Life and work have been so chaotic this past week that I somehow managed to space out on Monday's usual go-live for the LHMP blog! So here it is on a Wednesday instead. (Making a lie of my reference in this week's podcast that it was published on Monday, of course. Such is the life of a poster of pre-scheduled material.)
I chose this article to highlight for the 200th entry in the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast because Welsh history and language have always been a deep love of mine, and because I’ve longed for someone to address queer female themes in Welsh literature so that I could include them. The material is, alas, scanty. And the inescapable male focus of both the surviving queer Welsh material and the modern context in which Mihangel Morgan is discussing it in this article is frustrating. It matters if those developing a vocabulary for queerness within their language and culture focus on terms that not only historically, but semantically, prioritize the male experience and ignore or erase the female experience. It matters if one argues for the adoption of a queer-equivalent term like cadiffan that has always specifically meant “an effeminate or homosexual man, or a man cross-dressing as a woman” in preference to a term like hoyw (lively, spritely, gay, elegant, splendid), which has always historically been gender-neutral in its application, even skewing a bit toward use for women. (The title and reference in my Mabinogi-inspired short story Hoywverch draws on this play of meaning: one character improvises a verse addressing the other as hoywverch following poetic convention, but my use of the word is to celebrate and reflect the modern adoption of hoyw to mean “gay” in the inclusive sense.)
But I don’t want to focus only on criticism of approach. Morgan is examining the topic of queer historical heritage in very much the same way that the Project does: finding and discussing material with queer possibilities, even when those possibilities exist far more in the modern imagination than in the historic material. The point is, the material exists and the possibilities exist, and it’s important to struggle against the conservative academic reflex to explain it all away with non-queer interpretations.
One of the contexts for my interest in Welsh history has been via historic re-creation within the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). Expressing queer identity--and especially trying to re-create queer lives--within this type of group has not always been comfortable or welcome. My experience of the SCA was that it imposed a requirement of “compulsory symbolic heterosexuality” that was even more intense than that of the modern world I was trying to escape. So I was always delighted to be able to bring in scraps of historic queerness, such as reciting excerpts from Huw Arwystli’s poem, “The slender shapely maid prefers her business with her girlfriend than her boyfriend, she prefers desire for a girl than a boy,” with the full force of historic authenticity behind them. I wish I’d known then about the poem about the salmon love-messenger from Margaret Harry to Jane Owain. I would have memorized it and recited it at every campfire!
If anyone is interested in following up on some of the sex-focused poetry mentioned in this article, I highly recommend the following: Johnston, Dafydd. 1991. Canu Maswedd yr Oesoedd Canol - Medieval Welsh Erotic Poetry. Tafol, Cardiff. ISBN 0-9517181-0-X. It seems to have had a revised 2nd edition in 1998 but is not currently in print.
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