Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

INTRODUCTION • xxix
Jahrbuch, Hirschfeld regularly listed all recently published works with
lesbian, gay or transgender themes. The American Jeannette Foster,
who drew on Hirschfeld’s work, might be thought of as the first great
scholar of a specifically lesbian literature. She published her most important
work, Sex Variant Women in Literature, in 1956. It is significant
that Foster was an independent researcher. The acknowledgments of the
famous “Kinsey Report,” Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953), credit Foster as the librarian on Kinsey’s project for four years.
Though she worked as a librarian at what would become The Kinsey Institute,
and elsewhere, no library or academic institution funded Foster’s
work. She worked for 40 years to collect and compile information
on virtually every Western European and North American source for the
depiction of female gender deviance or same-sex desire in literature.
Sex Variant Women in Literature does not use the term lesbian to describe
the category of literature it discusses. Indeed, it cannot be said to
delineate any single category of literature at all. Foster uses the term
“sex variance,” which she borrows from the sexologist George Henry.
Henry worked with a group of researchers in New York City for several
decades in the mid-20th century. He used the term sex variance to describe
any characteristics or behaviors that deviate from masculine and
feminine heterosexual norms. Thus, what we would now term transgender
movement is included along with bisexual and lesbian identities
and behaviors. Foster uses this framework of Henry’s to create a special
reading practice in her study of the history of women’s sexuality in literature.
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The term sex variance gives Foster a greater latitude than the term
lesbian would. It also solves obvious historical and literary difficulties.
Anything strictly defined as lesbian literature could only go as far back
as the early 18th century, at best, and would be confined to very specific
social and cultural areas. Literature that had been tremendously
significant to lesbians, but was written by men like Charles Baudelaire
and Pierre Louÿs, could not be included. The development of what
would become the lesbian identity in literature evolved through texts
like Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Emile Zola’s Nana, which, in
various ways, might not fit the definition of lesbian literature. Foster
focuses on representation, rather than on the identities of authors. This
enables her to trace the development of women’s desire in literature
and to include nearly all of the literature that may have been important