(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

I've been even more focused on the new website. I am getting writing done and going into work, but that's about it.

I stumbled across an entry in some of the old prison records -- stuff from back when Quebec and Ontario were fused as the Province of Canada in the 1840s and 1850s. That's when they first started making detailed prison reports.

I shelled out the small fee to the Canadian Archives to get sent a photopcopy of a prison record (you can do that for very old prison records of people long dead). I've stumbled on to what may be one of the most disturbing prison stories in Canadian history, but I want to be sure I haven't made a mistake before I post about it.

The Canadian Archives has promised to process that under 7 working days. until then, I have another instalment, this one about the fanatic Bishop Saint-Vallier. I've also made little additions and changes to all my instalments.

My next one will be about queer women in New France -- I've saved that one for the end because I've been stalling for time while I try to dig up anything useful. There isn't much.

Comments

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that there typically seems to be less historical information about queer women than about queer men. I suppose they might have been better at keeping quiet about it but I suspect it's probably because there's more historical information about men than women. But I won't start on the feminist rant here and now. ^_^

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Go ahead! Rant! Feminist rants are welcome and encouraged in this journal.

The problem is twofold:

1. The authorities were less interested in finding and punishing female homosexuals. It was rarely illegal, and where illegal, rarely enforced. Part of that is male cluelessness about female sexuality -- as recently as the early 1990s, I was getting asked by straight men I was educating if I knew how two could even have sex.
   
   Men didn't seem threatened, either -- Michel de Montaigne seems surprised that a woman would be satisfied by another woman. Some men didn't think lesbianism really existed. So they weren't seen as a threat, though the authorities still officially recommended burning.
   
   Tolerance is a good thing, but it tends to leave behind few historical records. My main way of getting information about homosexuality is poring over court records -- no laws against it mean no arrests, no convictions, no court records.
   
   
2. Historians, like the societies they study, seem much more interested in male homosexuality. I haven't found one study, one article, one single reference dealing with lesbianism and female bisexuality in new France. As far as I know, I'm breaking new ground (not that there's much to break -- my article will be mostly speculation and inference).

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely surprised. For the longest time female sexuality was considered at best something passive (and yet we were also horrid temptresses, the great paradox of female sexuality under Christianity) so I suppose the idea that two women could have sex would be baffling to people who seriously believed that. Besides, even today people seem to falsely equate sex and penetration so you can still get people who don't understand how lesbians can have sex.

To get into that rant (which you so kindly encouraged ;)), historians don't only seem more interested in male homosexuality but also in men period. Until very recently the history of women was written about us, not by us when we were considered a fit subject for history at all (since being a fit subject of history often seems to imply traditionally male spheres of activity). I'm not saying that we know nothing about women in history but it's so much harder to find and often it feels like those old Christian histories of pagans, a sort of condescending curosity about something strange, alien and misguided. Of course it's gotten much better but still... You might notice that when you study the history of women you're often labelled as a feminist or as doing women's studies but if you study men in history you're just a historian. (Not that I dislike women's studies but I'd like one day to be able to say that they're unnecessary).