Female Homoeroticism Research Articles

Do I Participate in the Discourse of Respectability? Reflecting upon Histories of Female Homoeroticism and Enslavement

Do I Participate in the Discourse of Respectability? Reflecting upon Histories of Female Homoeroticism and Enslavement

Leftover peaches: Female homoeroticism during the Western Han dynasty1

Female homoeroticism in early imperial China has received minimal scholarly attention. This article purposes to investigate lesbianism in the Western Han dynasty, taking into consideration both the literary and archaeological material. I first offer a succinct rundown of the ancient terminology of male homosexuality, principally in an effort to underline the classical Chinese language’s absence of a precise vocabulary to describe lesbian attachments. Next, I turn to the transmitted textual sources, analysing the two extant records of love between women in order to gauge something of the nature and permissibility of female homoerotic relationships. The final section of this essay is dedicated to mortuary objects, namely the moulded bronze phalli and other sexual training tools disentombed from Western Han gravesites. When properly contextualised, the excavated dildos can be interpreted as having been used by concubines, both within same-sex partnerships and in the course of pornographic displays staged for their master’s enjoyment.

The matrices of female bonding and lesbian sexuality: female homoerotic cinema in Mainland China

ABSTRACT The mis-representation of female homoeroticism in China and misunderstanding of films in this regard leads to the question: What explanatory frameworks should we adopt to analyze Chinese female homo-erotic films in the way that respects the local historical and cultural context? After studying the local history of women’s separatism and formation of lesbian identity under Western influences, I suggest two frameworks, namely, the matrix of female bonding and the matrix of lesbian sexuality. Adopting these two frameworks, respectively, I conduct close analysis of Sweet Eighteen (甜蜜18岁, 2012) and Fish and Elephant (今年夏天, 2001), to locate the “Chinese lesbianism” in these not very lesbian films in the eyes of American audience. I will argue that the narrative of homosexual-maternal transferability in the former resonates with Chinese women’s literature, while the narrative of homosexual normality and a coming-home rather than coming-out strategy in the latter film speak to the local specificity of lesbian discourse since the 1990s.

Mortal Bromance: Homoeroticism on the Takarazuka Stage

The Takarazuka Revue is an all-female music theatre company founded over a century ago. It is an important institution in Japanese culture and has garnered quite a lot of scholarly attention, but only rarely from a Theatre Studies perspective. This article draws on Azuma Sonoko’s model for analyzing how onstage and offstage levels overlap and interact in the Takarazuka Revue. I challenge Azuma’s emphasis on female homosociality as the most important appeal for fans with discussions of a number of musicals and revue scenes portraying male homoeroticism. I argue that female homoeroticism between performers is deliberately invoked through male homoerotic themes, as part of fan service. The article offers rare close readings of original works and discusses the styles of several in-house writer-directors and choreographers. It also traces a shift over time towards more explicit and frequent portrayals of male homoeroticism on the Takarazuka Revue stage.

Queer for Art: Tennyson’s Poetic Autonomy as Female Same-Sex Desire

Abstract This article argues that in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and later, to lesser degree, in In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson expresses artistic autonomy by a Renaissance poetic trope of female same-sex desire. He does so to do away with the aesthetic closure and separation from the world implied by lesbianism in the Renaissance poetic imaginary. Via readings of these two poems, as well as historical and biographical examination of Tennyson’s writings and contemporaries’ writings about Tennyson – including later sexological writings – this article suggests that Tennyson’s choice of early modern aestheticized lesbianism as figure over the Hellenistic, intellectualized, male homoeroticism newly available in his Oxbridge milieu was personally as well as poetically motivated. Tennyson’s letters and biographies show that the poet was steeped in the tradition of erotic similitude. His poetry suggests that he anticipated the negative association between aestheticism and male homosexuality that would mark the end of his own century, so he portrayed solipsistic artistic production as linked to a female homoeroticism verging on autoeroticism. This article then offers a history of the strategic revival of a specific cultural-imaginary arrangement of female same-sex desire, and re-evaluates Tennyson’s place in the history of nineteenth-century homosexuality. Finally, in tracing erotic similitude’s relationship to autoeroticism, this article articulates the poetic and political stakes of historical morphologies of male homosexuality constructed as social, productive, and active, versus persistent constructions of female homosexuality as sterile, heretical, and anachronistic.

