Female Same-sex Desire Research Articles

Queer Mapping as Decolonial Praxis

Queer Mapping as Decolonial Praxis

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.

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, ed. Misty Krueger

<i>Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843</i>, ed. Misty Krueger

“The Kurds Have Not Made Love Their Aim”: Love, Sexuality, Gender, and Drag in Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn

AbstractThis paper explores the concepts and norms of gender and sexuality in Ehmedê Xanî's 17th-century mathnawi poem Mem û Zîn, nowadays regarded as the Kurdish national epic. A reading of this poem with the aid of the conceptual tools of gender studies and the history of sexuality reveals how different its norms and concepts are not only from modern Kurdish ones, but also from those of classical Persian literature. Although the poem does not hint at any taboo concerning male love for beardless boys, it does display a remarkable asymmetry between male and female same-sex desire; it also displays distinct views of legitimate and transgressive sexuality. Thus, this poem encourages a more historicizing view of the gendered and sexual dimensions of modern (Kurdish and other) nationalism, and a greater attention for the distinct characteristics of vernacular literatures within the premodern ‘Persianate cosmopolitan.’

Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires

Review of the book Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires, by Francisca Yuenki Lai.

Who Tells Our Stories?

Who Tells Our Stories? Marcia M. Gallo (bio) Lauren Jae Gutterman. Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 328 pp.; ill. ISBN 9780812251746 (cl). Jaime Harker. The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 239 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469643342 (cl); 9781469643359 (pb); 9781469643366 (ebook). E. Patrick Johnson. Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 592 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469641096 (cl); 9781469641102 (pb); 9781469641119 (ebook). E. Patrick Johnson. Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 256 pp.; ISBN 9781478005902 (cl); 9781478006534 (pb); 9781478007241 (ebook). Four recent books on female same-sex, bisexual, and “quare” desire provide rich opportunities for complicating contemporary accounts of lesbian and feminist history.1 In particular, the three authors reviewed here rely on a diverse set of sources—correspondence, oral histories, family albums and archival documents, journalism, fiction, memoir, fantasy, and LGBTQ+ studies—to expand the life stories we can access. For that alone, we owe them thanks, because all three authors bring to the fore an impressive array of people too often missing from our accounts of women who love women, from the mid-twentieth century through the first decades of the twenty first. Lauren Jae Gutterman is cohost of the “Sexing History” podcast and assistant professor in the American Studies and History Departments at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage, received the 2019 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians award for a “first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality.” Jaime Harker, the owner of the Violet Valley Bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi, is a self-described “gay bookstore connoisseur” who operates her business as an especially welcoming place for members of LGBTQ+ communities. [End Page 183] With the publication of her first book in 2018, The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, she aims to provide readers with “a literary history of a group of writers who, when remembered at all, tend to be approached in isolation” (16). The author of both Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History and Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women, E. Patrick Johnson is the dean of Northwestern University School of Communication and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and professor of African American Studies at Northwestern. He also was a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson’s first book, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003), examines how Blackness is appropriated and performed both within and outside African American culture. His second book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008) is an ethnographic oral history of the lives of Black gay men in the US South which received the Stonewall Book Award from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association. Utilizing these oral histories, Johnson also created “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales,” an evocative and spellbinding one-man show which he performed at numerous venues from 2006 to 2013. All three of the authors bring their own experiences to bear on their work, but they all focus on the women whose stories they tell. As a group, they utilize familiar sources to ask new questions about female same-sex desire and enrich the existing archives with new and complex narrators. Three of the books focus specifically on the US South, and all incorporate a range of eras, geographies, races, ethnicities, and class statuses to remind us that social institutions such as marriage connect many women’s lives. Lauren Jae Gutterman’s Her Neighbor’s Wife relies on a number of archives, including the treasure trove of materials in the Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Collection at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. She also makes good use of oral histories—such as those collected by lesbian scholar Kelly Anderson at...

(De)Pathologizing Lesbian Desire in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain

Discussions of "tribadas," "viragines," "marimachos," "hermafroditas," "mujeres hombrunas," and "lesbias" appear in works by prominent nineteenth-century sexologists. Vicente Suárez Casañ's El amor lesbio (1892), seemingly the lengthiest account on the topic of the time, insists on tying masculine lesbians, or marimachos, as he refers to them, to hermaphroditism. He also underscores the distinction between masculine and feminine lesbians, while revealing the persistent belief in spontaneous sex change and connections between lesbians and witches. While Eduardo López Bago's La Pálida (1884) and La monja (1886) reproduce long-standing beliefs that tie lesbianism to prostitution, hysteria, convents, and sorcery, the radical naturalist conspicuously shies away from the figure of the butch lesbian or "female hermaphrodite." In contrast, Emilia Pardo Bazán features a masculine lesbian associated with witchcraft as the eponymous protagonist of her short story "Afra" (1894). And in 1901 she publishes the column, "Sobre ascuas," about the first gay marriage in Spain between two women in A Coruña. Although most of these medical, literary, and journalistic discourses appear, in some way, to endorse heteronormativity and patriarchy by pathologizing female same-sex desire, they all simultaneously deconstruct arguments about the naturalness of universal heterosexuality.

«I Will Eat You and Spit You Out»: A Reading of the ‘Lesbian Machine’ in Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina

This article analyzes the «lesbian-machines» (Grosz 1995, 184) at work in Dacia Maraini’s novel Lettere a Marina (1981) and collection of poems Mangiami pure (1978). To this purpose, I engage with two conceptions of desire within the western philosophical tradition. Firstly, examining the development of the metaphor of cannibalism or ‘eros fagico’, I argue that Maraini avoids the ontologization of the notion of desire considered as a lack and thus disengages it from its historical association with the denigration of the female other. Secondly, conceiving desire as a force of production, relational and creative, I explore a particular use of metaphors in the novel which leads to bodily transformations or metamorphosis, without, however, reaching the subject’s imperceptibility through progressive identification. The co-presence and re-elaboration of two, apparently incompatible, theories of desire underline female same-sex desire’s potential to be thought and actualized as a lack and a production, its tendency to annihilate and being annihilated as well as its creative impulses. As a result, Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina and Mangiami pure complicate and destabilize the fixity of representational categories, expanding discourses on lesbianism and lesbian desire. Indeed, the convolution of negative and positive dilates the domain of desire and multiplies its possibilities, carving out a «narrative space in which women might desire differently» (Ross 2015, 16), beyond the heterosexual norm and in diverse ways, who and how they please.

Dildos and Material Sapphism in the Eighteenth Century

Building on critical discussions of how female sexuality structured ideas about the modern world more generally in the eighteenth century, this essay examines how the dildo becomes a signifier of material sapphism. Restoration and early eighteenth-century texts describe the dildo in terms of its material make-up and its status as a consumer commodity available for purchase in England, revealing authorial anxieties about the ability of women to pleasure themselves without men. The discussion of female husband narratives featuring dildos further exposes how these fears turned into anxieties about female same-sex desires that could no longer be blamed on non-normative bodies or recuperated for the pleasure of the male gaze. By examining how eighteenth-century fictions of female sexuality describe and discuss the dildo as a material marker of lesbianism, this article argues that the dildo becomes specifically aligned with a usurpation of male power and sexual prerogative, as well as with sapphic pleasures.

Unaccountable Form: Queer Failure and Jane Barker’s Patchwork Method

This essay traces Jane Barker’s “patchwork” aesthetic of imperfection as a methodology of queer failure that allows her to resignify disappointment and inaction as creative vitality. A Patch-work Screen for the Ladies (1723) incorporates stories, poetry, recipes, songs, and more, as its frame attempts to account for the author-figure Galesia’s singlehood—a circumstance portrayed as a series of accidents and errors. By tracing failure through these infelicitous courtship plots, the aleatory composition of the “patchwork screen,” and the insistently humble form of narrative uncertainty, this essay shows that the story of the Unaccountable Wife—a striking depiction of female same-sex desire—is not a hermetic episode of the text but a crucial articulation of a formal and thematic queerness that resonates precisely through its opacity. This essay proposes that queer failure and passivity offer a useful rubric for reading other eighteenth-century fictions that stall the reproductive momentum of the marriage plot.

