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hrj(I explain the LHMP here and provide a cumulative index.)
I’ve returned to the regular heading for this blog, but I wanted to note that while the organizing principle of this series will continue to be material of use or interest to authors creating lesbian-like characters, I remain committed to an understanding that much of the content is ambiguous in nature or involves intersections of motifs that aren’t unique to lesbians (and even may be unrelated to lesbians in certain historic contexts).
Most of the publications I’ve been covering have been in print for quite some time. I have a backlog of materials from a couple of decades and haven’t been prioritizing acquiring new material unless I stumble across it by chance. This book is one of those chance encounters. I dropped by University Press Books (a bookstore in Berkeley specializing in what their name identifies) just to browse and Lanser’s book was sitting there on the “new arrivals” shelf right by the door. The handful of similarly recent works I’ve covered have all been addressing the early modern period, especially the 18th century. This may be a matter of me following references from one publication to its citations, or it may be that the current fashion in lesbian history is focusing on this era. In any event, the trend is giving me a much deeper understanding of the forces at work during the period when much of my current fiction is set.
I have never had formal training in the theoretical framework of historiography, so my reaction to theoretical terminology and argumentation sometimes hits a breaking point where I find myself asking, "Is this genuinely the technical terminology of a specialized field, or is it obfuscating gobbledygook, meant to disguise the completely speculative nature of the arguments?" (OK, I usually phrase it a bit more pithily.) But I find Lanser's writing--though dense and theory-heavy--relatively easy to follow. I'd never call this a relaxing beach book, but I do think it's accessible to the non-specialist who has a basic familiarity with the dialect of academic historians.
* * *
Lanser, Susan S. 2014. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830. ISBN 978-0-226-18773-0
Chapter 1 - How to Do the Sexuality of History
Riffing off the title of Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Lanser turns the underlying question around. Rather than questioning what historic sources can tell us about human sexuality, she asks what the discourse about human sexuality can tell us about history. This book focuses on published discussions or treatments of “sapphic” themes in the 16-19th centuries. Rather than using them to try to identify or examine the lives of actual women, Lanser looks at how certain public preoccupations with women’s sexuality correlate with other historical phenomena, preoccupations, movements, and so forth. In essence, to ask “do large-scale historical patterns have a ‘sexuality’ that is expressed concommittantly?”
Lanser’s thesis is that preoccupation with the potential for female homoeroticism and its expression defines and accompanies the rise of “modernity” defined as a break with the notion of static history and the reign of tradition, and an embracing of individual human experience as a worthy focus of interest. She explores the relationship between these two phenomena as a matter of “confluence” rather than “influence” and so setting aside arguments over the directionality of causation.
Inherent in this study is the presupposition that female homosexuality is not simply a differently-gendered reflection of male homosexuality, but that it has a unique meaning within and to the societies it is a part of, and that that meaning can be traced in the differential attention paid to sapphic motifs in different times and places. Lanser’s data is drawn primarily from contemporary published materials (as opposed, for example, to private diaries and letters) precisely because she is not examining the private experiences and desires of individuals but the larger social engagement with sapphic themes as abstractions.
This first chapter lays out the plan of her analysis, discusses the history of the study of sexuality in the modern era, defines the terms under which she will be working, and discusses the advantages and pitfalls of her particular methodological approach. The chapter concludes with a summary of what the further chapters will cover, proceeding chronologically and correlating different treatments of sapphic themes with their corresponding social and historical developments. Lanser specifically notes that she uses “sapphic” precisely because it has become relatively obsolete in current use and therefore is less likely to stir up confounding resonances in the reader.
I’ve returned to the regular heading for this blog, but I wanted to note that while the organizing principle of this series will continue to be material of use or interest to authors creating lesbian-like characters, I remain committed to an understanding that much of the content is ambiguous in nature or involves intersections of motifs that aren’t unique to lesbians (and even may be unrelated to lesbians in certain historic contexts).
Most of the publications I’ve been covering have been in print for quite some time. I have a backlog of materials from a couple of decades and haven’t been prioritizing acquiring new material unless I stumble across it by chance. This book is one of those chance encounters. I dropped by University Press Books (a bookstore in Berkeley specializing in what their name identifies) just to browse and Lanser’s book was sitting there on the “new arrivals” shelf right by the door. The handful of similarly recent works I’ve covered have all been addressing the early modern period, especially the 18th century. This may be a matter of me following references from one publication to its citations, or it may be that the current fashion in lesbian history is focusing on this era. In any event, the trend is giving me a much deeper understanding of the forces at work during the period when much of my current fiction is set.
I have never had formal training in the theoretical framework of historiography, so my reaction to theoretical terminology and argumentation sometimes hits a breaking point where I find myself asking, "Is this genuinely the technical terminology of a specialized field, or is it obfuscating gobbledygook, meant to disguise the completely speculative nature of the arguments?" (OK, I usually phrase it a bit more pithily.) But I find Lanser's writing--though dense and theory-heavy--relatively easy to follow. I'd never call this a relaxing beach book, but I do think it's accessible to the non-specialist who has a basic familiarity with the dialect of academic historians.
* * *
Lanser, Susan S. 2014. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830. ISBN 978-0-226-18773-0
Chapter 1 - How to Do the Sexuality of History
Riffing off the title of Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Lanser turns the underlying question around. Rather than questioning what historic sources can tell us about human sexuality, she asks what the discourse about human sexuality can tell us about history. This book focuses on published discussions or treatments of “sapphic” themes in the 16-19th centuries. Rather than using them to try to identify or examine the lives of actual women, Lanser looks at how certain public preoccupations with women’s sexuality correlate with other historical phenomena, preoccupations, movements, and so forth. In essence, to ask “do large-scale historical patterns have a ‘sexuality’ that is expressed concommittantly?”
Lanser’s thesis is that preoccupation with the potential for female homoeroticism and its expression defines and accompanies the rise of “modernity” defined as a break with the notion of static history and the reign of tradition, and an embracing of individual human experience as a worthy focus of interest. She explores the relationship between these two phenomena as a matter of “confluence” rather than “influence” and so setting aside arguments over the directionality of causation.
Inherent in this study is the presupposition that female homosexuality is not simply a differently-gendered reflection of male homosexuality, but that it has a unique meaning within and to the societies it is a part of, and that that meaning can be traced in the differential attention paid to sapphic motifs in different times and places. Lanser’s data is drawn primarily from contemporary published materials (as opposed, for example, to private diaries and letters) precisely because she is not examining the private experiences and desires of individuals but the larger social engagement with sapphic themes as abstractions.
This first chapter lays out the plan of her analysis, discusses the history of the study of sexuality in the modern era, defines the terms under which she will be working, and discusses the advantages and pitfalls of her particular methodological approach. The chapter concludes with a summary of what the further chapters will cover, proceeding chronologically and correlating different treatments of sapphic themes with their corresponding social and historical developments. Lanser specifically notes that she uses “sapphic” precisely because it has become relatively obsolete in current use and therefore is less likely to stir up confounding resonances in the reader.
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