Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #23 – Malti-Douglas 2001

(I explain the LHMP here.)

When I started this blogging project, I pledged to make an entry every day during June, to celebrate Pride Month. With this 23rd entry (and 22nd day, since I doubled up on one day) I've fulfilled that pledge. Having gotten a little momentum going, I certainly plan to continue the project, though I may allow myself the occasional lapse. My working spreadsheet currently has 103 publications (either articles or books) and that's only a minor subset of what I have in my bookshelves and file folders of article offprints. And those are only a subset of all the bibliographic citations I have yet to track down and lay hands on. And more scholarship is being done every day in this field. At some point I will convert these entries into a more permanent form on one of my websites, make the keywords searchable (and standardize them a bit more!) and probably return to tackling topic-related summaries that present the material in more digested form. But I once more want to emphasize that my little summaries are only meant to be pointers to the original research, which is far more detailed and nuanced than I can cover here. The purpose of this project is to break down some preconceptions and stereotypes of what the lives of lesbians in history might have been like and -- I certainly hope -- to inspire a few more novelists to find that sweet spot between historical accuracy and satisfying fiction.

Malti-Douglas takes us outside my focus of Europe for the first time (although further articles on Arabic sources will show that there is no bright dividing line here). Medieval Arabic-speaking cultures were far from a feminist paradise, but the concerns and anxieties with respect to women's same-sex relationships were different, allowing us a broader triangulation on the historic possibilities.

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Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. “Tribadism/Lesbianism and the Sexualized Body in Medieval Arabo-Islamic Narratives” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages. ed. by Francesca Canadé Sautman & Pamela Sheingorn. Palgrave, New York, 2001.

Several of the articles in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages look outside the European sphere that the phrase “Middle Ages” normally implies. Malti-Douglas looks at the language and discorse around lesbianism in medieval Arabic texts, particularly as contrasted with the treatment of male homosexuality which is mentioned extensively in medieval Arabic/Islamic texts. The core text under consideration in this article is the 13th century Nuzhat al-Albâb fîmâ lâ Yûjad fî Kitâb (The Diversion of the Hearts by What is Not to Be Found in Any Book) by the jurist Shihâb al-Dîn Ahmad al-Tîfâshî (henceforth: al-Tîfâshî). The book is a collection of entertaining stories centering around sex, falling more in the “entertainment” side than the “sex manual” side. As such, it is part of a tradition of adab literature that combines entertaining and edifying material, often with verses from the Qur’an, poetry, and sayings of the Prophet, to form a sophisticated whole covering a topic or topics, with a traditional internal structure reflecting the social hierarchy from top to bottom. Women, therefore, and especially women’s same-sex activities come fairly late in the book. Even within the book’s section on sahq (tribadism, from a root meaning “to rub, pound, or make soft”) the material is structured into “stories and poetry”, “arguments in favor”, and “blame.” Presentation of sahq within this structure integrates and normalizes it within the literary genre as a whole.

The article provides a linguistic tour through the Arabic vocabulary for female same-sex relations. Much of it derives from the same root as sahq, such as the reciprocal verb tatasâhaq clearly implying the mutual participation of both women. A different root supplies a more intriging label zirâf, which the women call themselves, meaning literally someone who is witty, elegant, and charming, but used as a codeword. “If they say so and so is a zarîfa, it is then known among them that she is a tribade.” (This is not a fixed meaning, and elsewhere the term is used without sexual innuendo.)

Despite the topic, the material is always filtered through the male gaze and experience of the author al-Tîfâshî and many of the humorous anecdotes focus on male reactions to the women’s activities. One anecdote carries the implication that all (or most) women participate, when man curious about sahq is advised to enter his own house stealthily to learn more. Another focuses on a man’s indifference to his wife’s sexual activities with women as he considers it will better prepare her to appreciate him. But other descriptions and anecdotes build up an image of the lesbian as a distinct subculture with its own habits and practices (or at least its own stereotypes). The women are said to use perfume excessively, to be fastidious in their clothing, and to enjoy having beautiful possessions around them. They love each other more intensely than men love women, and spend large amounts of money on the object of affection. There is some implication of active/passive roles labeled as “lover” and “beloved”, with the “lover” normally taking the top position during sex. (Although an allowance is made for larger body types.)

