I'm starting a series of four articles from a collection entitled Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. After this first article, the others group nicely to cover shifts in cultural understandings of gender and sexuality categories in western Europe in the 16th through 18th centuries. If it weren't for the blog's structure of covering the contents of a collection in series, I'd pair this current article with another one I have coming up on the sexual context of cross-dressing in the medieval Middle East.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 45 (previously 20c) - Book Appreciation with Elizabeth Bear - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/03/17 - listen here)
Any time I'm obsessed with a particular text, I'm likely to spend a fair amount of effort to hunt down as much of the scholarly literature on it as I can. (I don't think I can ever exhaust my interest in commentary on Yde and Olive!) For one thing, lesbian historical studies have something of a history of jumping to lesbian-friendly interpretations of texts or persons, and it can be essential to examine contrary opinions. Clearly I need to track down Susan Lamb's analysis to see what I think of her arguments on Mademoiselle de Richelieu.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 44 (previously 20b) - Interview with Elizabeth Bear - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/03/10 - listen here)
Other than my fairly rigid schedule of LHMP posts and the Bingo series, my blog spreadsheet tells me I haven't posted much in the last couple of weeks. Sometimes all the overlapping deadlines and commitments conspire to knock out the time I'd normally spend brainstorming blogs.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 46 (previously 20d) - Falling in Love with Cross-Dressing Girls - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/03/24 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 43 (previously 20a) - On the Shelf for March 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/03/03 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for March 2018.
It’s been a busy month here at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project and I’m really excited about the things we have coming up to share with you, not just this month but in the year to come.
When I decided to blog a few books on Charlotte Cushman in support of doing a podcast on her, my online searches suggested two titles that fell in the “definitive” category: Merrill’s 2000 book that I blogged last week, and Leach’s 1970 one that I’m blogging today. I hadn’t quite realized that they’d be such an object lesson in ways to approach the sexuality of 19th century queer women.
I’ve chosen two biographies of Charlotte Cushman to synchronize with the podcast about her. The one in this entry directly engages with Cushman’s same-sex desires and relationships and examines how she curated her own reputation with regard to her personal life, as well as examining how changing attitudes toward same-sex relations after Cushman’s death may have contributed to a deliberate erasure of her legacy.
This biography falls outside the Project’s pre-20th century scope, but I already owned the book and since I featured an interview about a show based on Carstairs’ life on the podcast, it felt like a good excuse to cover it in the blog. The shifting experiences and receptions of Carstairs’s same-sex relationships over her lifetime provide something of a tour through 20th century lesbian history, though of course Carstairs herself was insulated to an astounding degree by her wealth and connections.
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