I've blogged several articles on sapphic aspects of Bluestocking culture over the years. Since I was blogging a different article in this special issue on Bluestockings, I figured I'd include this general introduction to their history as well. (I confess that I have something of a "thing" for brainy women in women-centered historic contexts.)
LHMP
Blog entry
This publication is wildly out of order in the numbering system for logistical reasons. Specifically: It had a lot of primary source quotations which I was mining for my vocabulary project, which took quite a while to process. It didn't make sense to read through it to create a blog entry then come back to process the vocabulary. But in order to create the entries in the vocabulary database, I needed to assign it a LHMP publication number. So I've been posting a bunch of later numbers while working my way thorugh the data entry for this one. More details than you wanted to know!
Part chance and part strategy, I'm in the middle of a sequence of pairs of related articles: 2 on linguistics, 2 on Eliza Haywood, 2 on bluestockings, 2 on anatomical issues.
I've been trying to figure out how to write a podcast on Eliza Haywood without actually having to read a bunch of 18th century novels.
Debate over the question of whether you can have "lesbian identity" without the use of the word "lesbian" as a type of person sucks a lot of oxygen out of the discussion of queer history. After all, a number of other words were clearly in use for a long time to describe women who have sex with women. But because the specific word "lesbian" is so iconic and is often a theoretical sticking point for questions of continuity, this one specific text bears a disproportionate amount of weight.
Because I enjoy doing clusters of related publications, here's the first of two talking about the semantics of the word "lesbian."
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode Sexology Changed Everything: or, Why the LHMP Ends Around 1900 - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/07/20 - listen here)
Introduction
This is the second of the two papers on the history of sexology that I pulled out in preparation for a podcast.
In addition to tackling some USA-related articles, I've picked the rise of sexology as this month's podcast topic, hence the choice of a couple of items on this topic to post. Sexology and its consequences are about half the reason why the Lesbian Historic Motif Project cuts off around 1900. The other half of the reason is that information on lesbians in the 20th century is so much more plentiful that it would swamp earlier material (and the earlier material is where my heart is). But mostly, models and understandings of lesbianism changed significantly around 1900.
Today's article is a survey of recent research in trans (and to a lesser extent, intersex) research on the middle ages.
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