Stephen Turton and François· e Charmaille

Jeffrey Masten once wrote, ‘There can be no nuanced cultural history of […] sex and gender without spelling out its terms.’ In this feature series, over the next six weeks six authors will explore what language and literature can teach us about the history of gender and sexuality.

Much of our knowledge about how forms of desire and embodiment have been felt and enacted throughout history comes down to us through written records. However, the language in which these records are written is not an inert or transparent medium. Semantics is never just semantics, and the syntactical is always tactical. Words themselves have a history of use, abuse, rejection, and reinvention. Studying the language of queer history—for example, the terms that have been used about (or against) queer people by legal and medical authorities—gives us insight into past efforts to control the social value of gender and sexuality by defining their meaning. At the same time, paying attention to the queer history of languages shows us that struggles to change standard grammars and vocabularies to make them more inclusive of sexual and gender difference are not limited to the present day, or to any single language. There is much to learn from the strategies of self-expression used by authors and activists working in different times and across multiple languages.

In the 1970s, the Italian activist Mario Mieli turned to wordplay in their writings to challenge sexual and social conventions. From the sixties to the nineties, trans educators in the US recognized that changing the definitions of trans words in dictionaries could help shift public perceptions of trans people. Today, the filmmaker Lee Campbell has shown how Polari—a form of slang used by some gay men as a means of secrecy in 20th-century Britain—can be turned into a medium for poetic self-affirmation. The importance of literature, too, to the history of gender and sexuality is evident from what has been erased from the canon. In the case of the Italian writer Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), 19th-century scholars considered it impossible for him to have written the poem Ganimede Rapito because of its homoeroticism. Today, literary history coincides with the history of nonbinary people’s struggle for recognition. Esther Villardón’s translation of Connection by Kae Tempest (2021) pushes against the restrictions of grammatical gender in Spanish, while Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000) records the decolonizing potential of the queer diasporic Algérienne in French.

In this special NOTCHES series on ‘The Languages of Queer History’, we’ll publish one piece per week over a period of 6 weeks. Collectively, these pieces invite us to reflect on the power of words to define, confine, and refine our understandings of the past and present.

 

Stephen TurtonStephen Turton is a Departmental Lecturer in English Language at the University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow in English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He researches the history of Western sexuality and English lexicography, and he is the author of Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930.

François· e Charmaille is a Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. Their research concerns the history of gender and sexuality in medieval Europe, with a focus on grammar, climate, and medicine.



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