Alpennia: On Normalcy versus Erasure in Lesbian Visibility

Comments from the beta-readers for The Mystic Marriage have gotten me ruminating on a particular topic that is difficult to portray clearly and effectively in my Alpennian novels. One of the reasons that my creative mind settled on the early 19th century for the Alpennian stories is that I wanted a historic context in which I had documentation of the existence of informal social circles of lesbians (or, generally, women with romantic and sexual interests in other women). I wanted my characters to have a context -- a framework for understanding their own experiences and desires, rather than having to invent themselves largely in a vacuum. And I wanted them to interact with each other: to have histories and futures and connections. While social networks of this sort could have existed earlier, the 18th century and later is when we have solid evidence. So I could create characters like Jeanne de Cherdillac who is at the center of a loose community of middle and upper class women who can rely on each other’s discretion (to varying degrees) and among whom they can look for lovers (of varying levels of commitment).

These networks do not exist with open social sanction, rather they are able to exist because they can hide in plain sight among the homosocial patterns of society and the expectation that women can share close affectional bonds, socialize in exclusively female groups, and even live in close physical proximity to the extent of sharing a bed without the automatic suspicion of sexual activity. Thus, people can see women like Margerit and Barbara living together, being affectionate with each other, and perhaps even knowing that they share a bedroom without entertaining the suspicion (much less the assumption) that they are lovers as opposed to Very Good Friends. Similarly, Jeanne’s open flirtations with women may be common gossip, but she is actually quite careful not to confirm the sexual nature of her relationships in public or outside of her intimate circles. Until, of course, she does. And then there are consequences. Alpennian society may wink and nod at “eccentricity” in women with sufficient social standing, but that is only possible because “eccentricity” is not a euphemism for lesbianism, but rather a vague cover term for all manner of norm-resistant behaviors. Because lesbian possibilities are erased in the popular imagination of the time, they are tolerated via tacit – and sometimes conscious – ignorance. This is a very different thing than acceptance and normalization. Margerit can make excuses for not marrying based on her studies, her duties for the crown of Alpennia, her wealth making it unnecessary to marry, and any number of other reasons. But she could not similarly proclaim her disinterest in marrying due to her romantic commitment to Barbara without serious damage to her social standing.

Looking at the protagonists of the Alpennian stories (both current and to come), one might be forgiven for thinking that Alpennian society is rife with lesbian couples and has no problem with them. But the stories are being told from within the viewpoint of those couples and they are all part of the same intimate social network. That network is, in fact, one of the reasons they interact and come into each others’ stories in the way they do. It’s something of the same problem as writing a series of murder mysteries with a continuing protagonist without implying that murder is a common everyday phenomenon in everyone’s lives. Just as my focus on female protagonists doesn’t imply that there are no men in Alpennia, my focus on lesbian protagonists doesn’t imply that lesbians are either common or accepted in Alpennia, simply that it is their stories that I choose to tell.

But clearly I need to find more ways to make this distinction to my readers (without belaboring the point too much).

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #25 – Clark 2001

(I explain the LHMP here.)

This and the article to be posted tomorrow both consider the same text: a moralizing poem of 12th century France that lectures various classes of society on their characteristic vices, including an intriguing section on lesbians. Clark looks at it as expressing the author's attitudes towards women, sex, and gender roles, while Amer (tomorrow's article) considers it as a possible borrowing from medieval Arabic erotic imagery, filtered through a disapproving European lens.

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Clark, Robert L.A. “Jousting without a Lance: The Condemnation of Female Homoeroticism in the Livre des Manieres” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages. ed. by Francesca Canadé Sautman & Pamela Sheingorn. Palgrave, New York, 2001.

This article looks at an unusual 12th century text: Etienne de Fougères’ Livre des Manières, a catalog-in-verse of different classes of people. The inclusion of women who have sexual relations with other women is unusual for touching on the subject at all and valuable for the reflection of the author's attitude. The concept of classifying and ordering the parts of society has a long tradition, whether the older Dumézilian division into priests, warriors, and farmers, or the medieval division into various "estates". The Livre uses various divisions and contrasts to address distinct groups. Each is lectured on their proper characteristics and duties and the relationships that should hold between them, first cataloging their virtues and then noting the sins that each group is prey to.

Women are excluded from the traditional social classifications except as connected to men in the categories. And when women are critiqued, their sexuality in general comes in for scrutiny. De Fougères’ work is systematically misogynistic, and only when discussing women does his poem treat first of vice and secondly of virtue. It is in this context--condemning both women and sex--that the verses on lesbians must be understood. But the tone of the condemnation is more mocking than virulent. Depictions of lesbian sex in medieval texts in general divide between those where an artificial penis is used (which are condemned as trespassing on masculine prerogatives) and those where the absence of a penis is emphasized (which are framed as ludicrous and pointless). De Fougères employs a number of visual metaphors for female-female sex that not only imply the absence of a penis but define the activity by that absence: two coffins (boxes) banging together, stirring up a fire without a poker, joining two shields without a lance, a mortar without a pestle, thigh-fencing.

This imagery of activity defined by the absent penis is consistent with the tone at the text but is unusual in the larger context of sexual commentary of the time.

Keywords: sex lesbians sin

On those viewer statistics...

Having played around with various other parts of the LJ statistics pages, I'm a little more heartened at how many viewers I seem to have. A typical recent posting seems to get 150-160 unique viewers. I still don't entirely understand all the statistics breakdowns, but there's some interesting data in there.