The Promise of Lesbians in African Literary History

The Promise of Lesbians in African Literary History Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi (bio) IMPLIED LESBIAN READERS AND AFRICAN LITERARY FEMINISMS Although scholars have now acknowledged the frequency of samesex desire and same-sex relationships in African literatures, they have yet to recognize that the sexually queer subjects in African writing are overwhelmingly male. When women's same-sex desire is found, it is inevitably roomed in the short story. This scarcity of women's same-sex sexuality in the novel has enshrined the short story as the genre in which writers stake claims about women's same-sex desire (Munro 2017). The genre's domination has produced some effects: (1) an emphasis on depictions connecting Africa and outer-continental locations in Europe and the United States; (2) the predominance of twenty-first-century perspectives; and, (3) the focus on private affective attachments or failed solidarities between individuals. The publication of Chinelo Okparanta's Bildungsroman, Under the Udala Trees, changes this literary landscape. Okparanta joins Unoma Azuah and Lola Shoneyin as another Nigerian novelist to feature women's same sex desire in a novel. Her novel, however, makes critical interventions in literary history. Its evident turn to earlier novels by Nigerian women rekindles stalled conversations about lesbian representations and African literary feminisms.1 By coupling [End Page 675] female same-sex desire and sex with the vast premises of civil war, law, national identity, and literary history, Okparanta forefronts the relationship between sexuality and literary and political authority. This decidedly meta-fictional novel introduces a lesbian teacher and a lesbian reader to promote alternative literacies for the enmeshments of sexuality and political authority. In The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority, Aleardo Zanghellini (2015) argues that the disavowal of same-sex desire has been central to the construction of political authority and good political conduct across cultures. Although he focuses on political trials in which allegations of homosexuality or non-normative sexualities damage political reputations, his work illuminates recent deployments of homosexuality in African political cultures in which the denials of homosexuality or antagonistic attitudes toward sexual minorities reinforce political authority. Under the Udala Trees portrays how similar attitudes shore up political authority, but its brilliance lies in replicating the dispersal and deployments of sexuality in pursuit of multiple forms of authority that are incorporated into the fabric of the everyday. This exploration of relations between sexuality and authority becomes evident when the protagonist, Ijeoma, makes the bildungsroman's requisite encounter with a library in her lover's home: I read many books, many months of consistent reading, at least two hours every evening: Agatha Christie's crime novels, Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard. Efuru, by Flora Nwapa. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. I had already read Things Fall Apart, as it was on her shelf, I read it again. (Okparanta 2015, 188) Having Ijeoma reread Achebe within the lover's library flags the drive toward alternative reading protocols in Okparanta's novel. In all of his novels, Chinua Achebe exhumes the relations between sexuality and the "constitution of political authority" (Zanghellini 2015, 2–3). That examination is apparent in Things Fall Apart, which features two gender non-conforming children in Okonkwo's household and the latter's anxieties over family successions. The novel also portrays the suppression of same-sex desire in the constitution of political masculinity and the deployment of aggressively competitive homosociality in service of colonial conquest (see Osinubi 2016). That relation between sexual activity and political authority appears [End Page 676] forcefully in the final pages of Okparanta's novel but it is turned toward women's complicity in the diffusion of political authority and sexual normativity. Although African feminist scholars and women writers critiqued Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the argument can be made that African feminisms smoothened its ascendance to literary and scholarly authority, in part, by disavowing same-sex desire. Historically, African feminists nursed a difficult relationship to non-normative sexualities (Arnfred 2009; Currier & George-Migraine 2017; Lewis 2008; Nfah-Abbenyi 1997). Julianna Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi recalls objections to a conference presentation on lesbian figurations in African literature at a conference of the African literature association despite the notable...

“A Queer-Looking Lot of Women”: Cross-Dressing, Transgender Ventriloquism, and Same-Sex Desire in the Fiction of Amy Dillwyn

