Random Thursday: Who Owns History?

I’ve probably written on this topic before, but it’s one that’s very much at the heart of much of my historic research (and historical fiction), and one where I’ve watched a lot of evolution of approach in academia over the decades.

One of the strongest preoccupations driving the early beginnings of LGBTQ history--actually, let’s be bluntly honest and call it “gay and lesbian history” at those early beginnings--was the identification of historic figures who could be “claimed for the team.” The building of team rosters, as it were. Given an awareness of the strong forces of heteronormativity in most historic cultures, and of how evidence for non-normative sexuality tended to be left unrecorded, suppressed when discovered, discounted, and all the other techniques of erasure, there was a tendency to take any scrap of evidence for same-sex desire and to count it as overriding the rest of a historic figure’s life story.

On an emotional level, the impulse was understandable. After so long of being told that we were historic aberrations, that we had no history--in the face of even researchers of gay and lesbian history assuring us that sexuality was entirely a cultural construct and that our own identities had no meaning outside our own little window of space-time--there was a fierce...let us say, “pride” in reaching back into the ages and staking a claim: “this person was one of us, we are like them, they were like us.”

But a big problem with the metaphor of ownership is that it’s grounded in the framework of tangible, physical control and co-location. If I own an object, no one else can own it. In the realm of “owning” historic figures, this metaphor leads to the notion that if one is going to claim a person in the past as gay or lesbian, then they cannot be anything else. They cannot belong to anyone else. And if they do belong to another group, then they have been taken away from us--stolen, in the language of physical possession.

The other side of the “ownership of history” problem is the ways in which the pool of potential “owners” shifts over time with shifting understandings of intersectional identity (and even--to the extent that social constructionism is valid--shifts in the existence and nature of identity-categories). Thus, in the initial exuberance of the “owning gay and lesbian history” movement, next to no consideration was given to questions of bisexuality or to gender identities rooted in something other than physiology or to differences in the experience and expression of desire. In part, this was because there were a lot of conversations around those topics that simply hadn’t evolved sufficiently yet. In part, it was due to the relative(!) social power of gay and lesbian academics compared to those studying bisexual or trans topics. In part, it was a realization (conscious or not) of the necessary power of extremes: that certain progress of historic understanding could not be made without the shock value of statements like “Leonardo da Vinci was gay and Queen Christina of Sweden was lesbian” as opposed to presenting a more nuanced (and more accurate) but less controversial position.

I came back to contemplating this topic earlier this week when author Cheryl Morgan brought my attention on twitter to an article she had written considering Radclyffe Hall (and her semi-autobiographical character Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness) as a trans man rather than as a butch lesbian. I touched more briefly on this consideration in my commentary on Esther Newton’s 1984 article about Hall and her best-known character.

How then, as a lesbian and a lesbian historian, is one to react emotionally to the hypothesis that the author of what is probably the most iconic early novel of lesbian identity might equally (or more?) validly be understood as a trans man? I say “emotionally” very deliberately. From an academic point of view, data is data and analysis is analysis. But emotionally? That’s something different. That depends on how one constructs historic similarity and category membership.

This emotional question has haunted the relationship between lesbian and transmasculine identities literally for thousands of years. At the very least, since Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe presented the only possible and imaginable resolution (much less the only happy one) to being an assigned-female-at-birth person in love with a woman was to identify as--and physically transform into--a man. In researching lesbian-like themes in pre-modern history, one of the emotional frustrations for me is this recurring trope: that to love a woman inherently means that one must be a man. It wasn’t the only pre-modern understanding of same-sex desire, but it was certainly the one most prevalent in literature. (This is a topic I keep meaning to come back to in more depth, but it's rather fraught and I don't think I'm ready yet.)

To claim those literary characters and their real-life counterparts (such as Eleno de Cispedes or Catherina Linck) as “lesbian” under the metaphor of historical ownership is to deny the very obvious transgender interpretation and to “steal” them from transgender ownership. But to categorize every literary character who received a magical/divine sex change in order to facilitate their Happily Ever After with a woman, to categorize every “passing woman” or “female husband” or “mannish Amazon” as a trans man (or as being significantly toward the transmasculine end of a gender continuum) is to ignore the immense pressure of cultural models, historic misygyny, and the erasure of less visibly transgressive persons from our understanding of history.

