Skip to content Skip to navigation

Guidelines for Guest Posts

Since there has been at least some interest from others in contributing guest posts to the Project, I thought I'd throw out some guidelines intended to be inviting and open-ended.

Content

The "project statement" pretty much lays out what sorts of publications I'm looking for. For more guidance, the sorts of topics that have already been covered should help. At heart, what I'm looking for is information about historical events and persons, or historic literature and art, that has relevance for the creation of fictional lesbian characters in historic settings. "Historic" for me has tended to mean "pre-20th century" simply because there is vastly more information available for the last century. But I won't quibble about dates for contributed material.

The topic can be as direct as romantic desire and sexual activity, or it can be as general as social and economic contexts that allow women to resist heteronormativity. There is no requirement that the material exclusively addresses lesbian concerns (or even that it specifically concerns women identifiable as lesbians at all). The key theme is "relevance". That relevance can come from the historic context itself, or it can come from the tropes and themes that modern readers expect or appreciate.

Sources

To be useful as research, entries in the project should be scholarly in the sense that they provide factual information for which the sources and reasoning are provided. This doesn't mean that I'm only looking for academic publications. But it means that "popular" sources should be evaluated for reliability and for the traceability of their information. (As an example of the sort of thing I mean: there was a lively and entertaining series of pop history books entitled "Uppity Women of X Times" that gave brief, sensationalized biographies of prominent historic figures. A publication of similar style listing supposedly lesbian historic figures would fall outside the sort of publication I want to include, although it might provide leads on more useful sources.)

Examples of historic literature with lesbian (or lesbian-like) characters is most useful if it comes with some sort of analysis. If you're working directly with the original text, then you may have a bit more work to explain what sort of information it provides.

I don't really expect other people to do the sort of deep-diving into bibliographies that I've done to put together my "to-do lists", but if you happen to stumble across something you think would be relevant...

And, needless to say, if I've already covered a publication, I'd be less interested in a new post on it unless it addresses the material in a new way. (For example, a more extensive index of the persons or publications discussed in the work.)

Format

I have very few requirements here. Provide a bibliographic citation in any standard form you like. Summarize what sort of work it is: the intent, the scope, the intended audience (as best you can determine). Summarize what sort of information it contains, including mention of any particularly juicy data such as transcripts of historic documents. You can also include highlights of specifics: names, dates, places, and why the data is interesting. The more specific information is provided, the easier it will be to index the coverage so readers can find material on particular topics. I may do some reformatting of the structure, but I won't be doing content editing.

Keep in mind that the LHMP entries aren't meant to provide detailed historic data in and of themselves, but to give readers enough information to know whether it would be worth tracking down the source.

Communication

Contact me to query about a publication or to send contributions of entries. (If you think something is of marginal relevance, probably best to query first before putting in the work, though I'm open to "bad example" publications as well as useful ones.) Any contributions will, of course, be credited to the provider.