Across many authors there’s a confusing assertion that lesbian possibilities have regularly gone from being considered impossible, to being recognized, then resulting in the demonization of demonstrations of affection. To some extent, this article deals with the reverse swing of the pendulum: how was that awareness suppressed again, such that there could be a later re-awakening of suspicion? Traub and Andreadis discuss how lesbian possibilities were identified and articulated in the 17th century, resulting in a genteel avoidance-discourse among authors like Katherine Phillips. Lanser and others examine a similar dynamic in the 18th century leading to the "sex panic" of the 1790s that rolled over into an erasure of female sexual possibilities in general in the 19th century...only to have a focus on lesbian possibilities revived in the late 19th century with the decadent movement and the sexologists, who once again raised the spectre that any close female relationships were suspect.
It almost makes me wonder to what extent this apparent pendulum swing is a real phenomenon in lived experience and to what extent it's an artifact of changing fasions in "official discourse." Were there actual ups and downs in the average person's awareness of the possibilities of female same-sex relations? Or were there only ups and downs in the degree of official scrutiny those possibilities were given? Other authors have pointed out that shifts in the attitudes of the patriarchal establishment toward relationships between women were often dictated by the extent to which those relationships defused or exacerbated women's challenges to their authority.
When Craft-Fairchild asserts "the lack of a coherent, codified model" of sapphic identity in the 18th century, could we not just as reasonably assert that 18th century English writers did not have a single stereotype for "real lesbians" while clearly having an awareness of desire between women? Rather than this lack of coherence indicating the absense of a sense of lesbian identity, might it rather indicate that 18th century lesbian identity was rooted in the experience of desire itself and had as wide a variety of expressions of that desire as were available for heterosexual desire? Does "lesbian erasure" come from the absence of a single, agreed-upon stereotypical image? Or does real erasure come from the idea that there must be a single, agreed-upon sterotypical image in order for "lesbian identity" to exist?
I think these are questions that might usefully be considered by comparison to 20th-21st century concepts and images of lesbian identity. Is there currently a "coherent, codified model" of lesbian identity of the sort that Craft-Fairchild is looking for in the 18th century? Or are there many different flavors of identity that connect to each other by a variety of similarity-links without the need or ability to define a sharp-edged category? (I'm always happy to insert cognitive approaches category theory into a discussion!)
One significant challenge that articles like this one raise is against the idea that "absence of evidence" for unambiguous lesbian-like identities can ever be considered evidence of absence. But another important challenge is to the idea that an overall picture of historic concepts of same-sex love and desire can come from studying individual historic periods. If any given defined historic period appears to recapitulate a cycle of covert identity, growing awareness, public identification, demonization, and suppression, then maybe we need to stop thinking in terms of "development". It's reminiscent of Traub's concept of "cycles of salience" (Traub 2011) as well as Lanser's point that in every age lesbianism was framed as being both "an ancient vice" and "a new fashion" (Lanser 2014).
When I started this Project, I truly thought of my own work as being the isolated summary and presentation of individual publications, but more and more I find myself developing my own over-arching image of the state of sapphic consciousness across time and space, and find myself challenging more narrow conclusions based on focused data. Not that I think there is a single unified field theory of lesbianism, but that I have an image of the connections and continuities as well as the disruptions and disjunctions that helps me make sense of how individual women in different times and places might have understood their own lives. It's a rich tapestry and has a lot of space for making up new stories that are woven seamlessly into the existing ground.
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