LHMP #500 Donoghue 2007 Doing Lesbian History, Then and Now

Emma Donoghue takes the occasion of having been an invited speaker at a history conference to reflect on her own life, motivations, and accomplishments in the field of sexuality history. As such, it doesn’t present any new information but is a fun roadmap of a career (that is still in process).

[Note: Some day I would love to have Donoghue on the podcast. I once queried her agent on the occasion of a book release but got no response. I probably know someone who could put me in contact but I haven’t had the nerve to make it a serious project yet. Maybe for the 10th anniversary of the podcast. That gives me two years to work up to it.]

Donoghue’s inspiration was the initial publication of material from Anne Lister’s diaries that contradicted the accepted wisdom that there was no context for early 19th century women constructing a self-aware identity as a woman who was “too fond of women.” There was, for all practical purposes, no field of lesbian history at that time and the history of homosexuality was dominated by men.

Donoghue notes that she didn’t pursue a topic in lesbian history for her PhD, not having any confidence that she could find administrative support for it. But at the same time, she conceived of the idea of assembling a sourcebook of material on lesbian topics in Britain between 1668 and 1801. [Note: regular readers will be unsurprised that the publication of Passions Between Women in the early 1990s was a major force in the inspiration for my own project.] With no apparatus for finding relevant material directly, she cast a wide net, pursuing what might seem to be tangential topics. Rather than finding a desert, she was surprised at the volume of material that came to light, especially in the fields of medicine and journalism. She records her sense of betrayal at finding the Oxford English Dictionary’s unreliability on the usage dates for “lesbian.” The wealth of different terms for women who loved women in the long 18th century challenged the claim that such women had no context for understanding themselves as belonging to a “type” of person.

The resulting book was written in two years (during a break from her PhD), having become a personal passion project related very much to Donoghue’s own queer identity. While groundbreaking, she acknowledges that the book is very much a product of its time, existing in reaction to what came before (just as Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men was of its time a decade earlier and reacting to a different set of predecessors). In reacting against what she perceived as an overly uniform lesbian feminist culture of the 1990s, Donoghue emphasized variety, eccentricity, a lesbian-bisexual continuum, and aspects of sexuality (like pornography) that were considered taboo among feminist circles of the time. She also rejected the idea of conflating male and female homosexual history, seeing a need to view lesbian history from a woman-centered point of view. One aspect of the book that is very much “of its time” is the treatment of female masculinity, which was not yet informed by the work done and questions raised since then by transgender studies.

Donoghue discusses the tension between presentism [i.e., viewing the past in terms of how it relates to the present] and an excessive over-emphasis on the avoidance of anachronism only when it touches on marginalized topics, whose study is so often driven by personal connections to the material.

She concludes the article by discussing how her study of history has intertwined with her work as a historical novelist (with a side comment on how many of her historical studies have ended up involving women named Anne).