, and in my generation that resulted in no small amount of trauma if we failed to recognize our lives and dreams within its pages. But Aimée Duc's Sind es Frauen? (Are these Women?) (1901) would have been a far more hopeful, sympathetic, and introspective introduction to the place of women who love women in the literary canon.
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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 97 (previously 32c) - Book Appreciation with Katharine Duckett - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/03/16 - listen here)
It's always interesting to see how shifts in philosophical thinking occur in waves across interconnected cultural traditions. Europe always had a diverse set of attitudes toward non-normative sexuality. But you can see specific concepts take hold and spread, either integrating with, or replacing, the existing local attitudes. These sorts of shifts are easier to see in more recent centuries.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 94 (previously 31d) - Prepositions, Sexuality, and Gender: Unpacking Our Bundles - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/02/23 - listen here)
Prepositions, Sexuality, and Gender
I sometimes make joking reference to the "industry of Anne Lister studies" but it's hard to exaggerate the value of Lister's candid diaries for disrupting theory-based understandings of 18-19th century female homosexuality. We need to be careful not to assume that Lister's experience is universal, nor to treat it as unique. Many women, no doubt, wrote candid private diaries and correspondence that may have expressed their negotiation of homoerotic desires.
One of the articles I covered last year was a study by Remke Kruk on the genre of "warrior women" epics in medieval Arabic litterature. In that 1998 piece, Kruk laments the lack of accessible translations of this fascinating corpus.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 100 (previously 33a) - The 100th Episode - Where My Heart Goes - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/04/06 - listen here)
I'm happy to announce the 2019 fiction line-up for the podcast! I haven't sorted out the appearance schedule yet, but in alphabetical order of story title, we have:
One of the consequences of lining up a set of all relevant articles from a single source is that I end up covering articles that are marginal to my personal interests--and keep in mind that this project is largely diven by what I personally find interesting. (If people want me to focus on things I find boring, they'd have to pay me a lot of money to do so.) In the case of the Journal of the History of Sexuality this means a group of articles about the field of sexology, as it developed in the late 19th century.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 93 (previously 31c) - Reprise: Ordinary Women - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/02/16 - listen here)
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