Sunday, March 31, 2024 - 17:08 lhmpodcast.jpg Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 283 – Daughters of Derbyshire by Daniel Stride - transcript (Originally aired 2024/03/31 - listen here) The first story for our 2024 fiction series, “Daughters of Derbyshire,” is set in 17th century England in one of the repeated outbreaks of plague that devastated that century. It’s hard not to think of the terrible toll of the Covid pandemic when reading it. For all that, this is a quiet, contemplative story. The author, Daniel Stride, lives pretty much on the opposite side of the globe from his story’s ..read more

Sunday, March 17, 2024 - 20:43 lhmpodcast.jpg Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 282 - Amazons - transcript (Originally aired 2024/03/17 - listen here) Introduction Last month, in the favorite tropes episode on Bluestockings and Amazons, I explicitly said I was not talking about the classical concept of Amazons, but specifically the use of the term for a “sporty” woman, especially one associated with equine activities. So when I was casting about for a topic for this month, it occurred to me that I hadn’t ever done an episode on classical Amazons. So I’ll fill that gap now. Amazons sho ..read more

Saturday, March 2, 2024 - 07:00 lhmpodcast.jpg Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 281 - On the Shelf for March 2024 - Transcript (Originally aired 2024/03/02 - listen here) Welcome to On the Shelf for March 2024. The On The Shelf episodes vary a lot in terms of how much content I have. I wouldn’t have predicted that the new book listings would be the one constant back when I set up this format—they weren’t even part of the template originally! But after a couple of bare-bones months, we have a lot to talk about this month. First off is announcing the fiction line-up for this year. One ..read more

Saturday, February 24, 2024 - 13:37 bookreview.jpg The analysis I did in two previous blogs (part 1, part 2) has been incorporated into a much broader and more detailed analysis by Camestros Felapton, and published under both our names (but be aware that he did a much larger proportion of the work). He introduces the report on his blog here, but the report and its associated data tables are being hosted by File 770 here. While I sympathize with a certain sentiment that enough time and attention has been invested in hashing over "what happened" (to the extent we can sort that out), I feel th ..read more

Monday, February 19, 2024 - 07:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project I really really mean to get back on a regular schedule of LHMP blogs. Silly things like analyzing Hugo voting statistics and internet interruptions and processing the fiction submissions keep getting in the way. But each day is a new chance to get back on track. Major category:  LHMP Tags:  LHMP LHMP #421 Bohata 2017 Mistress and Maid About LHMP Full citation:  Bohata, Kirsti. 2017. “Mistress and Maid: Homoeroticism, Cross-Class Desire, and Disguise in Nineteenth-Century Fiction” in Victorian Literat ..read more

Sunday, February 18, 2024 - 10:44 lhmpodcast.jpg I've received all the contracts and sent off the royalty payments so it's time to announce the 2024 Fiction series! In no particular order: "The Font of Liberty" by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall - Set in 1830s France, the denizens of a publishing house deal with political activism and censorship. (I love the little "font" pun in the title.) "A Very Long Malaise" by L.J. Lee - Romantic and political intrigue in Korea of the Joseon Dynasty (ca. 1790). "Follow the Monkey" by Jamie McGhee - Survival and hope in colonial Brazil during the rise of Qui ..read more

Saturday, February 17, 2024 - 16:05 lhmpodcast.jpg Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 280 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 12: Bluestockings and Amazons - transcript (Originally aired 2024/02/17 - listen here) Introduction This rather short episode is part of our ongoing series “our f/favorite tropes.” As used in the romance field, a trope is a recurring literary device or motif—a conventional story element that carries a certain set of expectations, associations, and resonances that connect the story that uses the trope to other works that have used it. The trope can be a character type ..read more

Thursday, February 1, 2024 - 10:10 lhmpodcast.jpg Submissions are now closed for the 2024 fiction series. I'll start reading and making decisions over the next week and should have offers out by the weekend of Feb 10/11. 2024 tied for second place in the number of submissions. Based on what I've seen in people's cover emails, this may be the most diverse year yet in terms of author backgrounds and story settings. (I don't require author details in the cover email, so I'm basing this on incomplete information.) About 40% of the submissions arrived in the last 3 days of the month, which tends ..read more

Monday, January 29, 2024 - 08:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project In addition to covering academic publications, one of the services this blog offers is to review pop culture books that present themselves as covering lesbian or queer history. In some cases, I want to warn readers off of a book, but in some cases it's jusst a matter of "Look, here's what this is. It doesn't pretend to be anything else. Be aware." And that's the current case. This isn't a bad book by any means -- it's quite entertaining -- but it's not a history book and should not be relied on for factual information. Ordi ..read more

Tuesday, January 23, 2024 - 21:08 bookreview.jpg Introduction Accessibility Note: I acknowledge that by using images of the graphs and of some tables, the full analysis is not accessible to the visually impaired. For this I apologize, however my time and the abilities of my website are limited. This is a further exploration of population-level patterns in Hugo Award nomination data. While the first installment was primarily aimed at asking the question, “is there something hinky going on in this data and if so, what?” this second installment is stepping back and asking, “are there different ..read more