“A Queer-Looking Lot of Women”Cross-Dressing, Transgender Ventriloquism, and Same-Sex Desire in the Fiction of Amy Dillwyn Kirsti Bohata (bio) In her 1992 study of cross-dressing and cultural anxiety, Vested Interests, Marjorie Garber invites us to look directly at rather than through the figure of the transvestite (9). She sees the cross-dressing figure as a “third term,” one that undoes binaries and thereby creates a “category crisis”: “By ‘category crisis’ I mean a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another” (16).1 In Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter: A Story of Killay Life (1880), gangs of cross-dressed men breach physical boundaries in the name of social justice, class, and nationality. But beyond the dramatic account of men smashing tollgates, The Rebecca Rioter is a text invested in a variety of different border crossings, from the purported translation of the original story (from Welsh to English) to the multi-layered transgender ventriloquism of the text’s narrative. Jay Prosser has convincingly argued that we need to disentangle transgender bodies from queer bodies and transgender identity from queer sexuality, but in the case of Dillwyn’s novel, these are deeply and deliberately intertwined. Indeed, as I shall argue, the queer erotic triangle at the heart of the text’s expression of female same-sex desire is contingent on the transgender construction of Evan, who is both one of the cross-dressing rioters and a character who ventriloquizes his genderqueer creator. This essay draws on recent historiography, newly available archival sources, and queer theory to investigate Dillwyn’s representation of trans Victorian identities and acts. In doing so, it claims the novel as a paradigmatic example of Victorian trans literature. Published nearly forty years after the popular uprisings of 1839–43 known as the Rebecca Riots, Dillwyn’s novel is closely based on historical events in which large gangs of protesters—mainly men dressed in female costume— destroyed hundreds of tollgates, liberated a workhouse, and conducted campaigns of protest and intimidation. The riots began in the face of an agricultural depression and focused on removing the numerous and costly tollgates run by turnpike trusts, but the movement that became known as “Rebeccaism” expanded to protest elements of the New Poor Law, absentee landlords, and other issues of social justice. There was an element of [End Page 113] nationalist protest in some of Rebecca’s declarations (Williams 192), and historical research suggests that there were also links between the Chartist movement stirring in industrial South East Wales and the Rebecca uprisings in the rural west (Williams 150–57). From the outset, Rebecca and her daughters (as the rioters were known) went about their protests wearing women’s clothing: often a white smock-like garment or a bedgown, bonnet, and shawl in keeping with the attire of farmers’ and labourers’ wives, though they occasionally sported more lavish wigs and dresses. Rebecca, referred to in contemporary accounts in the third person to mean the leader of a particular riot, the wider body of men (who are also her children/daughters), and the movement itself, took her name from the Book of Genesis: “let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them” (King James Bible, Gen. 24.60). Another widely circulated folk story is that the burly leader of the first riot borrowed his costume from Becca Mawr of Llangolman. There were hundreds of successful attacks on tollgates during 1843 (D. Jones 201), the year in which the riots of the novel take place; by summer, Rebeccaism had spread from the rural west to industrialized Glamorgan, where this story is set. The attacks depicted in the novel are based on events in which the author’s father and uncle were directly involved as magistrates summoned to help ambush the rioters.2 Dillwyn’s novel was considered by contemporaries a compellingly realistic account of the riots and was consulted and quoted by historians (Davies 328–29; Evans viii). As one local woman recalled, “such was the accuracy of [Dillwyn’s] portrayal of the rioters, that their now respectable descendants demanded an injunction in court...

