Sometimes this blog is a dispassionate and intellectual summary of academic research. Sometimes it's a total squee-fest about a great source or a fascinating piece of historical evidence. And sometimes it's the equivalent of rage-tweeting. This one has turned into the last. Ungerer's article is a valuable single source for most of the documentary evidence of Mary Frith's life.
LHMP
Blog entry
In conjunction with this month's podcast essay, I'm covering a couple of publications, both scholarly articles and primary sources, about Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse. Moll is a great example of what I'm talking about regarding the details of actual history being far more fascinating than the tropes they often evolve into in popular culture.
No thoughtful introduction. Posting on my phone from the middle of a big key ride. Needless to say the main entry was set up in advance!
ETA: You can tell I was posting from my phone because "big key ride" was supposed to be "bike ride".
If the last 30 years have seen a blossoming in academic research on homosexuality in history, they have seen an even more drastic shift in the academic approach to transgender topics in history. It's one thing to take a hard, dispassionate look at attitudes towards transgender topics within the historic context itself. It's a bit more painful to read the work of "modern" academics and recognize how their work is tainted by the application of frameworks that themselves are products of a specific historic and social context.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26c - Book Appreciation with K. Aten
(Originally aired 2018/09/15 - listen here)
In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.
In this episode Kelly Aten recommends some favorite queer historical novels:
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26b - Interview with K. Aten
(Originally aired 2018/09/08 - listen here)
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26a - On the Shelf for September 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/09/01 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for September 2018.
As I have found on previous occasions, there are a good number of survey articles on women's sexuality or even specifically on women's homoeroticism published in the 1980s and 1990s that--at this point--are mostly useful to include in the LHMP for the purpose of saying "don't bother with this, it's thoroughly outdated." So why do I include them? Several reasons. One is as a service to you, dear reader. One is so I can keep track of the fact that I have looked at them so I don't keep adding them to "to do" lists.
In the words of the sage, "You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss..." But that's never been true in western culture. A kiss is never "just" a kiss. And all the various meanings that kissing can have create what we might think of as "Schroedinger's intimacy" where observers decide whether a kiss is a sign of erotic intimacy based on their assumptions about the relationship of the people involved.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 25b - Interview with Vanda - (no transcript available)
(Originally aired 2018/08/11 - listen here)
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about
- The Juliana series and how it follows queer history across the latter half of the 20th century
Publications mentioned:
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