Evidently the Queer Middle Ages Didn't Include Women?

In a collection with 10 articles and 3 respondant discussions, despite regular references in the introduction to “gay and lesbian history,” there are zero articles that touch on female same-sex relations, and only one that centers women at all. (The latter examines women in romantic/sexual relationships with monsters in medieval versions of Ovid.)

One of the respondant discussions notes a “noticeable lack in medievalist queer studies…of same-sex/queer potential among women.” But then goes on to discuss how, in the articles in this collection, women are invariably framed as a “hetero-normalizing force.” Alas, that this respondant does not then go on to remedy this peculiar absence.

This situation is, unfortunately, not at all uncommon in the field of queer history studies. It’s only disappointing. A collection like this one is why I regularly make comments about how my default expectation is that a history book or article collection that uses the words “queer” or “homosexual” in its title but has only male-presenting authors or editors has a very slim chance of being of interest to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project.

It’s the same sort of silent erasure or bias that drove the creation of “women’s history” as a field. If the existing structures don’t even notice that they’re excluding topics from their scope, the people studying those topics have little recourse but to create a new field focused specifically on those topics. Which then gets accused of identity politics or of further marginalizing their subject by removing it from the mainstream discussion.

In the field of lesbian history, the backlash to setting up “lesbian history” as a topic of study also takes the form of challenging the very existence of the concept. The complicated discussions around using anachronistic labels for historical subjects lead, all too often, to simply erasing the existence of those historical subjects by concluding that the study of them is inherently invalid.

(Karma Lochrie’s introduction to the collection The Lesbian Premodern tackles this trap head-on. Lochrie also sets out a lament that I’ve recently been trying to track down. “[I]n historical examinations, when women are categorized as lesbians it is often because they exclude men from their sexual self, whereas men are labeled ‘homosexual,’ or at least discussed in terms of homosexuality, when they include other men. … Why is it that we feel exclusivity is a necessary component of premodern lesbianism, but not of male homosexuality?”)

So, all in all, while one might think that a substantial collection of articles titled Queering the Middle Ages ought, by rights, to include at least one article talking about women loving women, one would be disappointed in this case.