On the other hand, we see a very loud refrain in literary models that many people (quite likely including the women themselves) found the idea of a woman desiring another woman to be so unimaginable that if they did feel that desire, it automatically meant that they must actually be a man. This is one reason why I'm hesitant to default to a position that all AFAB persons living as a man should be understood as trans men. Similarly, I don't want to default to a position that all AFAB persons who have romantic/erotic desires for women should be understood as lesbians. (It's an interesting aspect that, in pre-modern literature, you can find a fair number of "happily ever after" transmasculine stories while finding essentially no HEA lesbian stories.)
I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that we can or should make retroactive judgments about the self-identification of specific individuals. On an intellectual level, because I do think the social categories we tend to use are strongly rooted in their specific cultural contexts. But on an emotional level because it puts lesbians and trans men in competition for "ownership" of historical stories and individuals. And while I understand the impulse, I personally think that embracing historic ambiguity is healthier.
That's why I regularly note that I'm presenting these stories as being "useful" for imagining lesbian characters without making any claims that the characters (both fictional and historic) were "lesbian" in some essential way. I do tend to be sloppy about it in shorthand, I confess.
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Date: 2016-07-22 05:56 pm (UTC)On the other hand, we see a very loud refrain in literary models that many people (quite likely including the women themselves) found the idea of a woman desiring another woman to be so unimaginable that if they did feel that desire, it automatically meant that they must actually be a man. This is one reason why I'm hesitant to default to a position that all AFAB persons living as a man should be understood as trans men. Similarly, I don't want to default to a position that all AFAB persons who have romantic/erotic desires for women should be understood as lesbians. (It's an interesting aspect that, in pre-modern literature, you can find a fair number of "happily ever after" transmasculine stories while finding essentially no HEA lesbian stories.)
I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that we can or should make retroactive judgments about the self-identification of specific individuals. On an intellectual level, because I do think the social categories we tend to use are strongly rooted in their specific cultural contexts. But on an emotional level because it puts lesbians and trans men in competition for "ownership" of historical stories and individuals. And while I understand the impulse, I personally think that embracing historic ambiguity is healthier.
That's why I regularly note that I'm presenting these stories as being "useful" for imagining lesbian characters without making any claims that the characters (both fictional and historic) were "lesbian" in some essential way. I do tend to be sloppy about it in shorthand, I confess.