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

<i>The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable</i>, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

Intersectionality and the Archives in Love Between Women

Intersectionality and The Archives in Love Between Women Jennifer A. Glancy (bio) To return to a classic work of scholarship after a quarter century invites reflection on the passage of time. Published in 1996, Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism appeared in a world in which two women or two men could not yet marry each other, at least not with civic recognition. According to Wikipedia, which in 1996 had not yet come into existence, the Netherlands was the first country to recognize same-sex marriage, in 2001. The ways we speak about sexuality and gender identity have evolved in the past twenty-five years. Contrasting ancient to modern views, the introduction to Love Between Women reads, "Whereas we often dualistically define sexual orientation as either homosexual or heterosexual, they saw a plethora of orientations. (When we in the late twentieth century think about it, we also recognize bisexuals and transsexuals, leading us to speak of a spectrum, rather than a bifurcation)."1 Since those words were published, broader discourses around gender identity and sexuality have become more fluid. There are exceptions—think of the vogue for prenatal gender-reveal parties, for example. Nonetheless, both in the popular media and in academic publications, there is an increasing sensitivity to the inadequacy of binary thinking about gender. Although not a central point of my response, evolving conventions around the expression of gender and sexuality invite additional perspectives on ancient female homoeroticism. Love Between Women has contributed to our ability to frame such academic conversations. Engaging Joan Nestle's exploration of butchfem relationships, for example, Brooten writes, "We can see how a first-person account significantly augments our grasp of the cultural and economic meaning of the fem role. Imagine how many more interpretive clues we need to read the [End Page 149] cultural signals of antiquity."2 In light of growing awareness of trans and gender-nonbinary identities, I am curious whether Brooten would recategorize any of the evidence on which she relies, or whether she might frame parts of her argument differently.3 I focus my response on two dimensions of Brooten's scholarship where the prescience of her approach has become ever more apparent—her commitment to intersectional analysis and her unflagging efforts to recover and reclaim archives for women's history. Although in 1996 the term intersectionality was not yet in use among biblical scholars, what we would now recognize as intersectional work was certainly being published by a vanguard of womanist and some feminist biblical scholars and theologians.4 Love Between Women both drew on and contributed to that expansion of vision in feminist scholarship. Insisting that gender should not be treated as a singular category of analysis, divorced from other elements of power relations, social status, and relational identity, Brooten self-consciously endeavored to identify "the social location and the ethnic and cultural identit[ies]" of ancient authors and the women about whom they wrote.5 To see how this approach played out in Brooten's analysis, we might start with her critique of historian John Boswell's thin treatment of female homoeroticism in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.6 Brooten takes issue with Boswell's pointing to Perpetua and Felicitas as "paired saints," a designation creating "the impression of church tolerance of erotic love between women."7 Dubious of the designation on multiple counts, Brooten concludes her discussion by observing, "Boswell did not address as a problem for an erotic relationship the fact that Felicitas was a slave, while Perpetua was a woman of an elite social stratum. If the relationship were to have been erotic, the power imbalance between a slave woman and an elite woman raises the question whether we would need to classify the sexual contact as sexual abuse, especially since the sexual use of slaves was commonplace in the Roman Empire."8 In 2022, drawing attention to the power differential between a woman of elite status and an enslaved woman may seem like an obvious move. However, [End Page 150] for many circles in the context of the 1990s, broadening a feminist lens to interrogate intersections of social status and relational identity could be seen...