This is where I keep circling back to my thesis that the underlying issue in these emotional conflicts is not that of identifying the precisely correct category membership of historic persons and characters, but of abandoning the idea of “historic ownership” based on categorical assignment. I remain quite skeptical about the idea that the internal experience of gender and sexuality is socially constructed, but I’m quite happy to embrace the notion that the categories we use to organize and label those experiences are entirely organized via the larger and ever-shifting cultural conversation. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen massive changes in the organization and understanding of categories and category membership on the lesbian end of the scale. How then could I assume that the categories understood and used by people in previous centuries would correspond sufficiently to the ones we use today such that we could argue over ownership?

It is too simplistic to say that we should abandon the idea of “owning” history entirely. To do so runs too great a risk of a de facto “ownership” by the most powerful and privileged cultural forces--the ones most able to take over the conversation and talk over the other voices. One only needs to look at the histories of non-dominant cultures and peoples in an ethnic/racial context to see the danger in that direction. But I think it’s important not to see “historic ownership” as a zero-sum game. Radclyffe Hall can be an icon for both lesbians and transmen. Iphis and Ianthe can be a mythic narrative for both. The early modern cultural model of “passing women / female husbands” provided a conceptual space for both lesbians and trans men to negotiate their way through a hostile society. History is not a ball that only one person can play with at a time.

My primary blog has moved, but feel free to comment in either place.

LHMP #137g Faderman 1981 Surpassing the Love of Men I.B.3 The Battle of the Sexes

Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6

A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).

* * *

Elizabeth Mavor, in her study of the Ladies of Llangollen, offers as a motivation for the rise of Romantic Friendship, that women could not achieve with men the ideal of equal Platonic friendship, and so turned to other women. But Faderman notes that 17th century writers (some female) considered such heterosexual equality possible. Even so, the general sense on both sides was that men and women existed in such different spheres (both by practice and because of beliefs about their inherent natures) that reaching across the divide was difficult. By the 18th century, middle- and upperclass women (and it is primarily those groups who participated in Romantic Friendship) were encouraged to be genteelly idle. Intellectual women were looked askance, as were women who indulged in active pursuits like riding. These pursuits had become considered to be inherently masculine in a way they hadn’t in previous centuries. [Or perhaps--thinking about some of the discourse around gender and intellect in the middle ages--the "masculinization" of intellectual women had now come to be considered a bad thing rather than an ideal to strive for.]

Thus the most assertive and ambitious women were the ones least likely to find satisfaction in friendships with men, even as they were celebrated in the supposedly egalitarian society of the salons. And their writings and correspondence show that they turned to each other for support, admiration, and friendship. Marriage to men was often treated as a necessary evil and no impediment to their passionate friendship with women. Successful resistance to marriage (when economically possible) was considered an ideal.

Now we get another one of Faderman’s asserted-but-not-proven conclusions: “Because women of their class and temperament generally did not engage in sex outside of marriage, it probably occurred to few of them that the intense emotion they felt for each other could be expressed in sexual terms--but that emotion had all the manifestations of Eros without a genital component. Perhaps the primary difference between the salons of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and England and the salons of Paris in the 1920’s where lesbian love was openly expressed...was that as a result of the late nineteenth-century sexologists, women in the 1920’s knew they were sexual creatures and behaved accordingly.” [It is in passages like this that I feel the work most suffers from a lack of historic depth. Social beliefs about women's sex drives have fluctuated greatly over the centuries. Chaucer's Wife of Bath didn't need a sexologist to give her permission to be a sexual creature and behave accordingly!]

There is a nod to the consideration that, although it is easiest to track the nature and development of Romantic Friendship among intellectual women who produced copies written records of their experiences and thoughts, the phenomenon of Romantic Friendship was common among non-intellectuals as well.

The eighteenth century in England, Faderman asserts, was the point of greatest female repression of passion and sexuality, with a hyper-focus on virginity and chastity in literature and life that made any social interactions with men suspect. Men might pursue women and encourage them to demonstrate their love, but--as epitomized in Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the goal was conquest, not mutual affection. A woman who capitulated might find that her lover now considered her impossible to trust with any other man. The extreme version of this war between the sexes was found in the increasingly violent misogyny of pornographic literature. Even literature about the importance of equal companionate marriages (such as Benjamin Franklin’s Reflections on Courtship and Marriage) are presented as proof that such a thing was considered rare.

What I find missing in this chapter is a sense of statistics. Anecdotal examples from eighteenth-century life and literature are presented as evidence for considering marriage and relations between the sexes to be a relentless hellhole. This, then, is presented as the context in which Romantic Friendship between women became a refuge and ideal. Marriage was desired only so far as it make it economically and socially possible to live a life independent of that husband.

My primary blog has moved, but feel free to comment in either place.