thanks, again. It's a way for me to look at our life and ancestry in ways that don't fall it the trap of abetting the "old, stifling, and urgently irrelevant model of the male-female, breadwinner-homemaker household"
Couples like your uncles were always less tragic and more heroic in my measure; it's good to see them read that way (and to hear more about these beloveds of yours, period).
I so appreciated Faderman's book when it came out, but reading your piece I'm thinking now about the binaries we (all of us, queer or not) impose. (Thank the ancient Greeks for that.) In the SF of the early nineties in lesbian (couldn't be bi or pan and out there very well) culture, the firm rejection of birkenstocked, unsexualized, mirror-image partners in favor of a strong butch/femme aesthetic, with the femme publicly in charge, was a reclaiming not of domesticity but of sexuality and feminine power. And: a binary choice.
Also wondering whether diaries and letters reveal a bit of that lost queerness-at-home. Rebecca Cox Jackson's "autobiography", the letters of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West, the ponderous journals of Anne Lister...come to mind.
thanks, again. It's a way for me to look at our life and ancestry in ways that don't fall it the trap of abetting the "old, stifling, and urgently irrelevant model of the male-female, breadwinner-homemaker household"
Couples like your uncles were always less tragic and more heroic in my measure; it's good to see them read that way (and to hear more about these beloveds of yours, period).
I so appreciated Faderman's book when it came out, but reading your piece I'm thinking now about the binaries we (all of us, queer or not) impose. (Thank the ancient Greeks for that.) In the SF of the early nineties in lesbian (couldn't be bi or pan and out there very well) culture, the firm rejection of birkenstocked, unsexualized, mirror-image partners in favor of a strong butch/femme aesthetic, with the femme publicly in charge, was a reclaiming not of domesticity but of sexuality and feminine power. And: a binary choice.
Also wondering whether diaries and letters reveal a bit of that lost queerness-at-home. Rebecca Cox Jackson's "autobiography", the letters of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West, the ponderous journals of Anne Lister...come to mind.
Thank you for the food for thought.