One of the interesting through-lines in the history of female same-sex desire are the parallel strands of "attraction based on similarity" versus "attraction based on difference." If you will: femme-femme and butch-femme. (It would be interesting to look for historic antecedents for butch-butch attraction, which would also fall under the similarity model, but the primary examples tend to be femme-femme.) But these models of attraction or desire aren't limited to same-sex couples.
LHMP
Blog entry
I've been sorting out the collection of pdfs of journal articles that I haven't blogged yet, so I can get them all taken care of and start some fresh collections. There were three I spotted that were loosely associated with same-sex issues in the medieval Islamic world, so I figured they'd make a good cluster. This one looks at the internal logic of legal texts discussing the appropriate classification and punishment of same-sex acts. The primary focus is on acts between men, but the ways in which women were treated differently is interesting on its own.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 244 – Our F/Favorite Tropes: Kissing Lessons - transcript
(Originally aired 2022/11/19 - listen here)
Introduction
This paper is brief and preliminary (though, alas, the author's CV doesn't list any more recent publications that appear to have expanded on it) but offers a glorious survey of classical greek painting on ceramics depicting pairs of women with all the symbolic signifiers of erotic courtship.
I don't think I was aware of the poem as a part of this record until I was processing and proofreading the text in preparation for the translation. The edition I first began working with didn't include it, and it was only when I was proofing certain unclear items against the other edition that I realized this one major difference. As a work of emotional expression and fiction, it fills in some of the gaps in our speculations about how French society of the time might have viewed and understood Grandjean.
This installment concludes the legal document, with a verdict that is surprising in some ways and that opens as many questions as it answers. The theme throughout this whole series has been to recognize how very different historic attitudes toward non-normative gender and sexuality could be from what we might imagine. The primary sources for history sometimes have a way of upending our expectations in that way.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 243 - On the Shelf for November 2022 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2022/11/05 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for November 2022.
In his summing up, the lawyer switches tactics somewhat, bringing a new argument: that the acceptance, validation, and certification of Grandjean as a man by the church and state authorities in Grenoble absolves Grandjean of guilt when they act in that capacity. This may have been a strategic add-on by the lawyer, fearful that the judge might not be sympathetic to an argument based on the problem of categorizing intersex persons. But there is also a ring of truth to it.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode Episode 242 - The Wolf that Sings on the Mountain by Miyuki Jane Pinckard - transcript
(Originally aired 2022/10/29 - listen here)
Today's argumentation comes to the heart, not only of the lawyer's argument, but of the difficulty in determining the emotional and conceptual facts of Grandjean's experience. We cannot entirely trust the details of the lawyer's "facts" precisely because one particular version of the facts is essential for the successful argumentation of the case. And even in the structure of his presentation--whether he intended to be ambiguous or not--we can see the logical holes, given our context of being able to envision a greater range of possible identities.
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