Given that I'm posting this last installment on Boswell's Same-Sex Unions at the same time as I'm reading and writing up Foucault's History of Sexuality, I can't help but make some comparisons between the two presentations. In both cases, the authors are presenting a specific take on a field of historic study that is susceptible of widely varied interpretations. Boswell is a historian while Foucault is a philosopher, but both purport to be dealing with historic observations and practices in their analysis.
LHMP
Blog entry
One of the fascinating aspects of the development of (western) marriage as a socio-religious-legal structure is the extent to which it derived legitimacy from symbolic performative acts by the parties to the marriage. (Those parties might be only the two people getting married, or their families might be considered "parties to the marriage" with required actions. It depended.) If the correct set of things were said and done (with "the correct set" altering over time and by local culture) then one was married.
In chapter 4, the polemical nature of this book becomes most evident. In tracing the development of Christian attitudes toward--and forms of--marriage, Boswell’s through-line is that there is no logical way to integrate Christian approaches to heterosexual marriage with a blanket prohibition on same-sex marriage. Some of the criticism of both this book and CST&H are that both books feel too much like a supplicant begging for acceptance, thinking that if only the right logical argument were offered, Christianity would suddenly realize, “OMG, we’ve been wrong all along! We’re so sorry!
While re-reading this chapter for the blog, I had a lot of flashbacks to the period after 2008 when California (my home state) first legalized same-sex marriage, then took it away under a ballot proposition, then ruled against the results of the proposition in the state supreme court, then waited for the parallel US Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage throughout the USA. The fight isn't over--we are seeing how easy it is for rights to be eroded, roadblocked, or de facto reversed under a hostile regime.
Like Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, I read this book back when it first came out and had not yet generated the intense discussion that marked its reception. (In fact, on checking the publication information, I appear to have picked up a first edition of the original hardcover.) Looking back in the context of this re-read, two things come back to me that still hold.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 141 (previously 42c) - Book Appreciation with Kate Heartfield
(Originally aired 2020/01/18 - listen here)
Transcript pending.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 140 (previously 42b) - Interview with Kate Heartfield
(Originally aired 2020/01/11 - listen here)
Transcript pending.
Show Notes
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 139 (previously 42a) - On the Shelf for January 2020 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2020/01/04 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2020.
There are two basic parts to Boswell's book on homosexuality and tolerance: 1) that Christian society was not always and inevitable intolerant of homosexuality; and 2) that the shift to intolerance can be localized to a particular historic period and related to other significant cultural and political shifts during that period. Perhaps the present day is an opportunity for understanding just how a conjunction of unrelated forces can combine to create apparently illogical shifts in popular thinking. Or at least apparent shifts in popular thinking.
This section of Boswell's work points up some of the structural flaws of his study, in my opinion. "Structural flaws" does not necessarily mean "incorrect data and evidence" but rather that the large-scale conclusions are shaped by the ways in which that evidence is interpreted. And in his quest to find evidence for the existence of a postive gay subculture, there are times when he is deliberately credulous (such as taking politically-motivated accusations of sodomy as descriptive fact) or fails to consider the meaning of the asymmetries in the data.
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