(Originally aired 2023/01/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2023.
Here’s looking forward to a new year of content, so let’s take a look back at what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has done this year.
Having hit on the idea of doing a podcast on the topic of sapphic themes in gothic novels, I searched my to-do lists for several publications generally on the topic of 18-19th century fiction. This is the first of a set of three titles I pulled for that purpose, although I hope to get through them a bit faster than one per month. December was a very intense month for the day-job and I left my LHMP reading for the vacation week at the end.
(Originally aired 2023/01/21 - listen here)
(Originally aired 2023/01/28 - listen here)
(Originally aired 2022/12/17 - listen here)
Introduction
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 247 – From the Bird’s Nest by Jennifer Nestojko - transcript
(Originally aired 2022/12/31 - listen here)
Sometimes an article looks really intriguing and then you feel cheated by the actual content. This isn't necessarily the fault of the author -- sometimes it's the fault of my pre-conceptions that "read in" assumptions based on my own interests. I find this happening a lot with novel descriptions. Because my social media feeds combine streams with different defaults (SFF, queer, romance, historical) I have a tendency to fill in any unmentioned characteristics in a book description with my own particular interests.
(Originally aired 2022/12/03 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for December 2022.
One of the interesting through-lines in the history of female same-sex desire are the parallel strands of "attraction based on similarity" versus "attraction based on difference." If you will: femme-femme and butch-femme. (It would be interesting to look for historic antecedents for butch-butch attraction, which would also fall under the similarity model, but the primary examples tend to be femme-femme.) But these models of attraction or desire aren't limited to same-sex couples.
I've been sorting out the collection of pdfs of journal articles that I haven't blogged yet, so I can get them all taken care of and start some fresh collections. There were three I spotted that were loosely associated with same-sex issues in the medieval Islamic world, so I figured they'd make a good cluster. This one looks at the internal logic of legal texts discussing the appropriate classification and punishment of same-sex acts. The primary focus is on acts between men, but the ways in which women were treated differently is interesting on its own.
