Workshops: Stories

Workshop 2: Changing Stories:
Attending to Early Modern Lesbianisms

Conveners:

• Harriette Andreadis, Texas A & M University
• Susan S. Lanser, University of Maryland
• Valerie Traub, University of Michigan
• Elizabeth Wahl, Independent Scholar affiliated with Stanford University

During the past decade, a burgeoning scholarship on female homoeroticism has deepened and complicated the study of gender and sexuality in the early modern period. By investigating that scholarship, "Changing Stories: Attending to Early Modern Lesbianisms" hoped to advance the study of female homoeroticism within the larger frameworks of feminist teaching and scholarship. Considering both the new knowledge and its sites of contention, we asked what is gained and lost in formulating developmental narratives about female homoeroticism in the period from 1500 to 1800. We examined differences of country and class, influences across cultures, and shifts in terminology that may have inflected and inflicted historical change. At the same time, we called into question the very notion of "story" as a way of thinking about early modern scholarship on female homoeroticism. In so doing, we returned to crucial questions of methodology, asking how such issues as identity politics, evidence, and periodization have created the "stories" of our field.

Our inquiry attended to texts by both men and women from several European countries, in discursive fields ranging of from medicine, science, cartography, law, and religion to letters, memoirs, fiction, and poetry. We hoped both to provide useful materials for teaching and research on "lesbianisms" and to strengthen the interdependence of sex, gender, and sexuality in the study of early modernity.

The workshop began with five-minute position papers from each of the organizers, followed by discussion of questions sent to participants in advance. We then invited additional topics for consideration, followed by a collective sharing of resources for teaching and scholarship. Advance packets included discussion questions, selections from the work of each of the organizers, and a bibliography of current work in the field.