LHMP

Having concluded that I'm going to postpone the On the Shelf podcast for a day or two in hopes that I'll get all the story contracts back and can announce the line-up in the show, I'm finishing up the last of the current prepared set of blogs with this exploration into why lesbian convent pornography was quite so popular in 18th century France.

I really needed to have read this article before I wrote the trope podcast episode about familial models in f/f relationships.

Ouch!  I hadn't meant to skip posting blogs while I was traveling, but somehow I got distracted, despite having everything lined up and ready to go. It might seem strange that I spend so much attention on research into historic intersex issues, given that my topic is lesbianism. I'll discuss the "why" in detail in my book, but the simple explanation is that ambiguous gender creates a context for understanding how people defined and reacted to gender anomaly. And one of the historic attitudes toward same-sex desire was that it was a gender anomaly, rather than a sexual orientation.

The current group of articles I'm blogging are more generally addressing gender and sexuality. As I read through them, I found a high proportion that didn't pan out as being of interest, though I think that has more to do with having cherry-picked the more interesting-looking titles in the past. This is more historiography than history, discussing current work on the history of sexuality and evaluating their approaches. Not sure whether I'm gratified or disappointed that it didn't turn up any reading that I didn't already know about.