Lesbian Historic Motif Project: Tag Pages - Misc. Tags - Households, Relationships, and Groups

The version of this post at the Alpennia site includes actual tag-links for the items being discussed. Check it out to explore. The tag display page currently has some technical issues that limit the number of entries displayed for each tag, but I hope to have that fixed soon. At the very least, it will give you a taste of what's available.

The purpose of tags is to make information relatively easy to find. The topics covered under “misc. tags” are a combination of themes that guided my choice of publications to cover, and themes that emerged from those publications. This essay is intended to explain briefly how the “misc.” tags are being used.

The second purpose is to provide a tag list that the visitor can use to explore the site. The number of tags used in the project, and the organization into four different categories, doesn’t lend itself to a traditional tag-cloud. The Place and Time Period tags each have a single essay. The Event/Person and Misc. Tags will be covered in thematic groups in multiple essays due to the larger number.

I’m planning three essays for the Misc. Tags, each covering a general category with several subcategories. This present essay includes the following:

• Topics about household and living arrangements associated with, or conducive to female same-sex relationships
• Topics about specific types of relationships or social status
• A wide variety of occupations, activites, and organizations (both real and fictitious) relevant to lesbian-like lives

Households and Living Situations

• bed-sharing - In many eras and cultures, same-sex bed-sharing was completely ordinary and even expected, not only among family members, but perhaps by employer and servant, and certainly by close friends. In these cultures, sharing a bed carried no implication of engaging in erotic activity. But conversely, this practice created a context where erotic activity could take place with little notice or comment.
• co-burial - In many cultures, it is standard practice for spouses to be buried together after death and to share a memorial marker. In this context, the occasional practice of same-sex pairs being buried together accompanied by symbols or text usually associated with marriage may indicate social acceptance of a marriage-like bond between them.
• female co-habitation - Sharing a household is not a pre-condition for participation a close same-sex romantic or erotic relationship, but cultures which normalized co-habitation by unrelated women created a context where such relationships could be more easily accommodated.
• female head of household - One of the strongest barriers for women trying to establish a permanent, stable partnership could be a social or economic necessity to be part of a male-headed household. This tag identifies discussions of the times, places, and circumstances in which female-headed households existed, and in some cases were considered unremarkable.
• homosocial environments/communities - There were many different reasons and contexts where people interacted and socialized primarily with their own gender. These ranged from entirely single-sex communities, such as some religious institutions, to single-sex schools, to simply a strong differentiation between the everyday activities of men and women that resulted in separation. In such contexts, it was often considered typical (though not always desirable) for individuals to form strong emotional same-sex bonds.
• monastic communities - Monastic communities are a special case of homosocial (single-gender) environment. They were often a focus of anxiety around the potential for close same-sex emotional bonds, both within the community and from those hostile to it.
• Turkish harems - European contact with the gender-segregated institution of the harem in Ottoman Turkey, beginning around the 16th century, led to a fascination with the potential for female same-sex eroticism. This combined with a preference for “othering” lesbian activity both in time and space.
• women’s communities - Both in literature and life, women-only communities created a focus for speculation on (or the experience of) romatic or erotic attraction between women. This tag includes not only formal single-sex institutions such as convents, but de facto ones such as women’s charitable organizations, or fictitious ones such as amazon societies or separatist utopias.

Relationships and Status

This group of tags focuses on specific types of relationships between women, across a whole spectrum from marriage to friendship and mentorship. In general, a relationship will be tagged if there is a strong emotional component that is not familial, or if the relationship is one that, between opposite sex participants, would be considered romantic.

Marriage and marriage-like relationships

• marriage between women - This tag is used for any occasion where two female (or assigned-female) persons entered into marriage, whether or not both were aware of the other’s identity.
• female husband - This tag is used for occasions when two female (or assigned-female) persons entered into marriage with one passing as male to the rest of society.
• dextrarum iunctio - (Latin) This phrase “joining right hands” indicates an action or the artistic representation of that action that represents entering into a marriage under Roman law. A formal depiction of two women with joined right hands could reasonably be understood as indicating a marriage-like relationship.
• marriage resistance - In cultures where heterosexual marriage was normalized, the act of resisting marriage was sometimes considered a sign or a possible consequence of close emotional bonds between women.

