One of the creative aspects of organizing a large "dump" of journal articles into a sequence of presentation is identifying clusters of common themes. This article would fit in several places within the group of articles I'm currently processing. I'll be running an extended set of studies of the intersection of friendship and romance in March and April. (Yes, I currently have blogs drafted up through April. The theory is that I'll try to keep that far ahead so I have space to tackle some of the longer books in my stack.) But those mostly address the 18-19th century and I had another, smaller group that focus on ideas about an Early Modern "turning point" in how same-sex relations were viewed. As I note in the analysis below, either different authors are seeing entirely different turning points in different centuries, or we need to step back and look for a larger picture of multiple recurring "turning points" that operate more like a revolving door of attitudes toward sexuality. At some point, I need to start deveoping a timeline of all the various theories (and their evidence) for these shifts in attitude, because I've been getting the image of a constant sense of present change that somehow re-sets even as it turns.
Comments