One of the hazards of any vast sprawling research undertaking, such as the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, is anxiety about doing any sort of synthesis or conclusions with incomplete material. I still give an ironic mental wince when I recall that my original idea for the Project was to gather all the research and write a definitive sourcebook on lesbian motifs in history.
LHMP
Blog entry
I've put my commentary in the "notes" section attached to the LHMP entry this time. A bit of an explanation of the complexities of the LHMP file structure...
It occurred to me that if I want to finish blogging The Apparitional Lesbian very tidily by the end of July, I need to start posting some extra blogs beyond the usual Monday post. There are 5 more chapters after this one, so it'll be blogging every day this week. Of course, there's no reason other than a love of symmetry to require completion of a publication at month's end. But since I have the notes all typed up already, there's also no reason not to finish posting, since the blogging schedule is what drives getting the reading done.
This chapter is the article that forms the philosophical heart of the book, with subsequent chapters elaborating on the motif in specific contexts. I've interspersed some commentary within the summary, and will include more general retrospective commentary in the last post for this publication.
Chapter 2 is a personal reminiscence that has no relevant content for the Project. I was tempted to combine it with Chapter 3, like I sometimes do for chapters with minimal commentary, but since it's the only such chapter in this book, I flipped a coin and gave it its own entry.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 235 – A Farce to Suit the New Girl by Rebecca Fraimow - transcript
(Originally aired 2022/07/30 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 234 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 1: Only One Bed - transcript
(Originally aired 2022/07/16 - listen here)
“…and there was only one bed!”
There's a phenomenon where the majority of books you read keep citing a specific earlier work, and you build it up in your mind to being something larger and more significant than it turns out to be. Of course, academic citations aren't necessarily a mark of significance; sometimes they're an acknowledgment of origins, of idea-lineages, of honoring those who first mapped out the territory. But it can still, sometimes, feel like a let-down when you finally get around to reading some highly-cited work and it doesn't live up to the image you've created in your head.
All in all, this was the least satisfying of the four chapters of this book that I summarized in detail, from the viewpoint of providing a survey of the field. While the other three chapters were written by scholars with extensive work in the topic they took up, Thomas (based on some cursory googling) seems to be more a specialist in Victorian English culture, with queer history being only one of a number of specialized topics she has written on within that field.
As with the previous post, this chapter is written by a prolific and deeply knowledgeable scholar on the era in question. One of the benefits of a survey like the Cambridge Companion that is both a high-level overview and focuses specifically on lesbian history is that it can be easier to see some of the large-scale patterns. If the 17th century was an era when female homoeroticism was becoming more visible in general, the 18th century was an era when knowledge about female homoeroticism was becoming more organized into motifs, tropes, and categories.
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