A later article in this same collection provides more material from al-Tîfâshî.

Keywords: sex lesbians literature marriage lifestyle

Four Questions for Writers (the blog tour)

There's a "four questions for writers" meme going around currently. I was tagged by Suzanne M. Harding, whose answers can be found on her facebook author page. [ETA: sorry about this being a fb page and not available to anyone without an account. Unfortunately, that's what I had to work with.]

In turn, I received permission to tag Liz Hamill who will be posting at http://travelswithpain.com and Allison Thurman who plans to post at http://inspiredmelancholy.com.

Here are my answers:

What are you currently working on?

While my second Alpennian novel The Mystic Marriage is off with the beta readers, I'm working on a final short story (or maybe novelette) in my "Skin-Singers" series (previously appearing in the Sword & Sorceress anthologies). At the moment it's a vast mass of text-dump dictated during my commute, which needs to be organized, pruned down, and then thoroughly re-written.

How does your work differ from others in the genre?

Depending on how narrowly you define "my genre", there may not be a lot to compare! I write at the intersection of several genres: fantasy, historical, romance, and lesbian fiction. I depart from the current defaults in all of those: my fantasy is neither dark and gritty nor urban; my history is not medieval; my romance is not erotic; and my lesbian is not contemporary (or erotic). I write exciting adventures with complex, likable but flawed characters, whose sexuality is neither an angsty focus of the plot nor a background detail with no more significance than hair color. My current short story, which concerns shape-shifters, differs from the currently popular uses of that motif in not having a contemporary setting and not having erotic overtones. (There's a theme here.)

Why do you write what you do?

I'm writing the stories that I want to read but that nobody else seems to be writing. The stories that I desperately wanted -- needed -- to have when I was growing up and coming out, but that our society wasn't ready for yet. In my own favorite corner of literature (fantasy, historic fantasy, pre-modern historic) I want to create stories like the ones I loved but that always excluded or erased women like me from existence.

How does your writing process work?

That's a complex question because I'm always tweaking my "process" and trying to expand it. When I wrote my first published novel, Daughter of Mystery, it began as an exercise in completely overturning my writing process. Before that, I'd tended to plot out an entire story in my head, then start by writing out the most vivid scenes, after which I'd "fill in" the connecting bits. This resulted in a handful of vivid scenes connected by some pretty dry, boring filler, as you might expect.

Writing Daughter of Mystery, I promised myself to start at the beginning and work my way through in sequence to the end, and to avoid working out the plot and details more than one chapter or so in advance. Eventually I did find myself needing to sketch out vague outlines of where things were going and what needed to happen (and later I needed to go back and do some massive revisions of what I'd already written), but this worked much better in terms of keeping the story fresh and maintaining the right level of detail and vividness in the scenes. Now that I have half a dozen books in the series sketched out in my mind, I do need a bit more advance outlining, but I mostly kept to the "write from beginning to end" part of the process when working on The Mystic Marriage.

In terms of the actual process of writing, I have a day job and a commute, which shapes a lot of what I can do. On days when I take BART to work, I either write long-hand or type in my iPad. On days when I drive to work, I use a voice-activated dictaphone and transcribe the results when I get home in the evening. I always try to have some sort of notebook on me (the iPad is my default) where I can scribble scenes in odd moments. On weekends, if I don't have anything scheduled to interfere, I usually treat myself to a morning at a coffeeshop where I work on my laptop. Revisions get done by pulling up the text as a pdf on the iPad where I can mark it up in an app designed for that purpose. (I prefer to separate the process of "identifying problems" and "fixing problems".) I don't have a fixed goal of "X words per day" but I do have a goal of "write SOMETHING every day". There have been days when it was a single sentence, but it keeps the momentum up. When I really get going, I feel like I don't want to do anything else except write. But realistically I'm not going to quit my day job, so the full-time writing will have to wait until I'm retired. In the mean time, I'm working on getting up to one novel a year.