Love Between Women in the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca

Love Between Women in the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca Christy Cobb (bio) I first encountered Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women as a master's degree student at Wake Forest University. It was, perhaps, the first time an academic book spoke to me personally. It showed me the power of academia to impact people. I devoured the book. I read it, reread it, marked it up, and wrote in the margins. My copy of this book is beloved. Brooten provided me with the language, the texts, the proof, that women had been loving women since antiquity. I am certain I am not alone in my appreciation of Love Between Women. I imagine others read this book at some point in the last twenty-five years and felt similarly. For these reasons, it is an honor to add to the conversation about the impact of Love Between Women. For my contribution, I consider the ethos of ancient sexuality, which in recent years has been scrutinized by scholars. In my view, Brooten's project anticipated this conversation and also set the groundwork for current and future work on sexuality in the ancient world. Thus, I begin with an overview of the dominant scholarly view of sex in the Greco-Roman world and then provide examples of two scholars—Joseph Marchal and Maia Kotrosits—who offer alternative options to this prevalent view. I subsequently propose some possibilities for expanding upon the theorizing of sexuality begun in Love Between Women. I do this through a reading of the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca, an early Christian narrative, that focuses on the eroticism and pleasure present in the text, specifically as they surface in the relationships between women. Brooten begins Love Between Women with a discussion of the view dominant in the Greco-Roman world concerning sexuality, that is, the hierarchical binary of active and passive sexual roles. The typical description of this view goes something like this: in antiquity, sex was understood to be primarily about penetration. One partner was active and penetrated the other partner, who passively received this penetration. The active partner was male while the passive partner [End Page 161] could be female or male, but in either case was feminized. As long as the partners remained in their stratified roles as active and passive, sex was viewed as "natural." This phallocentric view of sex in antiquity was (and is) a dominant one within scholarship. As Brooten notes, though, "social reality was, however, more complex than the ideology."1 In fact, female homoeroticism complicates this view, as not all sex between women involves penetration, and even when women were depicted through this paradigm, the woman receiving penetration was not always passive. Brooten also notes that women who refused to be penetrated by a man or who were "erotically oriented toward women" stood outside these socially accepted roles. Sexual relationships that did not fit within the active/passive paradigm were viewed as unnatural and therefore condemned; this includes, of course, female homoeroticism. In recent years, several scholars in our field have challenged this hierarchical view of sex in the ancient world as active/passive. For example, in his essay in Bodies on the Verge, Joseph Marchal rethinks this paradigm through a consideration of those on the bottom, or the persons who were depicted as the receptive participant in sex.2 In addition to examples from ancient texts, material culture further complicates the phallocentric view of sex within antiquity. Graffiti in Pompeii, for instance, suggests that both men and women experienced active pleasure while receiving penetration.3 Marchal writes, "Penetration and, or as, domination is not the whole story, even if that equation reflects the social order or at least the perspective of those at the pyramidal apex of power."4 Maia Kotrosits also challenges the penetration paradigm through a reading that focuses on pleasure instead of penetration.5 Offering a new model to counter the focus on active/passive sex roles, Kotrosits turns to the Acts of Paul and Thecla in order to "attend to some places in ancient literature that register an erotic relationality that does not fit comfortably with figurations of penetration."6 In doing so, she...

