This article explores Lister’s sources of anatomical knowledge and how they affected her embodied understanding of erotic response. The question begins with an odd fact: although Lister first recorded the word “clytoris” in 1814, at age 22, it wasn’t until 17 years later that she describes clearly identifying her own clitoris. What can make sense of this for a woman who was deeply and clinically interested in her own sexuality?
medical treatises
This tag identifies medical studies or manuals that touch on lesbianism or physical characteristics thought to be related.
LHMP entry
This is a collection of excerpts from historic sources related to homosexuality in America. As with other publications of this sort, I’m mostly going to be cataloging the items of interest. Although it’s a very thick little paperback, the lesbian content is sparse. In fact, Katz notes, “In the present volume, Lesbian-related material is dispersed unequally within the parts, and not always readily identifiable by title—thus difficult to locate at a glance.
[Note: calling these texts “scientific” is stretching things a bit, but I’ll allow that the people writing them considered them to be scientific, in a sense.] This section of the chapter covers a handful of texts that fall generally in the category of non-fiction, as understood by their authors. A secondary theme to this section is “motifs that classical Roman texts do not support,” specifically with respect to physiology and gender role topics.
Macro-clitoral Motifs
Traub claims the title of this article is a “bait and switch” as she follows Halperin in treating “homosexuality” as such as only existing in the last 100 years, with “the lesbian” as an even more recent discursive invention.
This article covers much of the same territory as Bauer’s article from the same volume (Bauer 2009) except from a specifically Italian perspective. The concept of “sexual inversion” entered Italian medical literature in 1878, but female same-sex desire was a familiar concept already and was associated with excessive sexual longing, female masculinity, and certain women-only environments. The article looks at how those concepts were interpreted during the devopment of sexology as a study at the end of the 19th century.
Bauer examines the discourse around female homosexuality at the turn of the 20th century in the context of the discipline of “sexology”, i.e., the supposedly scientific study of sexual desire and expression. Bauer points out that the dominant Foucaultian approach to historical understandings of sexuality has in many ways marginalized issues of gender, centering the male experience as the default. How does this gendering of sexual theory affect the ways in which sexuality is understood and studied?
Amer begins by tackling the Whorfian-tinged assertion that the lack of a specific terminology for lesbianism in medieval Europe contributed to a lack of modern scholarship about same-sex desire between women in that era, by noting that the existence of a diverse and specific vocabulary for the topic in medieval Arabic (sahq, sihaqa, musahaqat, al-nisa’, sahiqa) hasn’t resulted in a vibrant field of study. This is particularly disappointing given the significant surviving literature on the topic.
Preface
This is an invaluable book that collects all manner of classical Greek and Roman texts relevant to homosexuality in a single volume. I doubt that it’s exhaustive, especially with regard to male homosexuality, but Hubbard seems to have made special efforts to include female-oriented material. The material is organized chronologically and by literary genre, with an introductory discussion in each section to provide historic context.
This is an overview of treatments of human sexuality as indicated in the title. Only a very small amount of material pertains to same-sex sexuality, so this summary will be brief. The subject matter is medical, astrological, and philosophical treatises of the 12-15th centuries, either written in or translated into Latin.
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