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- Title
SAME/DIFFERENCE? TOWARD A SAPPHIC/NONBINARY SEXUALITY OF HISTORY.
- Authors
LANSER, SUSAN S.
- Abstract
What is the next step when one has published a strong intervention in a field but later recognizes that one's angle of vision deserves new scrutiny? In this article, which began as a roundtable talk, I return to The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (2014) to interrogate its "same‐sex" logic through a nonbinary/trans lens. My book argues that seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century representations of the sapphic became a flash point for European cultures grappling with questions of power and governance, desire and duty, mobility and difference in an age of colonialism, racial capitalism, revolution, and reaction. In figuring the sapphic exclusively through notions of sameness, however, The Sexuality of History does not do justice to trans and nonbinary figures both historical and fictional. Is there a place among sapphic subjects for these figures, and, if so, with what implications? I argue here for a both/and approach that requires recoding certain figures as nonbinary while still insisting on their efficacy as signs of the sapphic. This recoding encourages a more nuanced exploration of the cultural work performed by sapphic representations and a more expansive conception of what I have called a sapphic episteme. Such revisionist thinking may be useful at a time of social and theoretical tensions at the intersections of "lesbian" and "trans."
- Subjects
HUMAN sexuality &; history; SEXUALITY of History: Modernity &; the Sapphic 1565-1830, The (Book); LGBTQ+ people; NONBINARY people; DIFFERENCE (Philosophy); SEVENTEENTH century; EIGHTEENTH century
- Publication
History & Theory, 2023, Vol 62, Issue 3, p356
- ISSN
0018-2656
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/hith.12319