Introduction

Introduction Joseph A. Marchal (bio) One potential genealogy for this special section of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) begins with a special session of the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Multiple program units (including the Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World section, the Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible section, and the LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics section) and status committees (including the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession and the recently established—if rather belatedly in comparison to other academic organizations—Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship) collaborated to recognize and reflect upon Bernadette J. Brooten's Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication (with the University of Chicago Press in 1996). The task required that many partners because of this work's immense influence and impact on the study of women, gender, sexuality, and enslavement, among other domains and topics in relation to both material and textual remains, history, and the ethics of interpretation. Given these themes and Dr. Brooten's innumerable contributions to both knowledge and community building, the session was critical and celebratory, lively and substantial in ways that strongly correspond with JFSR's historical interest in honoring influential feminist scholars and desire to think reflexively and prospectively about our scholarly pasts in relation to our presents and anticipated futures. Of course, in reflecting on such scholarly pasts, the contributors who have known Brooten the longest (Sheila Briggs and Angela Standhartinger, among them) explain how this project concretely, politically, and interpersonally began years, even decades, before the quarter-century publication date that partially inspired the session. Thus, the following contributions trace how Love [End Page 143] Between Women and Brooten's work within and beyond this book are part of longer histories of feminist, queer, and increasingly intersectional approaches to biblical, ancient Jewish, and emerging Christian materials. Yet to call Love Between Women just a book is a gross oversimplification. It was and is a phenomenon, likely because Love Between Women contains multitudes. As several of the contributors to this special section highlight, it is an incredible resource; its many different parts inspire and inform work in its wake. Its latter half is anchored by an indispensable commentary on Rom 1:18–32, in which Brooten meticulously examines the arguments in this notorious passage in light of the relevant interpretive frameworks and intertextual echoes. Just as importantly, though, Brooten also gathers, translates, and explains an unprecedented assemblage of ancient materials reflecting upon female homoeroticism in the ancient Roman world. In clearly and critically presenting a range of cultural sources, from erotic spells and astrological texts to medical treatments and manuals of dream interpretation, Brooten pressed beyond the "classical" (mostly elite, imperial, enslaving, and male) literary sources to provide multifaceted angles on these (still often depressingly kyriarchal) materials and the potential people behind them. Love Between Women, then, performs a massive mitzvah in providing essential context. It builds an archive and in doing so, gives generations of readers, "scholarly" and otherwise, a new, profound, and still unparalleled access to a matrix of sources on, about, and at times even from women in the ancient Mediterranean context. Yet the picture provided by this archive is far from rosy, and Brooten refuses to adopt either apologist or falsely idealizing approaches to the often disturbing materials within and beyond Paul's letters. Indeed, Love Between Women demonstrates how thoroughly Paul's letters and particularly the "bashing passage" of Rom 1:26–27 are conversant and concordant with most of the ancient kyriarchal ambiance that presumed and projected a fundamental asymmetry so that what counted as "natural" intercourse was only the penetrative use of a social and political subordinate by their superior. Brooten's work demonstrates, then, why and how histories of sexuality could, even should, also be feminist histories, attending to specifically gendered dynamics and differences. The broader project also cautions scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity against dismissing "religious" sources out of hand, particularly if one is at all concerned with the vast majority of people who lived distanced from the apex of kyriarchal power and privilege. For a great many...

A Reflection on Love Between Women and the Importance of Embodied Thinking in Research, the Academy, Politics, and Life

