It's the last weekend of the month, so it's time for another Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast to go live! This month we're looking at the exciting and implausible life of 17th century playwright, poet, world traveler, and spy Aphra Behn. Check out the show on your favorite podcast aggregator. If you enjoy it, I strongly urge you to subscribe and to rate the hosting show (The Lesbian Talk Show) to help others find it more easily.
Now with transcript!
The current installment of working through the People/Publication/Event tags is a somewhat uncomfortable topic. One of the ways in which lesbian desire has been dismissed in literature (and then used to "prove" that lesbian behavior is sick or evil) is to take the trope of an asymmetric desiring/desired pairing and frame it as inherently non-consensual and abusive. The reasoning goes something like this. Lesbian desire always exists between an "abnormal" desiring woman and a "normal" desired woman.
This finishes up the literary works that feature cross-dressing and gender disguise. These works may involve a number of other themes as well. Keep in mind that these tag essays are meant to identify thematic groups, but individual stories are rarely simple. In particular, if cross-dressing opens the window to an enduring love once a disguised woman's gender is revealed, or if the personal interactions within the disguise have more of a predatory flavor than an erotic one, then I've placed works on those more specific categories.
When we shift from historic individuals to literary figures, there's a corresponding shift in the emphasis within types of motifs. The reasons women might choose to pass as men in real life were often economic or practical. In literature, there must be a reason that is important to the plot. Given how (relatively) common it was in real life, cross-dressing to join the military is fairly rare in fiction, outside of the specific genre of "female cabin boy" ballads.
I've written up a new set of tag descriptions. You can find the permanent page with access to the tag-links here. For reasons of internal website structure, this is going to duplicate the content of that tag essay to get it into the blog feed. (Life is complicated.) But you'll now find that permanent page in the LHMP drop-down menu.
The season of people posting their "top 10" or "10 favorite" for the past year is a bit fraught for authors. There's always the hope that maybe, just maybe, your work will have been among someone's favorites, or considered by someone to have been among the best of whatever category it is they're considering. For those of us whose work falls outside the popular categories, and when that work came out at the very end of the year when most people have already drawn up their lists, it's best just to close our hearts and move on.
Working through setting up the tag pages is taking longer than expected, so I'm going to do this in smaller chunks. I'll present each chunk in a blog entry then put them together into the permanent "tag essay" page when I have each group collected up. Why does it take so much work? Here's my process:
The purpose of tags on Lesbian Historic Motif Project posts is to make information relatively easy to find. The topics covered under “people/event tags” identify specific historic texts and authors, or historic individuals or events that are discussed in LHMP publications. This essay is intended to explain briefly how the “people/event” tags are being used.
We've come to the largest and most diverse set of LHMP tags: "People/Works/Events." It's taken me a while just to start organizing how I'm going to present these, and I've only barely started writing up the brief descriptions to accompany each one. So today's post is just a high-level overview. (I.e., I don't have anything else to post on LHMP day, so this is what you get.)
