You win some, you lose some. When I'm book shopping, I often don't have the time to determine whether the intriguing reference in the table of contents will pay off in the actual content. I'll probably be putting this book on my give-away shelf, but it did provide me with one useful lead (as noted below).
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 115 (previously 36c) - Book Appreciation with K.J. Charles
(Originally aired 2019/07/20 - listen here)
Transcript pending.
Show Notes
In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 114 (previously 36b) - Interview with K.J. Charles
(Originally aired 2019/07/13 - listen here)
Transcript pending.
Show Notes
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 113 (previously 36a) - On the Shelf for July 2019 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2019/07/06 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for July 2019.
I'm trying two new things for next year's fiction series: a longer lead-time to publicize the Call For Submissions, and an expansion of the thematic scope. In keeping with the LHMPodcast's coverage of historic fantasy as well as strictly historical fiction, the 2020 fiction series will also be open to stories with certain types of fantastic elements. (See the CFS for details.) In keeping with my basic principles, I'm also increasing the pay rate to $0.08 per word, in keeping with the standard set by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).**
Several of the articles I currently have lined up collide to produce an emergent theme of how apparently transgressive motifs can be seen as resolving in ways that reinforce the heteronormative status quo. This current article points out that cross-dressing narratives in medieval European literature may flirt with the creation of homoerotic possibilities, but always resolve to heterosexuality. Further, the homoerotic possibilities in these narratives are always f/f.
Sometimes I have a run of LHMP entries on a particular topic simply by chance, sometimes I'm organizing a large number of items and grouping them by topic is simply a fun way to approach them. At the moment, I've tackled a series of articles and books revolving around cross-dressing themes for two intersecting reasons. Firstly, I'm working on developing my paper on cross-dressing narratives into an article for publication, so it makes sense to become familiar with as much background information as I can.
This book is a bit more on the "literary criticism" and theoretical side than I'm generally looking for. It's a fascinating read, but somewhat less useful for research purposes. Although the text itself was of marginal usefulness for the Project, the bibliography offered a lot of interesting leads for new publications to review.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 111 (previously 35d) - Emily Dickinson Goes to the Movies
(Originally aired 2019/06/22 - listen here)
(partial transcript, full transcript is pending)
I'm very aware of how the content of the LHMP tends to revolve around white, Christian, western European defaults. I try to counter that tendency by seeking out publications outside that academic gravity well. I think of it as a "gravity well" because of the way authors and publications link to and lead to each other in connected ways, building a body of shared interests that reinforce each other. When I find new publications by searching the bibliographies of work I've already covered, I'm absorbing all the biases--both explicit and implicit--of the authors I've already covered.
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