A Reflection on Love Between Women and The Importance of Embodied Thinking in Research, the Academy, Politics, and Life Mónica I. Rey (bio) So much has happened since Love Between Women was published in 1996. In some ways, the environment in which Love Between Women was published is an entirely different world. I was nine at the time.1 It is easy for me to take for granted how radical Love Between Women truly was in its focus solely on love and sex between women at a time when same-sex marriage was still illegal. Maybe not surprisingly, Love Between Women is important to my own research primarily because of its approach to historiography and method in a field where the historical record is extremely fraught. As a student reading Love Between Women, I was fascinated by its ability to cover questions that center issues related to gender, sexuality, and difference simultaneously. As a PhD candidate, I am now struck by the rich theory it demonstrates, a map that guides me down a path still less traveled in academic inquiry. In my own research I have found true Brooten's observation that "the lack of sources on women is part of the history of women."2 I will admit that at times I am bitter about both the difficulties this presents and the unwillingness of malestream scholarship to embrace or take seriously different methods to deal with this fact. Yet these difficulties create the opportunity to do something fruitful, creative, and innovative in the historiographical arena. What Love Between Women does so beautifully is to demonstrate how women's histories challenge the discipline of biblical studies and its deeply held beliefs about itself. Case in point, much of Brooten's groundbreaking work is really centered around letting the evidence and [End Page 155] texts speak for themselves, something that is (apparently) difficult for scholars to do. The subject matter the evidence presents led to what Sara Parks describes as "acrobatic antics performed in order for interpreters to maintain . . . assumptions in the face of clear evidence to the contrary."3 How is it that a discipline that claims to so deeply value objective analysis is actually so beset by phallocentric bias? This continues to be a mystery to me. Already in 1985 Brooten had concluded that "no amount of historical-critical work, no amount of taking the Tendenz into account will make woman emerge as a subject of history."4 Recognizing this, Brooten challenged the discipline's readiness to abandon half of humanity in the historical record by instead engaging a methodological insight she calls historical imagination.5 Similarly, one can appreciate how Brooten's critical comments actually also impact the historicizing of women loving women in ways that challenge even Michel Foucault.6 What Brooten accomplishes in Love Between Women is no easy task. Underappreciated in this field is the sort of labor of theorizing seen and produced in a work like Love Between Women. Hennie J. Marsman, who develops a feminist approach heavily influenced by Brooten, laments that "it is remarkable that those writing on biblical historiography generally give little attention to the theoretical requirements of writing women's history."7 On top of grappling with sparse or missing sources in the historical record, historians like Brooten who do this work also must contend with the fact that the available evidence is also fraught with distortions both in the telling of "history" and quite frankly in the source's own detestable views. Brooten is aware of this paradox, acknowledging that Love Between Women "contributes to the history of male ideas about lesbians far more than to women's history."8 In that history of male ideas, Love Between Women reminds me that we are not really very far from some of these ancient patriarchal views of female homoeroticism. In recovering the sexual lives and relationships of and between women, Brooten had to contend with ancient attitudes toward female homoeroticism, which (spoiler alert) are often extremely negative. In my mind, many of the parallels between ancient and modern views of female homoeroticism are striking. For example, Brooten notes that tribades, women who pursue women, were viewed as mentally ill...

“Inseparables”: Tobacco Workers in Seville and Female Homoeroticism at the End of the Nineteenth Century

“Inseparables”: Tobacco Workers in Seville and Female Homoeroticism at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Augustinus en vroulike homoërotiek in die vroeë Middeleeue: ’n Foucaultiaanse ideëhistoriese interpretasie

Augustine and female homoeroticism in the early Middle Ages: A Foucaultian idea-historical interpretation. Taking his reading of Romans 1:26–27 and Genesis 19 as its hermeneutical key, an idea-historical interpretation of the views of the Western church father Augustine of Hippo (354–430) on female homoeroticism is presented in this article. The accentuation of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) on the overall significance of Augustine in the Western history of sexuality, in his posthumous Histoire de la sexualité 4 (Les aveux de la chair, under editorship of Frédéric Gros, 2018), is used to contextualise Augustine’s views on sexual desire as the ‘form of the will’, here positioned specifically within a female homoerotic context. Drawing on the substantial studies of John Boswell (in 1980) and Bernadette Brooten (in 1996), which, although relatively dated, are still without equal in Medieval research, the article subsequently explores Augustine’s views on intimate relations between women, both in monasteries and in secular society. It is shown that intimate relations between women must have transpired in fifth-century monasteries and that female homoeroticism was for the next two centuries dealt with with restraint rather than with forms of exclusion and punishment, despite the negative portrayals of same-sex relations by some of Augustine’s patristic contemporaries (particularly John Chrysostom [ca.347–407]), yet precisely on the basis of Augustine’s understated approach. Although Augustine renounced homoerotic relations as a form of ‘unnatural’ (for him, expressly, all ‘non-procreative’) sex, he dealt with the incidence of female same-sex relations with understatement. Given his general authority in the early Middle Ages, one effect of Augustine’s non-homophobic approach was that female homoeroticism was de facto bypassed as a ‘moral problem’ in the fifth and sixth centuries, until handbooks of penance, that prohibited all forms of same-sex relations, started circulating at the end of the sixth century.Contribution: This article contributes to the ongoing study of Medieval female sexuality, and particularly of female homoeroticism in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, by exploring Augustine’s views on same-sex relations between women around the early fifth century, while concurrently contributing to ongoing analyses of Michel Foucault’s interpretation of the church and desert fathers in the (edited) fourth volume of Histoire de la sexualité (Les aveux de la chair), published in 2018.

