I’m now going to walk back my claim that Downing 1989 had no relevant content, because Downing 1994 is a slight re-working of several chapters in that book, mostly restricting itself to laying out the mythological and historic material that she analyzed in the earlier publication. In this article, she omits the psychoanalysis and focuses on the texts, interpreting them in the context of a broadly-defined “woman-centered-woman” definition of “lesbian.”
Reputed Lesbian
Historic cases of women who had documented sexual relationships with women, or whose contemporaries are recorded as believing they did. This group collects cases that don't fall in a more specific category.
LHMP entry
The poem by Sappho identified as “fragment 1,” which isn’t a fragment but the only surviving complete poem, is also the one where Sappho as a woman-desiring-woman is most overt. This is not only because she names herself within the poem, but also because it is specifically about asking divine help to attract the love of another woman.
This article is not particularly relevant, as it presents an overview of the structure of sexual relations from an elite male point of view. There is discussion of the social construction of sexual systems, with some odd anecdotal parallels from more modern cultures. There is a brief discussion of how to understand Sappho’s biography and work within this context (including a perhaps unwarranted assumption that social structures in Lesbos were identical to those in Athens).
Bremmer presents some anecdotal, cross-cultural evidence for classical Greek pederasty having structural similarities to some generational-initiation ceremonies or systems in “primitive” cultures, positing that it is, perhaps, a relic of a more widespread Indo-European practice. The body of the article is focused exclusively on male relations, however a very brief appendix reviews three brief references to a possible female parallel in Sparta that could expand understanding of the context of Sappho’s love poetry. The references are:
This book as a whole looks at connections between medical theories and political culture, in 18-19th century Britain and France. Only one chapter has any relevance to the Project and this summary will be confined to that material.
Chapter 1: The Case of Marie Antoinette: Revolutionary Politics and the Biologically Suspect Woman
Like a number of other publications, this focuses on the political propaganda that depicted Marie Antoinette as an extreme sexual deviant along several axes, with a special interest in tying those themes to deviant anatomy.
In this article, Lanser examines the intersection of changing conceptions of sexual difference (i.e., the difference between male and female) and changing attitudes toward sexuality in the 18th century, specifically with regard to how female homosexuality plays a part in these processes.
This article examines the interactions of class and sapphic desire in the “long 18th century,” arguing for a complex interaction between the two. That is, that class could insulate women from scrutiny of their intimate friendships with women, but that suspicion concerning women’s intimate friendships could degrade their class standing.
A great deal of this article isn’t directly of interest, so much will be glossed over. The “proverbs” in question are various Greek adages in reference to people from Lesbos that mostly are not in reference to female same-sex relations. [Note: I’ve seen some arguments that some of the interpretations are more ambiguous that indicated here, but I’ll stick to summarizing what’s in this article.]
Narratives of the lives and “adventures” of passing women were popular in 18th century British culture, purporting to provide biographies of women who lived as a man for some period of time, including: Hannah Snell, Christian Davies, Jenny Cameron, Anne Bonny & Mary Read, Charlotte Charke, Elizabeth Ogden, an unnamed “apothecary’s wife” whose story is appended to the English translation of the life of Catharine Vizzani, and Mary Hamilton whose story inspired the label “female husband” for those passing women who engaged in relationships with other women.
The central topic of this article is “femme invisibility” when researching queer women’s lives in archival material. The difficulty in identifying and researching historic persons who “read straight” due to conforming to gender expectations is paralleled by the author’s experiences as a femme (i.e., straight-passing) queer woman who repeatedly found herself calculating the risks of coming out to archival personnel who could potentially gate-keep access to material based on attitudes toward the type of research being done.
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