on "Between Women"

Interesting snippet from a book review essay in the Chronicle of Higher education:

In Between Women, Ms. Marcus observes that the big theoretical movement of 20 years ago compelled scholars interested in gender and sexuality to dig up what mainstream culture "excludes, represses or pathologizes,"-- gay and lesbian desire, for instance, or the idea of women as sexual creatures independent of men. Even queer readings have obeyed a sort of inverse heterosexual template: Desires had to be either hetero or homo. There was no middle ground.
Victorians made no such distinctions, she argues. "Our contemporary opposition between hetero- and homosexuality did not exist for Victorians," writes Ms. Marcus. "Victorians were thus able to see relationships between women as central to lives also organized around men."

-- Jennifer Howard, "Beyond Wives and Lovers," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2007, p. A14-A17.

The book in question is:
Between women : friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England. Sharon Marcus. Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2007.

While I don't buy the argument entirely, I think our view of history in the late 20th and early 21st century has been warped by the mid-20th-century decades. I've always been uncomfortable with the idea that deep same-sex friendships and emotional relationships in history and literature should be examined carefully for signs of repressed desire, to 'uncover' buried homosexuality. This method has its values, of course, but it tends to replicate the late twentieth century [adolescent] emphasis on sex and the repressive categorizations of the same time period.

hm...

At some point I need to blog about "the dangers of setting up an autonomous process in one's own brain." There are dangers, and they are very real. One absolutely should neither hack nor system administrate one's brain (or psyche) without acknowledging that hacking an early Macintosh wired to a bomb with a dead-man switch is far safer, not to mention a cleaner way to go.