I apologise for anything I've said that implies there can be no overlap. I agree that same-sex romantic friendships can and at times do overlap with 'lesbianism' - however, to claim a historical figure is a 'lesbian' as the term is constructed today makes me wary. Not to say that there aren't people who were exclusively interested in people of the same sex/gender in the past, but to use modern terms and all their baggage on historical figures is something that I'm quite wary of.
My argument for devaluation comes from my identity as a demi-romantic asexual. Society elevates romantic relationships at the expense of friendships, and I've experienced this with my own friends. So to me, relationships construed as purely romantic in order to explain their depth of meaning totally erases my reality, and any romantic friendship of mine that is interpreted as purely romantic would, to me, be devaluing the meaning of a non-romantic relationship by insisting that it must be romantic in order to be so meaningful.
(But then, I don't know where asexual romantic relationships fit in because maybe the specific case of Emily Dickinson is an example of that, and we just can't know. The line between asexual romance and romantic friendship seems to depend completely on how each individual constructs it, especially when both concepts are so nebulous and dependent on rigid dominant discourses.)
Yes, I agree that historical queer figures have had their queerness erased, and I get that reclaiming them is partially about legitimizing and celebrating queerness, but at the same time...I'm uncomfortable about the ways this reclamation has been done, especially by mainstream white homonormative people.
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Date: 2010-09-14 11:32 am (UTC)My argument for devaluation comes from my identity as a demi-romantic asexual. Society elevates romantic relationships at the expense of friendships, and I've experienced this with my own friends. So to me, relationships construed as purely romantic in order to explain their depth of meaning totally erases my reality, and any romantic friendship of mine that is interpreted as purely romantic would, to me, be devaluing the meaning of a non-romantic relationship by insisting that it must be romantic in order to be so meaningful.
(But then, I don't know where asexual romantic relationships fit in because maybe the specific case of Emily Dickinson is an example of that, and we just can't know. The line between asexual romance and romantic friendship seems to depend completely on how each individual constructs it, especially when both concepts are so nebulous and dependent on rigid dominant discourses.)
Yes, I agree that historical queer figures have had their queerness erased, and I get that reclaiming them is partially about legitimizing and celebrating queerness, but at the same time...I'm uncomfortable about the ways this reclamation has been done, especially by mainstream white homonormative people.