Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

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Caras/Making Face, Making Soul (Anzaldúa). These anthologies not only collected a wealth of poetic and fictional works, but also theoretically challenged the construction of women’s sexual identities from a number of positions in terms of class, race, ethnicity and ideas of nationhood. Also significant were the works of theorists and pornographers like Pat (now Patrick) Califia, who overturned ideas of what feminist sexual power might be. Similar questions were reflected in the popular works of lesbian fiction writers like Ellen Galford, Jeanette Winterson and Jackie Kay, all of whom challenge the idea of fixed and stable lesbian identities through their novels. This trend carried with it fictional and self-reflexive (sometimes, as in Winterson’s case, overly self-conscious) narrative style that is often labelled postmodern, though it does not differ significantly from modernist experiments made by writers like Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. These interrogations of the nature and stability of the lesbian identity reflect the development of the academic discipline of lesbian studies during the same era. THEORY FOR READING LESBIAN LITERATURE INTRODUCTION • xli From the earliest sexological studies of lesbian desires and behaviors, literature has formed an important source of information, and arena for reflection, on the nature of lesbianism. The 19th-century sexologists Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld depended on literary examples for their elucidations of the nature of female same-sex desire. At the same time they understood the importance of literature as an organ for human inquiry and understanding. Thus Magnus Hirschfeld regularly published literary reviews of publications dealing with same-sex desire and transgender movement and Ellis was persuaded to write the preface for Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Almost three decades later, the American sexologist George Henry wrote the preface for Jeannette Foster’s groundbreaking study Sex Variant Women in Literature. Here Henry asserts that “sexual variance shows itself in so many different ways that all types of imaginative writings have to be studied if we are to understand human motivations and behavior” (Foster, 6). Thus, a medical justification was argued for a literature that might otherwise have been considered obscene. This trend, conflating erotic and medical literature, is continuous from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Midwifery texts
xlii • INTRODUCTION were read as pornography in the 18th century and Sigmund Freud worries, in his famous “Dora” case, that some doctors will read his writing for their own “delectation.” Likewise literature that served primarily erotic functions often masked itself as medical or scientific, as in the case of many pulp paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, literature that describes and expresses female same-sex desire found in medical science a set of discourses which enable this expression. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood would not be what it is without psychoanalysis, any more than The Well of Loneliness would be what it is without sexology. The American postwar lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis stated as two of its goals both the dissemination of lesbian literature and the understanding of and cooperation with social and medical science. So, the earliest theories of the lesbian subject that inform literature and literary readings come out of medical science. It is evident from a look at literary studies and lesbian anthologies like Jeannette Foster’s and Terry Castle’s that a conflation between female same-sex desire and female to male transgender movement has persisted for centuries. Early examples used by both Foster and Castle focus on transgender movement first and same-sex desire only as a consequence of this. This same conflation is reflected in sexological science, which produced the first modern theories of the lesbian subject. Beginning in Germany in the 1860s and continuing well into the 20th century in Western Europe and the United States, and until the present day in China, sexological studies find and document “masculine” characteristics in women who desire other women. In some cases, as in the work of Havelock Ellis, characterizations of lesbian and bisexual women as transgender rest on the idea that ideal masculine and feminine norms do exist and that these women deviate from them. Often these theories are supported by physical examinations and documentations, which, like similar psychological investigations, assume ideal male and female bodies. Thus infinite variations in human morphology and behavior are compared to a mythical norm. Though it cannot possibly exist, this mythical norm remains the standard by which the bodies and behaviors of men and women are measured to produce ideas of deviance. Other sexologists have questioned ideas of masculine and feminine as polar opposites. To quote again from George Henry’s preface to Jeannette Foster:
Page 1 and 2: Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Li
Page 3 and 4: Editor’s Foreword Most of the cat
Page 5 and 6: xii • PREFACE literature and prov
Page 7 and 8: Acronyms and Abbreviations BBC Brit
Page 9 and 10: xviii • CHRONOLOGY 1611 Thomas Mi
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Page 13 and 14: xxii • CHRONOLOGY 1942 Ismat Chug
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Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

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