LHMP #163 Giffney, Sauer & Watt 2011 Introduction: The Lesbian Premodern

The title and concept of the collection is deliberately provocative of the concept that “lesbian” is a limiting and essentialist concept. The editors point out that the challenges to identifying “lesbian” concepts in premodernity (i.e., that it’s anachronistic) apply equally well to heterosexuality, and that the concept “lesbian” almost always has been considered anachronistic throughout time.

The collection challenges the notion that theory-to-premodernity is a one-way street, and considers primary pre-modern scholarship as a theoretical structure in itself. The book is organized in three sections: theories and historiographies, histories and texts, and encounters with the lesbian pre-modern. It begins by re-examining the work of influential pre-modern scholars in lesbian and queer studies, as well as collecting and examining recent research and analysis, with the last section bringing scholars of later periods into the conversation to respond to its content and premise.

Part one addresses the erasure of lesbian experience from the body of received history. But erasure also comes from the presumed heterosexuality of historic societies, as well as from a framing that requires exclusivity to same-sex relations to bring someone under the rubric of “lesbian”. (In contrast, scholars of “gay history” include men under the category of “homosexual” if their lives include any same-sex relations, rather than requiring exclusively same-sex relations.)

The rest of the introduction is a summary of the papers to come.