Desperately Seeking Sapphistry – an introduction to lesbian history
Tutor: Jane Traies
Wednesday evenings 7pm to 9pm on Zoom (sign up to our learning platform, Ryver for details and Zoom link)
Six weeks, 23rd Feb – 30th March 2022
Suitable for beginners.
Queer historians look for themselves – or people like themselves – in the past. We want to write ourselves back into history, to prove that people like us existed before us. But how far are we justified in retro-fitting modern sexual identities onto historical figures?
Whether we look at behaviour, social attitudes or simply the language used to describe those things, the past is a very different sexual place. So historical contexts require us always to interrogate not only the ways our predecessors were like us, but also the ways in which they were not.
In this six-week course, we will consider themes in lesbian history such as ‘female husbands’; cross-dressing women; romantic friendships and ‘Boston marriages’; and the changing attitudes to women-loving women in the twentieth century.