Although Boehringer doesn't touch on the question directly, I wonder how badly our image of f/f eroticism in Classical Greece is skewed by having two significant textual references filtered through one specific author (Plato)? There is a brief advisory in one discussion that Plato's opinions on the topic may not have been representative of the general public. But I also wonder to what extent Plato's opinions on anything were representative of his contemporaries.
LHMP
Blog entry
This chapter divides nicely for blogging into the four main topics: Plato’s Symposium, Plato’s Laws, the presence and absense of specific erotic motifs in different kinds of material, and f/f erotics in humorous literature. We really see the power of a work of this depth in how it can tease out meaning by extensive comparison among themes and sources.
The most delicious thing about Boehringer's approach to this material -- and what I hoped I would get -- is a very detailed presentation not only of the cultural and historic context of the small scraps of hard data, but an analytical comparison of all the variant material related to each motif, with a discussion of how the variations speak to the central themes and how they can guide understanding of the accreted layers of interpretation and elaboration. The dive into the Calliso myth that forms the majority of what today's blog covers is a great example.
This post covers perhaps the first half of Chapter 1. (Plus a tiny bit of the front matter that I overlooked previously.) I debated over how to break up the content of this book. There are only three chapters, so doing a whole chapter in each blog post would be far too much, given the level of detail I"m interested in. But within each chapter there are a number of much shorter titled sections, which are shorter than it makes sense to cover separately. So I figure I'll break the coverage in what feel like natural places (or when I need a break).
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 213 – All-Woman Societies in History and Fiction - transcript
(Originally aired 2021/10/17 - listen here)
When I blogged Dover (1978) Greek Homosexuality, I started off by quoting the author's own assessment: “That female homosexuality and the attitude of women to male homosexuality can both be discussed within one part of one chapter reflects the paucity of women writers and artists in the Greek world and the virtual silence of male writers and artists on those topics.” But the "paucity" of material isn't the only factor at play here.
This concludes my coverage of Skidmore's book, and of my recent mini-sequence of books on transmasculine history. I have to say that my own understanding of trans possibilities in the early 20th century was greatly broadened by Skidmore's detailed and extensive research. I knew about a few well-known biographies, like Billy Tipton, but not the utter normalness that could be the experience of many (though not all) trans men. And the surprising glimpses of acceptance, both by communities and families, in some cases.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 212 - On the Shelf for October 2021 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2021/10/02 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2021.
News of the Field
You know how in the last blog I was confused by the chapter's alleged theme of how whiteness insulated trans men (to some extent) from being considered deviant, but then the chapter focused entirely on white people? Well, it’s because this chapter is the one that looks at the different treatment received by trans men who were excluded from whiteness (by the contemporary culture – whiteness is always contingent and mutable). We have one more chapter in this book, then we change topics entirely!
Skidmore seems to be doing the same thing that confused me a little in Manion's book: assigning themes to chapters, and then working hard to shoehorn a set of biographies into the theme. I can see the structural reason for doing so if the book isn't simply to be a biographical dictionary. But it strikes me as odd to have a chapter focusing on the role of whiteness in the acceptability of specific trans-masculine lives without discussing specific non-white trans men in that chapter.
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