What Little We Know

As I have found on previous occasions, there are a good number of survey articles on women's sexuality or even specifically on women's homoeroticism published in the 1980s and 1990s that--at this point--are mostly useful to include in the LHMP for the purpose of saying "don't bother with this, it's thoroughly outdated." So why do I include them? Several reasons. One is as a service to you, dear reader. One is so I can keep track of the fact that I have looked at them so I don't keep adding them to "to do" lists. And one is to show how much and how rapidly the state of the field has changed in the last several decades. I know that when I talk to authors of my generation, they often aren't aware of that shift. (Talking about fiction authors here, not academic authors.) There have been any number of times when I've talked to people about how they research historic sexuality for their novels and gotten the response, "There's nothing to research. There's nothing there. It's all been suppressed and erased. We have to invent women's sexuality from scratch." That simply isn't the case, but for people whose understanding of the field was formed back when articles like this one were published, try to understand where that attitude comes from.

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