This is a dense and wide-ranging study of lesbian-relevant themes in Indian history, literature, religion, and politics, covering the entire range of history from the earliest written records up through the present day. I'll confess that I'm not familiar enough with the literary and religious traditions to be able to take in a lot of the nuances, but Thadani does a great job of providing both an overview and deep dives within an amazingly compact volume. This is the sort of book that can really only be written from within a culture, as she tackles the ways in which modern Indian nationalism adapted and built on the colonial legacy of misogyny and homophobia for its own purposes. Although the chapters on the experiences of lesbians in modern India come across as fairly depressing, keep in mind that this book was written over 20 years ago. It is foundational, but far from the last or most recent word on the topic.
This post brings 2018 to a close, and it makes a good time to reflect on the state of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. I'll be including this year's content in my "What Hath She Wrote in 2018" blog that goes up tomorrow, but this is more of a "where have I been and where am I going?" thing.
I started the LHMP in the middle of 2014, and a simple count of the publications covered dodges the fact that sometimes a book has been covered in multiple posts (I think Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men took the longest with over two dozen separate posts) while other times I've covered a book of similar length in a single blog. But here are the raw statistics:
- 2014 (for the half-year) - 75 publications
- 2015 - 36 publications
- 2016 - 26 publications & 5 podcasts (toward the end of the year and the beginning of 2017, I wasn't adding new publications due to work on the website)
- 2017 - 34 publications & 29 podcasts
- 2018 - 57 publications & 52 podcasts
I've been trying to reconstruct how my "to do" list of publications has grown over that time, but I'm not sure the information can be retrieved. I think that back in 2014 when I first populated my database from the books already in my library it had about 50 books in it. In early 2016, I drew up a "to do" list from the database of material I knew about but hadn't yet covered, which had 177 items listed (some of which were collections that were covered as multiple publications). So if you combine that with the 111 items I'd covered in the blog by then, we get a total of 288. Or, roughly, I'd added 2 titles for every one I blogged. The database currently has a total of 605 titles, so in the last two years I've added a little over 300 and covered 91, for an addition rate of 3 titles for every one I blog. I think you can see where this is going.
Did I know what the potential scope of this project would be when I started? Back in the 1990s when it was only a twinkle in my eye, not only did I not envision how many publications would be available, but most of them literally didn't exist back then. I've recently added a field for "year published" to the database so I could look at the distribution -- although keep in mind that my database contents are far from random or even necessarily representative, given that I tend to add new titles mostly from the bibliographies of existing ones. It isn't necessarily that fewer relevant thing were published in the last decade, but that I may not know about them because they were published after the material I've been blogging recently. It does seem to be true, however that the '90s were a glorious time for works on the history of gender and sexuality!
- Published prior to 1980: 40
- Published 1980-1989: 88
- Published 1990-1999: 252
- Published 2000-2009: 144
- Published 2010-present: 81
One of the things I hope to add to the Project in the near future is the beginnings of a synthesis of what I've learned about trends, motifs, and patterns in the expression of lesbian-relevant history. (I've started using "lesbian-relevant" rather than "lesbian-like" in talking about the project because in many ways it better fits the subjective focus on "useable" history for the purposes of creating historical fiction.) One of the more daunting projects is to tackle the complex intertwining of gender and sexuality around the motif of transmasculine expression, especially with an eye to helping authors create historic lesbian characters that employ gender disguise or butch/femme dynamics in ways that don't erase or disparage transgender framings of the same themes. Another daunting project is to create something of a timeline (at least for a European context) of expressions and receptions of female same-sex relations that gives an idea of what types of stories fit well into different historic contexts.
I'm also interested in hearing from readers about what would make the Project more useful to you. Both the tag system and the search function are intended to make it easier to find relevant content, but I'll confess that I'd love to be able to include a multi-factor search (e.g., "16th century AND Germany") which isn't currently possible.
On a separate path, I'm getting closer to massaging my database of lesbian-relevant historical fiction into usability, and by the end of 2019 I hope to be able to present it for others to use in identifying works falling in a particular historic context or with particular themes. (I currently have 430 titles in it and I'm sure that there are large gaps due to the random nature of my current sourcing system, i.e., mostly Goodreads lists and combing through the catalogs of the major lesfic publishers.)
As I'll be explaining in next week's podcast, I'm loosening up the structure of the podcast slightly to include more variety in the mid-month shows, so ideas for podcast content are also welcome and appreciated (including people interested in appearing on the podcast to talk about books or themes).
And that's what I'm thinking about on this New Year's Eve.
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