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Literary Same-Sex Love

This group covers literary examples of romantic love between women that is presented as the equivalent of a heterosexual bond, or that clearly has an erotic component. The dividing line between this group and "Romantic Friendship" is fuzzy, but characters are more likely to be classified as Same-Sex Love if they share living arrangements, present themselves as a bonded couple, actively avoid marriage or relationships with men, or had a clear or strongly implied physical relationship.

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LHMP entry

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: Book Review - Rughum and Najda by Samar Habib

I desperately desperately wanted to love this novel. Unfortunately, it fought me every step of the way.

Habib is a scholar of the history of sexuality, and particularly female same-sex desire, as reflected in medieval Arabic texts. This novel grew out of that research and weaves a complex portrait of the lives of several women recorded in 9th century Baghdad, at a time when it was possible--if not at all easy--for women who loved each other to make a place for themselves, sometimes in private but sometimes as public figures.

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #102c Habib 2009 "On the Mention of Grinding and Grindings" in al-Yemeni, Ahmad Bin Mohamad Bin Åli (d. 850)

An Appendix of Texts from the Arabian Middle Ages Concerned with Female Homosexuality

”On the Mention of Grinding and Grindings” in al-Yemeni, Ahmad Bin Mohamad Bin Åli (d. 850).

Explains the nature of “grinding” and the vocabulary.

Notes the hadith the equates grinding with fornication.

Gives the story of Hind credited as the first “grinder”.

Gives the story of Rughum and Najda (tragic lovers).

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #101c Habib 2007 - Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (Part II Ch 3)

Part II: The history and representation of female homosexuality in the Middle Ages

Chapter 3: An overview of Medieval literature concerning female homosexuality

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #101b Habib 2007 - Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (Part I Ch 2)

Chapter 2 - Constructing and deconstructing sexuality: New paradigms for “gay” historiography

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #29 – Eisenbichler 2001 “Laudomia Forteguerri Loves Margaret of Austria”

In the 16th century Laudomia Forteguerri wrote sonnets to Duchess Margaret of Austria, five of which survive. And at least one contemporary of theirs placed the relationship between the two in the context at Plato’s myth of lovers seeking their "other half”, placing them in a list of "those who...love each other’s beauty, some in purity and holiness, as the elegant Laudomia Forteguerra loves the most illustrious Margaret of Austria, some lasciviously, as ...

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #48d - Donoghue 2010 Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature - Chapter 4

Literary women who love women often lament being "the only one" or consider themselves outside of nature, but in the 18th century this begins being transformed into a sense of monstrousness. Versions of Ovid's myth of Sappho's late-life conversion to heterosexuality begin to presage this shift in the early modern era. Though a straightforward reading of Ovid's tragic ending would be that heterosexuality was the death of her, it began to be framed as a retroactive punishment for her previous love for women.

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #48e - Donoghue 2010 Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature - Chapter 5

Lesbian sex, per se, has rarely been against the law, but in literature the forbidden nature of lesbian relationships encourages entanglement with murder (in both roles), blackmail, and other staples of crime fiction. This chapter, though, focuses more on the act of detection and the ways in which the identification of lesbians and lesbian behavior parallels the solving of mysteries or crimes. As the specific literary examples in this chapter fall after my project cut-off of 1900, I'll just summarize motifs.

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #48f - Donoghue 2010 Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature - Chapter 6

The expression of a self-realized romantic and erotic preference for women significantly predates modern language about “being out". Anne Lister in her ca. 1800 diaries expressed a clear and absolute preference for loving and being loved by women. As a literary motif, this recognition of same-sex preference and the effects it has on a character begins appearing in the later 19th century. But the context of this realization can take the story in many directions.

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #48c - Donoghue 2010 Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature - Chapter 3

While the Inseparable motif sometimes employs a male character to bridge the practical logistics of forming a female couple, it is more natural for a triangle of this sort to frame the man and woman as rivals for their shared object of desire. Sappho’s fragment 31 encapsulates the envy of a woman for the man who has the attention of the woman she loves. And in contrast to the common motif of-two men competing for a woman's love, when one of the rivals is a woman there is always an awareness that the playing field is badly uneven.

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #48b - Donoghue 2010 Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Inseparables

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