The History of Lesbian History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4847616 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Martha Vicinus (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 566-596 |
| Publication date | 2012-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0046-3663 • E-ISSN: 2153-3873 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/fem.2012.0043 |
| OpenAlex | W4205848189 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
The HistoryofLesbian History Martha Vianus I recently reread HAVELOCK ellis's 1897 Sexual Inversion in prepara tion for writing this essay. I dwelt, understandably, on his chapter "Sexual Inversion in Women," which is organized to show evidence that "homosexuality is not less common in women than in men." This is a statement that he repeats frequently, even as he admits the immense difficulty of finding documentation. It is not his only difficulty. Trying to describe every form of lesbian sexuality, Ellis can never make up his mind exactly what it is. He obsessively circles such questions as "Is same-sex desire acquired or congenital?" and "What are the identifying marks of a lesbian?" Unable to find a simple defi nition, he divides lesbians into two categories, the "actively inverted" (masculine-appearing women), and those who are "not repelled or dis gusted by lover-like advances from persons of their own sex" (femi nine-appearing women), concluding that the latter category of women are "the pick of the women whom the average man would pass by."1 He attempts to include all possibilities and can settle on no one defin ing characteristic. Never afraid of inconsistency, he frames lesbian ism as an emotion, a sexual act, a general reversal, and either situa tional or innate. It is striking how much we are still indebted to these different and contradictory propositions. Yet my rereading of Ellis has made me more sympathetic to his achievements; I now feel that his very indecisiveness is precisely what characterizes lesbian history, FeministStudies38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 566 Martha Vicinus 567 down to the controversy of when, how, and if it is appropriate to use the word "lesbian." In this essay I will briefly survey the last thirty years of lesbian history and its theoretical paradigms, and then suggest further areas of research and possible new approaches in this unstable field of study. For evidence, I draw largely upon my own field, modern Brit ish history, as well as classic texts in US history. Inevitably this focus on Euro-American scholarship limits my generalizations, but such a lively a field, which increasingly includes other nations, languages, and disciplines, cannot be fully covered in a single essay.2 Some may find the title of this essay obsolete, or at least histor ically out of date. But I find that "lesbian" is not simply a placeholder for women who loved women; I think it can give us a useful shortcut for evoking a whole range of words that have been used to describe attachments between women, ranging from such seemingly neu tral words as sapphism, sexual inversion, and homosexuality to por nographic slang such as tribade, fricatrice, and "doing the flats." Like Ellis, I think the word "lesbian" still has an important place in our vocabulary for the study of sexual behaviors among women, though I agree with Nan Alamilla Boyd that it may be most useful to see "les bian" as a historical artifact created at a particular period and used only intermittently as a self-defining noun.3 While a good deal of ink has been spilled over the correct vocabulary for women-loving women in the past, the word lesbian has several political advantages: it asserts the fact of sex and it provides boundaries to a subject that at times seems in danger of disappearing into such overbroad catego ries as "queer" or "nonnormative." It also focuses attention on ques tions such as: When did it become possible to think about, or pub licly acknowledge, erotic desire between women? When and how did women themselves articulate this desire?4 In just one generation, the study of same-sex sexuality has under gone several major paradigm shifts, all marked by a radical turning away from the psychologically based models of the mid-twentieth century that assumed emotional frustration and perversity for all but "normal" heterosexuals. The Freudian model espoused in the 1950s and 1960s employed a hydraulic metaphor of sex, in which desire, like steam in a kettle, builds up until it must be released, and if "normal" 568 Martha Vicinus release is impossible, other perverse outlets must be found. This met
Coming out · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Psychoanalysis · Sexual history · Sociology · Cultural History and Identity Formation · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Medicine · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.71 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |