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Pride Month Project: Re-starting the Lesbian Historic Motif Project
Because it's Pride Month, and because I keep meaning to get back to it, I'm going to re-start my project on Motifs of Use to Writers of Lesbian-like Characters in Historically-Inspired Fiction. (I'll keep playing with the name until I get an acronym I like. Lesbian Historic Motif Project? Hmm, it I can fit something starting with A in there, I may have something.) The survey essays I've done in the past on cross-dressing/passing women and on sex between women were part of this project. But my original idea was more in the way of an open-ended annotated bibliography with extensive keyword indexing. Blogging brief summaries of individual articles (or book chapters) makes the project more manageable than aiming for the thematic survey essays. There will be a lot of redundancy with those essays to begin with. And I may decide to set up a Tumblr blog or something to make it a distinct project.
My goal here -- beyond the selfish utilitarian aspect of organizing my research -- is much in parallel with that of sites like the Medieval People of Color blog, or Kameron Hurley's award-nominated essay "We Have Always Fought". I want to help change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art, and imagination. I want to do it to help other authors find inspiration and support for the stories they want to tell. And I want to do it to affect the reception of my own writing. My project will be flawed in that it will privilege topics and interpretations of personal interest to me. (A geographic focus on Europe and it's neighbors. A temporal focus that ends before the 20th century and focuses strongly on the pre-modern. An examination of the data through a lesbian lens even when other lenses, such as transgender ones, are equally valid.) This is a caveat but not an apology. If I weren't doing it for selfish reasons, I wouldn't be doing it at all.
My selection process for data to include is relatively simple: is this something that would be useful in grounding a fictional lesbian character in the context of historic human experience? Probably a minority of it will be items that could reasonably be connected with the label directly. I'm broadly interested in material that creates spaces in which lesbian characters (and especially ones that resonate strongly with modern readers and authors) could have existed. Topics will include behavior, appearance, emotional and affectional lives, economic issues and personal agency, social and legal structures, and anything else that takes my fancy. A pantry full of ingredients from which an infinite variety of dishes could be cooked.
Let's see if I can maintain one post per day for the rest of June (separate from my various other blog activities, of course.)
My goal here -- beyond the selfish utilitarian aspect of organizing my research -- is much in parallel with that of sites like the Medieval People of Color blog, or Kameron Hurley's award-nominated essay "We Have Always Fought". I want to help change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art, and imagination. I want to do it to help other authors find inspiration and support for the stories they want to tell. And I want to do it to affect the reception of my own writing. My project will be flawed in that it will privilege topics and interpretations of personal interest to me. (A geographic focus on Europe and it's neighbors. A temporal focus that ends before the 20th century and focuses strongly on the pre-modern. An examination of the data through a lesbian lens even when other lenses, such as transgender ones, are equally valid.) This is a caveat but not an apology. If I weren't doing it for selfish reasons, I wouldn't be doing it at all.
My selection process for data to include is relatively simple: is this something that would be useful in grounding a fictional lesbian character in the context of historic human experience? Probably a minority of it will be items that could reasonably be connected with the label directly. I'm broadly interested in material that creates spaces in which lesbian characters (and especially ones that resonate strongly with modern readers and authors) could have existed. Topics will include behavior, appearance, emotional and affectional lives, economic issues and personal agency, social and legal structures, and anything else that takes my fancy. A pantry full of ingredients from which an infinite variety of dishes could be cooked.
Let's see if I can maintain one post per day for the rest of June (separate from my various other blog activities, of course.)