The Signifying Tomboy and the Thai TV Series Club Friday To Be Continued: She Changed

Abstract This article examines the representation of same-sex attracted women in contemporary Thai culture by using the television series Club Friday To Be Continued: She Changed (2016) as the prime example. The show’s portrayal of the tomboy protagonist is not uncontroversial, given that her unfolding love for a man betrays the tomboy’s original self-identity as a woman-loving woman. It invokes the heteronormative specter that sees female homoeroticism as temporary or situational while same-sex attracted women will turn “straight” so long as they meet the right men. This article, however, urges us to look beyond the seeming political incorrectness and focus on the changing signification of “tomboy” in the Thai culture. I argue that the series dramatizes the expanded meaning of tomboy: now detached from a firm association with female homoeroticism (tom) to become a form of women’s gendered self-fashioning (tomboyism) that is mediated by trendy intra-Asian cosmopolitanism in contemporary Thai society.

Sappho's Mythic Models for Female Homoeroticism

This paper contends that Sappho draws upon the mythic tradition to represent female homoeroticism as queer in her poetry. First, I show how Sappho's invocation of Tithonos and Helen as erotic paradigms in fragments 58 and 16 figures female same-sex love as non-normative and shadowed by loss, while also symmetrical and idealized. Then I propose that the Homeric Andromache also informs Sappho's representation of her speakers' desires in fragments 16 and 31, and I argue that recognizing Andromache's latent example helps us to understand how Sappho, in these songs, positions female homoeroticism in painful opposition to conventional marriage.

“O meu estranho mundo secreto”: identidade lésbica e homoerotismo em Eu sou uma lésbica, de Cassandra Rios

Este trabalho tem como objetivo fazer uma leitura crítica das representações da mulher lésbica no romance Eu sou uma lésbica (1980), da escritora paulistana Cassandra Rios, cujas obras foram consideradas pornográficas e censuradas durante o regime militar brasileiro. Ao acompanharmos as recordações da protagonista Flávia, observamos uma série de questionamentos em torno de sua identidade e de seus desejos por outras mulheres, o que evidencia questões relacionadas ao homoerotismo feminino, ao preconceito e à discriminação da mulher lésbica em um contexto histórico-social marcadamente repressor, sobretudo em relação às identidades consideradas como não hegemônicas. Para alcançar nossos objetivos na leitura do romance de Rios, valemo-nos dos conceitos teórico-críticos de George Bataille (1987), Judith Butler (2003), Tânia Navarro-Swain (2004), Adriane Piovezan (2005), Isabela Nóbrega (2015), e Anderson Guimarães (2013), dentre outros, que nos possibilitaram uma compreensão mais acurada sobre as representações da mulher lésbica na literatura de Cassandra Rios.

Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

<i>Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self</i>. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

The ebb and flow of female homoeroticism in the online Chinese queer fandom of Super Voice Girl (2006)

Abstract Super Voice Girl (SVG) was an Idol-style Chinese reality show that allowed only female contestants. The show became famous worldwide for featuring gender-nonconforming contestants. This article examines the rise and fall of the most popular online Chinese queer fandom of the 2006 SVG in the forum feise chaonv (FSCN). I focus on the fans’ ambivalent play with Chinese-specific female homoerotic imaginaries that initially popularized and protected but eventually led to the decay of FSCN as a queer fantasy space. First, I look at the subtle ways in which the 2006 SVG tactically normalized the female homoerotic imaginaries surrounding its tomboyish national finalists. Then, I examine FSCN fans’ struggles with both this female homoeroticism and the stigmatization of real-world lesbianism. I demonstrate that the fictional imagination of female homoeroticism sustained FSCN as a popular queer fantasy space after the show ended. Additionally, I detail the fans’ self-contradictory reactions to several real-life lesbian incidents involving the finalists that gradually came to light in the post-show years. I argue that the fans’ confinement of female homoeroticism to a youthful, memorable fantasy scenario that was substantially shaped by both Chinese mainstream and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender cultures eventually contributed to the abrupt end of FSCN’s queer-themed practices.

The Challenge of Female Homoeroticism in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract Queer studies of the Victorian period have debated female homoeroticism's relationship to heterosexuality. Critics debate whether female dyads contest or support courtship and marriage. For Martha Vicinus, the Victorians saw women's friendships as an “unnamable threat to social norms,” while Sharon Marcus contends that they celebrated such relations and that same-sex “relationships worked in tandem with heterosexual exchange.” In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens belongs to both camps, showing women's connections as pervasive and disruptive. He celebrates women's erotic friendships precisely because they threaten heterosexual exchange: Abbey Potterson and Jenny Wren seek to protect Lizzie Hexam from her family and suitors; Sophronia Lammle gives Georgiana Podsnap a space away from her father to articulate her own feelings. These relationships that shelter women from heterosexual predation disappear in the novel's second volume. I argue, however, that we shouldn't read this disappearance as the unqualified triumph of normative relations. Mutual attraction continues to flicker—between Jenny and Abbey, Lizzie and Bella Wilfer—and the novel's heroines only accept marriage proposals once suitors cast off predatory designs and demonstrate an affection that resembles that of the female friends who have sustained them throughout the novel.

The Challenge of Female Homoeroticism in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract Queer studies of the Victorian period have debated female homoeroticism's relationship to heterosexuality. Critics debate whether female dyads contest or support courtship and marriage. For Martha Vicinus, the Victorians saw women's friendships as an “unnamable threat to social norms,” while Sharon Marcus contends that they celebrated such relations and that same-sex “relationships worked in tandem with heterosexual exchange.” In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens belongs to both camps, showing women's connections as pervasive and disruptive. He celebrates women's erotic friendships precisely because they threaten heterosexual exchange: Abbey Potterson and Jenny Wren seek to protect Lizzie Hexam from her family and suitors; Sophronia Lammle gives Georgiana Podsnap a space away from her father to articulate her own feelings. These relationships that shelter women from heterosexual predation disappear in the novel's second volume. I argue, however, that we shouldn't read this disappearance as the unqualified triumph of normative relations. Mutual attraction continues to flicker—between Jenny and Abbey, Lizzie and Bella Wilfer—and the novel's heroines only accept marriage proposals once suitors cast off predatory designs and demonstrate an affection that resembles that of the female friends who have sustained them throughout the novel.

Oscula iungit nec moderata satis nec sic a virgine danda : Ovid’s Callisto Episode, Female Homoeroticism, and the Study of Ancient Sexuality

This article examines a neglected ancient source for desire between women that nonetheless has a rich reception history in the context of female homoeroticism: the Callisto episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses . The article argues that the relationship between Diana and her hunting companion Callisto can be read as homoerotic and that, unlike many ancient accounts of female-female eroticism, neither character is represented as a tribas (a gender-deviant “woman” with a masculinized body, who seeks to penetrate other women). The Callisto episode is therefore an invaluable piece of evidence for ancient discourses on sexuality exceeding the bounds of the active/passive model.