Women Lovers, or The Third Woman by Natalie Clifford Barney

Reviewed by: Women Lovers, or The Third Woman by Natalie Clifford Barney Lowry Martin II WOMEN LOVERS, OR THE THIRD WOMAN, by Natalie Clifford Barney. Translated from French by Chelsea Ray. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. 216 pp. $29.95 cloth. Chelsea Ray's translation of Natalie Clifford Barney's Women Lovers, or The Third Woman provides a fresh and fascinating window into the life of the writer, salonière (salon hostess), and translator Natalie Barney for English-speaking audiences. Originally published posthumously in French in 2013, this experimental novel reveals not only new dimensions of Barney's personal life, but it also makes an important contribution to LGBTQ and French literature, as well as cultural history. Barney was at the epicenter of Paris's burgeoning lesbian communities of the Belle Époque and interwar years. As an American heiress, she was educated at the exclusive girls' school, Les Ruches, outside of Paris, and afterwards spent most of her life as an expatriate in France. Barney established a reputation as an engaging intellectual force around whom circulated some of France's most celebrated writers, musicians, artists, and thinkers. She actively worked to promote female writers and artists, often offering everything from emotional to financial support. A writer herself, Barney has been far less known on this side of the Atlantic because her French literary production remained untranslated into English. The unfortunate consequence is that Anglophone audiences are relatively unfamiliar with her works in comparison to one of her contemporary American expatriates, Gertrude Stein. Yet, the artistic and literary luminaries in the gravitational pull of Barney's salon included Marcel Proust, Colette, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Paul Valéry, Djuna Barnes, and numerous others. The majority of the novel centers on a fictionalized account of Barney's changing relationships with Mimi Franchetti and Liane de Pougy—the three women represented in the narrative by their first initials N., M., and L.—and the forced examination of her own principles and theories on love, friendship, and polyamory. The love triangle began with the end of Pougy's sixteen-year marriage to the Romanian Prince Ghika. Pougy had engaged in a same-sex affair with a beauty named Manon Thiébaut with her husband's full knowledge and consent, but her husband also began a secret affair with Thiébaut. When Pougy discovered the affair, she took [End Page 220] her husband's offer to share Thiébaut in a ménage à trois as an intolerable double betrayal and divorced him. Lonely and out of sorts, Pougy wrote to Barney, her former lover, and soon received unexpected aid. Barney, who Djuna Barnes once described as a "one-woman relief organization for the disappointed in love, a sort of lesbian Red Cross," offered Pougy an amorous distraction: a three-way relationship with herself and Franchetti (qtd.p. xix). Barney believed that sharing herself and her new lover with Pougy would be the tonic to cure her depressed mental state. Instead, Barney's old and new lovers quickly formed a real attachment that exiled Barney to the periphery—the proverbial third wheel. Within this framework, the novel serves as an exploration of Barney's feelings of jealousy, abandonment, and betrayal as well as a discursive laboratory where she could play with rhetorical elements such as form, genre, and voice while meditating on her philosophies of friendship, romantic attachments, and love. Women Lovers, or The Third Woman is an important translation for the fields of French literature, women's literature, and women's and gender studies for many reasons. First, this novel further cements Barney's place in LGBTQ cultural and literary history as a sexual renegade who challenged bourgeois social mores on both sides of the Atlantic. She never made any secret of her sexual orientation, and her novel eschews any trace of the morbidity or deviance so often associated with same-sex desire and lesbian literary representation during that period. Women Lovers illustrates how Barney normalized female same-sex desire rather than internalizing the pathologizing medical discourse so pervasive during the Belle Époque and through the interwar years in the works of novelists such as Radclyffe Hall, Claude Cahun, and other lesbian writers. In addition...

States of emergence: Writing African female same-sex sexuality

ABSTRACTTracing a series of intertextually linked short stories from the 1990s to the present by women writers from Nigeria and its diaspora—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Unoma Azuah, Chinelo Okparanta, and Lola Shoneyin—I suggest that although the figure of the African lesbian appears “new” in the context of heightened contemporary attention to the issue of homosexuality, this figure has a literary history. Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Our Sister Killjoy: Or, Reflections From A Black-Eyed Squint (1977) inaugurates this formation, in which the imagining of female same-sex desire is entangled with articulating the experience of migration under the shadow of imperial histories. In these short stories, the emphasis on the difficulties of love in puritanical times and transnational places produces the figure of the African lesbian as a symbol of appealingly human vulnerability, resilience, and complexity.

Polite Hauntings: Same-Sex Eroticism in Sophie Albrecht’sDas höfliche Gespenst

This article analyzes Sophie Albrecht’s Das höfliche Gespenst (1797) as a text that employs Gothic motifs to explore queer identity and female same-sex eroticism. The article first identifies the queer nature of the female protagonists and their relationship. It then examines how queer desire is thematized through communicative difficulties, including the excessively polite language referenced in the title. It concludes by exploring the role of the embedded narrative in vilifying queer desire from the perspective of heteronormative society. In doing so, this Gothic text allows moments of female same-sex desire but ultimately reinstates a patriarchal viewpoint that silences queer possibilities.

Eighteenth-Century Female Cross-Dressers and Their Beards

Eighteenth-century British narratives describing female cross-dressers often attempt to explain how the cross-dresser performs maleness despite her lack of certain physical markers of masculinity. One of the elements of masculinity that these texts often focus on is facial hair. This absence of a facial beard is overcome by the cross-dresser’s appeal to other women: the desires of other women become the cross-dresser’s “beards.” At the heart of these narratives, though, is an essential contradiction: although these texts posit that only a man can elicit desires from women, the cross-dresser appeals to other women precisely due to her gender ambiguity, not necessarily due to her performance of maleness. By portraying the female cross-dresser’s act of acquiring a metaphorical beard to disguise her lack of facial hair, such narratives destabilize categories of gender and sexuality and reveal the cultural fantasies of gender fluidity that fascinated the reading public of the eighteenth century. Further, the notion of “bearding” opens up new avenues for understanding and analyzing female same-sex desire in the early modern period, as the desires of the cross-dresser’s “beards” suggest that desire is not founded on traditional gender binaries but can, and often does, exceed them.

