When I review a thematic collection of academic papers, there are several possible outcomes. The entire collection is relevant and I blog each one in turn. A few papers aren’t relevant, but I blog the entire collection for completeness’ sake. Only a few papers are relevant and I only blog those. Or it turns out that none of the papers are relevant and I move on without blogging. Well, it turns out there’s a fifth option: none of the papers are relevant and I want to blog about that to let people know not to bother.
LHMP
Blog entry
I love doing the podcast poetry episodes, but I need to catch up on blogging the sources I used!
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 305 – Lesbians and the Law - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/01/19 - listen here)
Introduction
Sometimes I choose publications to blog based on a topic I'm currently working on, sometimes it's just a matter of picking the next title that I have loaded into my iPad to read. This is the latter case.
It's often the case that my bibliography includes not only substantial books on queer history, but the articles written by the same author as they developed the material--sometimes across decades. I have a couple articles by Turton in my list, and this one seemed like a good chaser.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 304 - On the Shelf for January 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/01/04 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2025.
It feels very tidy to finish up this book on the last day of the year. While 2024 didn't achieve my theoretical goal of posting a blog once a week, I did come closer than I expected, thanks to several bursts of productivity when reading for specific podcast topics.
2025, of course, is going to see a lot of change due to my retirement. I hope to plunge deeply into getting more material read and blogged, filling in the gaps in the table of contents for my sourcebook project, and of course getting back to writing the fiction that all this research is (theoretically) supporting.
While the purpose of this book is not entirely to lead up to how the OED became the thing that it is, this chapter feels like everything was leading to this moment. Without understanding the long history of editorial moral anxiety over the content of dictionaries, the specific choices made in compiling what was intended to be a neutral "scientific" record of the English language might seem more sinister than they were. And yet here we are: a work that purports to objectivity and yet systematically and deliberately erases, obscures, and vilifies f/f sexuality.
Genre turns out to be a key factor in whether lesbians are documented in dictionaries.
When Turton lays out the details of how vocabulary for f/f sex was deliberately omitted, obscured, and removed from dictionaries -- especially in comparison to how vocabulary for m/m sex was handled -- it becomes clear how badly queer historians have stumbled in relying on dictionary entries as evidence that "they didn't even have a word for it." One of the things I'm working on for my Sapphic Sourcebook is a collection of these vocabulary items, along with the dates, sources, and contexts, to help provide authors with a counter to the "common wisdom."
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