This article started out feeling a bit like Clark came up with an interesting metaphor and then went searching for contexts to apply it. That feeling faded as I read further. I think she has hit on a useful concept for a diverse type of experience that falls between the cracks of many of the existing theoretical approaches. It seems to boil down to “Within any given societal context, there will be activities that are not condoned but where people are willing to look the other way as long as no one’s forcing them to deal with it.” It is, to some extent, how my Alpennia series depicts people’s attitudes towards women’s same-sex relations. So clearly it’s a concept I’m happy to accept as a way of describing specific historic attitudes. I’m not sure whether my initial reaction to Clark’s article is because she treats it like some new insight, or because it feels like she’s lumping too many disparate topics under one umbrella.
There are a number of other useful conceptual tools that Clark discusses in the article that I may need to use as search keywords and explore further. Of particular interest is the concept of "sexual scripts," i.e., scenarios that a specific culture recognizes as a context for the experience of desire or for engaging in sexual activities. While the existing scripts in any particular culture will not cover all possible variations of sexual experience, we can identify the "approved scripts" by the ways they're adapted for use in those other contexts. For example, viewed in this context, the medicalized model of same-sex desire created and promoted by the late 19th century sexologists can be understood simply as one possible "script"--one that came to dominate professional circles for a time--into which many different individual experiences were crammed. Similarly, that script overlapped and coexisted with the "romantic friendship" script, as well as overlapping with the "lesbian decadence" script. None of those scripts provided a model for relationships between women that were based on a combination of romantic and sexual partnership, and individual women whose experience was the latter might look to different scripts to adapt for understanding their own lives.
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