One of the main characters, in the Gothic Novel I’m writing, is a shapeshifter who’s unapologetically pansexual and occasionally gender-fluid, so this was a question I was bound to ask myself. 1701: could you be killed for being gay? Specifically, we assume the character left England in the wake of the 1542 “Witchcraft Act”, being […]
There’s the widespread narrative that transsexuality is something new and we’re all wound up around something we invented yesterday. And to that narrative we say: fuck you. Representation has never been so important and this is why I’m publishing this string of notes on LGBT+ characters throughout history. Because we have always existed. And we’re […]
Following Aphra Behn’s death in 1689, Delarivier Manley collected her inheritance and brought forward the discourse around the sexual identity of women and the legitimation of female same-sex attraction. She’s one of the “fair triumvirate of wit” with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, a term coined by Irish critic James Sterling. Pathetic Behn, or Manley’s greater Name; […]
As we have seen with Aphra Behn, the Restauration period started challenging some of the concepts around women’s desire in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, with delicate examples of transgender and what we now know to call non-binary relationships taken into account. Anne Finch’s late production let us enjoy a production celebrating what Harriette Andreadis […]
Undervalued as an author till the 1970s, Aphra Behn is not only a feminist icon but her works around women’s sexuality are an exquisite example of sapphic poetry. 240 years after her death, Virginia Woolf will remember Aphra in her independence manifesto A Room of One’s Own: All women together ought to let flowers fall upon […]
In 1964, Egyptologist Ahmed Moussa made an astonishing discovery: a tomb, in the necropolis at Saqqara, nearby the paved, raised road leading to the pyramid of King Unas. The tomb was a mastaba, a flat-roofed structure rising with sloped external walls from a rectangular footprint that had been typical during the Early Dynastic Period and […]
Well, I said I was going to share some notes for Pride Month, didn’t I? Here they are. I’d like to start with an amazing author and intellectual: Christine de Pizan, an Italian poet who worked in France at the beginning of the XV Century, is considered one of the first female professional writers and […]