If we don't mention them maybe they'll go away.

[marshtide]

I'm perpetually amazed by the things people don't mention about books and authors. I know that for a great many years I had an impression of Virginia Woolf as some Classic Author who probably wrote very dry and dull things which no-one really liked but literary snobs claimed to. This can probably partly be blamed on the uneasy interaction between my mother's literary taste and my aunt's literary taste (the latter being rather more self-consciously high-brow than the former and clashes between the two being fairly common), which left me confused about a lot of books, really.

But also: no-one ever mentioned what they were about. If they did, they left things out. Things that I would have been interested in knowing, even quite a few years ago! Things like "Orlando is about the construction of gender" or "Mrs Dalloway is partly about sexuality, actually."

A lot of people - really a lot! - told me throughout my teens that I should read The Colour Purple, which I think was described as "about race" or possibly as "important" without elaboration. (Where to even start with this one...)

These are just the ones I can remember fastest. You've probably got more.

Do we just not mention the queer stuff? Is it not the done thing in polite conversation? Because really...

(Apropos of: thinking some more about Emma Donoghue's Inseparables - still recommended - and also suddenly remembering that I started reading Virginia Woolf finally because a few years ago Val said that she was a really good writer and also that there was stuff to be had on the gender and sexuality front there. And that I had this oh my god I had no idea moment.)

...and I'm going to go to class right now (and am totally going "oh my god and my teacher will have looked at my practice paper over the weekend and I know I spelt that one word wrong oh my god!" because I am ridiculous) so you get left with this mess of half-thoughts. Have fun!

Comments

[cimorene]

In the US we have to learn a lot, A LOT, about Emily Dickinson, but nobody ever tells you that she was a lesbian. Like, we know. There are letters!

[marshtide]

When I was working at a college library in spring 09 we got in a set of author biographies! It was kind of fascinating, in the sense of having been written by a visitor from an alternate universe where All Important Authors Are Straight... whimper.

[pulchritude]

But was she a lesbian, or did she have a very intense romantic friendship? (I'd use the term 'just', but I don't want to discount the importance of romantic friendships.)

I'm really uncomfortable with the lgbtq community trying to claim same-sex romantic friendships as same-sex romantic relationships because we just don't know. I've had very intense romantic friendships - the language I've used in correspondence to those friends could be taken as what one woman would write to another woman with whom she is in love, but to characterise those relationships as lesbian would be a complete misinterpretation and would, imo, actually be diminishing the value of those relationships in my life.

Of course, if there are things in those letters that would explicitly mark Emily Dickinson as lesbian, then I apologise, but the portions I've read solidly support nothing more than romantic friendship.

[marshtide]

OK! This is a complicated issue and I fully recognise that, but I find this kind of uncomfortable.

Yes! Romantic friendships. People have them and have had them and they're important. Although for you personally they are distinct from any lesbian identity the implication I'm getting here that there is and can be no overlap strikes me extremely oddly as does the claim of devaluation. (I come at this from a standpoint of having had relationships which have slid back and forth through various levels of lesbianism and friendship and stuff that could certainly be described as romantic friendship without stretching, and having not found any of them to diminish any of the others. So clearly my angle has to be very different from yours.)

I have really a lot of thoughts related to this, but 1) I think they're at a tangent to your point rather than in response to it and 2) I have to go to class now. So maybe I should leave it. Or come back later, depending.

[pulchritude]

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.

[marshtide]

OK, we're constructing types of relationships and projecting them back on the past or otherwise outside of their original context. That applies every bit as much to romantic friendship and to asexuality as to lesbianism. And heterosexuality.

You say that romantic relationships are elevated and sure! I'll buy that! But women's sexuality sure isn't highlighted in a positive way by any society I've lived in, and the whole idea of romantic friendship has at times played into the frankly creepy idea of female "purity" way more than I am personally happy with. I have an uneasy relationship with the term although I absolutely recognise that it can have value outside of that area; but seriously, this is not a problem-free thing either.

[pulchritude]

Oh, I absolutely agree that all the terms we've used are bound up with our own understandings of gender and sexuality. But then, the very boundaries of these discussions are framed this way. I don't know if we even can move beyond them.

I take your point about women's sexuality and the origins of the idea of romantic friendship. My own asexuality blinds me to the ways women's sexuality are devalued, I admit. But I don't know how we can counter heteronormative ways of looking at the sexualities of historical figures (which I apparently have been using in this discussion, for which I apologise) while not projecting our own ideas about gender and sexuality upon them.

[marshtide]

I have to also add, looking back over my comments, that school has been leaving me in a weirdly combative mood lately. *wry* Oops.

Well, we can't, basically. It's a problem which is fairly universal to all study of the past; in the end you have more and less blatant bias shaping the things we take away from any given historical person or event. One can basically just acknowledge whatever bias one's aware of, try to be conscious of it, and keep going, as far as I can tell.

[cimorene]

It was presented as fact, I believe, in Graham Robb's highly acclaimed Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, but I haven't read any myself, not being a fan. On the other hand, I feel that debates over homosexuality vs "romantic friendship" in historical interpretation and particularly the insistence on proof are somewhat problematic given the well-known necessity of camouflage.

[pulchritude]

Yeah, I've realized that my insistence on proof in my previous comment to you implies an assumption that people are 'straight' until proven otherwise, which is very problematic and contributes to a lot of queer erasure in history. However, I dislike that the discussion is typically framed in a binary way, in this case heterosexual/homosexual, and it's actually that rigidity that prompted my insistence on proof previously. So really, there's no perfect way to go about discussions like this.