Romantic relationships

This group of tags covers circumstances where no formal marriage-like relationship exists but the outward forms of courtship are seen, or there are behaviors that would be considered romantic for an opposite-sex couple.

• emotional/romantic bonds between women - This is a very general tag for any circumstance where specific emotional bonds are established between a pair of women.
• romantic friendship - Romantic friendship refers to a specific set of behaviors and social circumstances, largely confined to the 17-19th centuries, where close and intensely emotional “friendships” between women were normalized by society and even considered expected or desirable. Romantic friendship were generally considered not to preclude heterosexual marriage although they were often seen in conflict with it.
• love poetry - I have tagged as “love poetry” any poetic expression written by a woman (or in a woman’s voice) to a woman that would be considered love poetry if written between an opposite sex couple.
• predatory lesbian - In the 18-19th centuries, and possibly earlier, the recognition of the potential for female same-sex desire was sometimes depicted in the form of an agressive, “predatory” lesbian expressing desire for a “normal” woman.

Close non-romantic relationships

• female comrades/friends - There is sometimes a fuzzy overlap between the depiction of bonds of friendship and bonds with romantic overtones. This tag identifies topics where the friendship interpretation is stronger but where the recognition of the importance of female friendship allows space for stronger feelings. This tag is distinguised from the “friendship” tag by the presence of a couple-like relationship but without romantic elements.
• female mentors - There is a regular theme over time, expressed in a number of different ways, where same-sex erotic relationships (both male and female) exist within the power differential of a mentor-student relationship. This tag also covers some situations where a close non-familial mentorship bond exists between women without erotic overtones when other circumstances make it relevant to the purpose of this Project.
• friendship - This tag covers general themes of friendship between women when the context is relevant to the purpose of this Project.

Occupations, Activities, Organizations

This is a rather random grouping of tags that have in common referring to some identifiable subset of women whose common feature has at some time been associated with the themes of this Project, though not necessarily with love or desire between women. Alternatively, the tag identifies some social or economic issue that is relevant to women’s relationships with each other. I haven’t tried to give these subgroupings.

• amazons - Although Classical Greek stories of the amazons don’t necessarily associate them with same-sex love, amazon figures in medieval and renaissance literature were often a context for romantic gender-confusion plots.
• class issues - This tag identifies themes where class difference is a significant factor in a relationship between women.
• courtesans - A courtesan is a professional companion, typically educated and sophisticated, whose duties may include sex. It was a regular motif that courtesans might sometimes have female clients, or that they might enjoy sexual relationships with women as a change from “work.”
• economic independence - This theme is not specifically associated with lesbians historically, but for the purposes of the Project is is useful to identify historic and social contexts in which economically independent women were not unusual.
• education - Education is a regular theme around lesbian-like figures, either as a homosocial context or as a context for escaping a normative life.
• female warrior ballads - The central characters in this literary genre may be passing as men or simply stepping outside a normative gender role. In the former case, they may hint at the potential for same-sex desire.
• inheritance by women - As with economic independence, this theme is not specifically associated with lesbians historically, but for the purposes of the Project is is useful to identify historic and social contexts in which economically independent women were not unusual.
• literary heroine - This tag somewhat inconsistently identifies lesbian-like figures who feature as protagonists. I’ve tended to use this more for pre-modern literature than novels of the modern period.
• martial activity - I’ve included this tag not simply because women engaged in martial activities are inherently gender-transgressive, but also because the motif is popular when writing historic or fantasy fiction about nonconforming women.
• prostitutes - Like courtesans, prostitutes sometimes had a reputation for turning to other women for love and recreational sex as a change from “work.”
• singlewomen - The study of the lives of non-married women, regardless of their affectional preferences, identifies contexts in which women who preferred not to marry men would be unremarkable.
• widows - In many societies, widowhood gave a woman the best chance at economic independence combined with control over her marital status.