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      The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography

      This chapter builds on the critique offered in the previous chapter by offering some new strategies for negotiating the apprehension of similarity and difference in the history of sexuality. It does so by means of the particular case of lesbian historiography. The genesis for this chapter, as for the book as a whole, lies in my sense that the future of studies of sexuality demands more deliberate reflection about how we go about constructing historical narratives. To the extent that historiographic method has been a topic of debate, for a long time it took the form of the by now notorious distinction between acts versus identity, and its corollary, alterity versus continuism. Scholars whose historical accounts take a continuist form tended to emphasize a similarity between past and present concepts of sexual understanding; those who instead highlight historical difference or alterity (as it is termed by literary scholars) tended to emphasize problems of anachronism, changing terminologies and typologies, and resistance to teleology.¹ In my estimation, the relative weight accorded to alterity or continuism has had a more pronounced impact on the practice of lesbian history than any other issue (including debates about what counts as evidence of same-gender desire).

      The premise of the present chapter is that the methodological assumption of a sameness/difference polarity has outlived its utility. Indeed, as the previous chapter’s critique of unhistoricism suggested, what now requires methodological scrutiny is how queer historicism, and the history of sexuality more generally, can pursue both synchronic and diachronic explanations by using a range of different methods. The historiographic choice is no longer between a supersessionist continuous history and an examination of synchronic complexities and contradictions, for few scholars of sexuality are indifferent to the simultaneous existence of incoherent discourses of sexuality, whether in the past or in the present. Nor would many commit to writing a teleological history, in which one model of identity seamlessly supersedes the next. I have begun to intimate that attention should focus on how to think about multiple similarities and differences, whether conceived as continuous or discontinuous, not by juxtaposing periods but by constructing an analytic focused on the “across” of time.

      But first, let us recall how the opposition between alterity and continuism evolved within lesbian history, for it took a very decided form that has influenced, under cover, as it were, the terms of subsequent debate. As was true in the previous chapter, the point of this historical exercise is not to reenact old debates, but to take stock of where they have led us and where we might go. The first implicitly continuist approach was Lillian Faderman’s groundbreaking 1981 Surpassing the Love of Men, which, as its subtitle announced, traced romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present. Terry Castle’s 1993 The Apparitional Lesbian, although it opposed Faderman’s desexualized paradigm of romantic friends, nonetheless reiterated her continuist premises by provocatively collapsing eighteenth-century representations with twentieth-century cultural formations.² The continuist approach was extended backward in time through Bernadette Brooten’s magisterial Love Between Women, which, even as it treads cautiously through the historical specificities of ancient Rome, in its effort to demonstrate a lesbian identity in antiquity nonetheless implicitly employs concepts of 1970s lesbianism to read the early Christian West.³

      Castle and Brooten, in particular, were critical of the influence of Michel Foucault on the periodization of homosexual identity, including his notorious pronouncement in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, that “the sodomite was a temporary aberration; the homosexual is now a species,”⁴ which has served as a banner cry for the alterist position. The critique of methodologies that stress historical difference, however, has also taken a form less dismissive of Foucault and the historical methods he inspired. In a thoughtful challenge to the practices of women’s history, Judith Bennett has argued that a “patriarchal equilibrium” has “worked to maintain the status of European women in times of political, social, and economic change.”⁵ Writing as a social historian who views history as necessarily a story of both continuity and change, Bennett proposes a distinction between changes in women’s experiences and structural transformations of women’s social status, while also proposing the term “lesbian-like” to resolve the issues of alterity posed by the distant past.⁶ Diagnosing various reasons for gender historians’ penchant for focusing on change, Bennett suggests that European women’s history may be profitably viewed as “a history of change without transformation.”⁷ From a rather different angle, Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, editors of the collection Premodern Sexualities, critique the fascination with alterity that, they argue, had taken hold of queer historical studies. Suggesting that identification with the past is an important motivation for historicist work, they advocate a practice that observes “similarities or even continuities” while eschewing “an ahistoricist or universalizing effect.”⁸ Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval similarly advocates the affective need for apprehending similarities, this time through the metaphor of “touches across time.”⁹ And Martha Vicinus echoes these sentiments in Intimate Friends, maintaining that “attitudes toward and behaviors by lesbians show a rich combination of change and continuity.”¹⁰ Arguing that “we gain a better sense of intimate friendship by tracing repetitive patterns,” she notes that “even though the structures of intimacy remained in place, their meanings changed over time.”¹¹

      I rehearse these forays into lesbian, women’s, and queer history because I believe they indicate that, methodologically

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