{"id":280555,"date":"2018-10-17T14:43:46","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T14:43:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/17\/what-annoys-the-fuck-out-of-me-about-the-all\/"},"modified":"2018-10-17T14:43:46","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T14:43:46","slug":"what-annoys-the-fuck-out-of-me-about-the-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/17\/what-annoys-the-fuck-out-of-me-about-the-all\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

somecunttookmyurl<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

generally-nauseated<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

mediaeval-muse<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

cedrwydden<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

unstilness<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

cedrwydden<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

unstilness<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

cedrwydden<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

What annoys the FUCK out of me about the \u2018all historians are out there to erase queerness from history\u2019 thing on Tumblr is that it\u2019s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who\u2019ve spent fucking years studying said field. <\/p>\n

Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different \u2018back then\u2019. Um\u2026no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it\u2019s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren\u2019t Victorians anymore. <\/p>\n

It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you\u2019re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.<\/p>\n

It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we\u2019re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
\nand ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
\nago. Of course queer people existed then\u2014don\u2019t be fucking daft, literally any
\nresearcher\/historian\/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
\nnoted above, there\u2019s a lot of ambiguity as well\u2014ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
\ntranslation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
\nisn\u2019t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
\nfucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
\nthis us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
\nmentality has got to stop.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You\u2019re absolutely right. <\/p>\n

I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn\u2019t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people\u2026we just don\u2019t know and we never will. The divide wasn\u2019t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word \u2018transmasculine\u2019 didn\u2019t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.<\/p>\n

Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that\u2019s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the word \u2018queer\u2019 is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it\u2019s just been so long since I\u2019ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating \u201cWulf and Eadwacer\u201d from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover\/something along those lines. But there\u2019s also some who say that she\u2019s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there\u2019s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.<\/p>\n

TL;DR\u2014If we can\u2019t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can\u2019t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn\u2019t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also, if there\u2019s nothing to debate, what\u2019s even the fun in being an historian? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All of this.<\/p>\n

I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of\u00a0\u201cqueer\u201d and\u00a0\u201cstraight\u201d weren\u2019t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.<\/p>\n

And hoo boy. The student didn\u2019t want to hear that.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren\u2019t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can\u2019t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn\u2019t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn\u2019t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we\u2019re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask \u201cWhat did queerness look like in the past?\u201d as opposed to \u201cHow did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?\u201d As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance\/affection\/sexual practice was sinful, we\u2019re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.<\/p>\n

I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It\u2019s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn\u2019t mean there isn\u2019t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

@lazarusquince<\/a> for old english content<\/p>\n

also yeah, the key thing that\u2019s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jesus Christ all of this<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

somecunttookmyurl: generally-nauseated: mediaeval-muse: cedrwydden: unstilness: cedrwydden: unstilness: cedrwydden: What annoys the FUCK out of me about the \u2018all historians are out there to erase queerness from history\u2019 thing on Tumblr is that it\u2019s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[261,43,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280555"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}