Religion, Same-Sex Desire, and the Imagined Geographies of Empire: the case of Constance Maynard (1849–1935)

Although a devout Evangelical, living in an era that largely predated the dissemination of sexological discourses of female same-sex desire, Constance Maynard (1849–1935), the prominent Victorian educational reformer, pursued a series of same-sex relationships. This essay focuses on Maynard's relationship with the Anglo-Irish Marion Wakefield (1876–1956), exploring the role of Maynard's erotic imagination in the constitution, contestation, and consolidation of the imagined geographies of imperialist discourse. Maynard's erotic positioning of her lover in diverse imperial landscapes reveals the ostensibly ‘private’ discourses of the erotic imagination to be profoundly implicated in the ‘public’ discourses of empire. At the same time, the domestic settings in which these landscapes were imagined and in which the women's illicit desires were enacted, pose a challenge to the gendered spatial dichotomies—private/public, domestic/imperial, and home/away—of both imperialist discourse and the historiography of empire.

‘Anders dan de anderen’

Abstract During the early twentieth century, Germany and the Netherlands witnessed an unprecedented surge in discourses on sexuality, galvanized by the pioneering research of central European sexologists. Against the backdrop of sexological developments and the hedonism of post-war society, Berlin saw the emergence of a thriving homosexual circuit during the interbellum. Across the border, however, the conservatism of Dutch society meant that a Sapphic subculture would not fully emerge in the Netherlands until the mid-1950s. Drawing on a framework that Laura Doan has recently termed ‘queer critical history’, and through an exploration of a selection of literary, scientific and ‘emancipatory’ writings, this article will examine how societal and cultural constructions of female same-sex desire in Dutch contexts were often at odds with scientific depictions of the ‘congenital invert’. Acknowledging the existence of this incongruence, as the article will argue, can provide historians with a space to explore alternative configurations of same-sex desire in Dutch interwar society that cannot be interpreted in the sense of a self-reflexive ‘lesbian’ identity.

Giovanni Sercambi

Abstract Although references to male same-sex practices are rare in medieval Italy, discussion of female same-sex desire is virtually nonexistent. One exception to that rule is a story in the collection of narratives by Giovanni Sercambi (1348–1424). A bawdy tale, it relates how an abbess initiated novices by having sex with them, but her plans are disrupted when a young man disguises himself and enters the convent. It cannot be taken as historical documentation of actual practices, as it undoubtedly represents a fantasy composed for humorous effect. Nonetheless, through all its distortions, Sercambi's story evokes the possibility of female same-sex practices at a time when discourse on such matters was negligible.

Out in Africa: same-sex desire in sub-Saharan literatures &amp; cultures

Homosexuality was and still is thought to be quintessentially 'un-African'. Yet in this book Chantal Zabus examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same-sex desire in a pan-African context from the nineteenth century to the present. Reaching back to early colonial contacts between Europe and Africa, and covering a broad geographical spectrum, along a north-south axis from Mali to South Africa and an east-west axis from Senegal to Kenya, here is a comparative approach encompassing two colonial languages (English and French) and some African languages. 'Out in Africa' charts developments in Sub-Saharan African texts and contexts through the work of 7 colonial writers and some 25 postcolonial writers. These texts grow in complexity from roughly the 1860s, through the 1990s with the advent of queer theory, up to 2010. The author identifies those texts that present, in a subterraneous way at first and then with increased confidence, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. The work sketches out an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female same-sex desire in the novel and other texts, as well as in the cultural and political contexts that oppose such desires. Chantal Zabus holds the IUF [Institut universitaire de France] Chair of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at the University Paris 13 and at the Universities Sorbonne-Paris-Cite, France I. She is author of 'Between Rites and Rights'; 'The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel', and 'Tempests after Shakespeare'.She is presently Editor-in-Chief of the on-line journal 'Postcolonial Text'.