236 pages
Published 2009
Read from May 10 to May 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
[2024 edit: I wrote this review early in my own gender and sexuality deconstruction. At that time, I was also a recovering would-be social academic with a data-driven bent. This review is bad. No way around that, and no excuse for it. I’m leaving it up in order to sit with my past ignorance.]
The social sciences are vital, indispensable for a complete picture of human motivations and behavior. Human beings cannot be understood on a purely biological basis, nor should conventional social or religious attitudes be left unquestioned. Many social sciences do not lend themselves to numbers and statistical analyses, so in some cases non-traditional or postmodern approaches may yield insightful and informative contributions to our understanding of human behavior. Unfortunately, postmodern approaches can also lead to a bunch of twaddle and poppycock.
Queer and gender studies, by their avowedly subversive natures, are especially prone to this. Which is doubly unfortunate, as queer and gender studies are essential to establishing the healthy sort of society I would like to live in. The very importance of queer and gender studies makes them ideal for (or perhaps susceptible to) the promulgation and promotion of political causes, such as identity politics. There is also an incredibly self-defeating idea out there that the conceptual framework of science itself is inherently masculine, and that all those oh so "emotional" and "intuitive" women should, instead of claiming science as a gender-neutral pursuit, come up with their own alternative approaches to understanding the world. Which, if you give it a moment's thought, is every bit as limiting and as prejudiced as the actual institutional sexism you would assume we'd all like to be fighting.
That all comes together to dispiriting effect in certain portions of this book. The second chapter is by far the worst offender. It's supposedly a musing or speculation upon the idea of woman-on-woman love in prehistoric times. Given how little real information we have to go on, some carefully contextualized speculation would make for interesting reading. Rupp, however, ignores the possibilities of social science altogether, quoting or inventing "creation stories" to prioritize the female procreative role, and giving credence to the whole "primordial earth goddess and original matriarchal society" myth popularized by second wave feminist identity politics. There quite simply isn't any persuasive evidence of worldwide goddess worship "suppressed" after a "masculist revolution" deep in prehistory. Which is not to say that such events did not occur occasionally throughout the world. But subscribing to the idea of a global goddess religion and subsequent "masculist revolution," while useful to certain factions of feminism, is about as naive as postulating the lost continent of Mu to explain scattered linguistic similarities. Or, for that matter, as naive as postulating that men are a separate, alien species tainted by a "mutant Y chromosome." Speculations are excellent, except when they ignore what evidence we do have. Speculations that simplify the head-spinning diversity of culture and customs over the last 40,000 or so years are no better than wholesale myth-making. In my view, social science should seek to contextualize and controvert myths, not create them. Likewise, quoting modern novels that treat with the subject of woman-on-woman love or all-female societies in prehistory does not tell us anything about the possibilities of the past; it does nothing but reflect our own modern sexual and emotional sensibilities back at us.
This isn't a criticism of Sapphistries so much as of postmodern scholarship in general. Subsequent chapters aren't as egregious, drawing more from historical sources than modern fiction, but even then the "scholarship" can stretch culturally appropriate expressions of friendship into a modern homoerotic reading not likely intended by the original authors. Again, this is a case of augmenting woefully sparse sources, but it's none too convincing. Unless Rupp's thesis is merely to suggest that women cared about other women in the middle ages, in which case, thesis proven.
Sapphistries finally merits something of its "global history" title halfway through, when historical sources become numerous enough to predominate over modern fictionalizations. The book becomes rather engrossing by the time it visits the cabaret culture of Weimar Germany or the jazz clubs of 1920s Harlem. If Sapphistries had confined all the myth-making and literary speculation to a concluding chapter on the ideologies of recent lesbian feminists, and concentrated more on the eras with substantial primary documentation, I would have gotten much more useful knowledge from its pages. Unfortunately, this scintillation of actual scholarship comes as too little, too late.
The social sciences are vital, indispensable for a complete picture of human motivations and behavior. Human beings cannot be understood on a purely biological basis, nor should conventional social or religious attitudes be left unquestioned. Many social sciences do not lend themselves to numbers and statistical analyses, so in some cases non-traditional or postmodern approaches may yield insightful and informative contributions to our understanding of human behavior. Unfortunately, postmodern approaches can also lead to a bunch of twaddle and poppycock.
Queer and gender studies, by their avowedly subversive natures, are especially prone to this. Which is doubly unfortunate, as queer and gender studies are essential to establishing the healthy sort of society I would like to live in. The very importance of queer and gender studies makes them ideal for (or perhaps susceptible to) the promulgation and promotion of political causes, such as identity politics. There is also an incredibly self-defeating idea out there that the conceptual framework of science itself is inherently masculine, and that all those oh so "emotional" and "intuitive" women should, instead of claiming science as a gender-neutral pursuit, come up with their own alternative approaches to understanding the world. Which, if you give it a moment's thought, is every bit as limiting and as prejudiced as the actual institutional sexism you would assume we'd all like to be fighting.
That all comes together to dispiriting effect in certain portions of this book. The second chapter is by far the worst offender. It's supposedly a musing or speculation upon the idea of woman-on-woman love in prehistoric times. Given how little real information we have to go on, some carefully contextualized speculation would make for interesting reading. Rupp, however, ignores the possibilities of social science altogether, quoting or inventing "creation stories" to prioritize the female procreative role, and giving credence to the whole "primordial earth goddess and original matriarchal society" myth popularized by second wave feminist identity politics. There quite simply isn't any persuasive evidence of worldwide goddess worship "suppressed" after a "masculist revolution" deep in prehistory. Which is not to say that such events did not occur occasionally throughout the world. But subscribing to the idea of a global goddess religion and subsequent "masculist revolution," while useful to certain factions of feminism, is about as naive as postulating the lost continent of Mu to explain scattered linguistic similarities. Or, for that matter, as naive as postulating that men are a separate, alien species tainted by a "mutant Y chromosome." Speculations are excellent, except when they ignore what evidence we do have. Speculations that simplify the head-spinning diversity of culture and customs over the last 40,000 or so years are no better than wholesale myth-making. In my view, social science should seek to contextualize and controvert myths, not create them. Likewise, quoting modern novels that treat with the subject of woman-on-woman love or all-female societies in prehistory does not tell us anything about the possibilities of the past; it does nothing but reflect our own modern sexual and emotional sensibilities back at us.
This isn't a criticism of Sapphistries so much as of postmodern scholarship in general. Subsequent chapters aren't as egregious, drawing more from historical sources than modern fiction, but even then the "scholarship" can stretch culturally appropriate expressions of friendship into a modern homoerotic reading not likely intended by the original authors. Again, this is a case of augmenting woefully sparse sources, but it's none too convincing. Unless Rupp's thesis is merely to suggest that women cared about other women in the middle ages, in which case, thesis proven.
Sapphistries finally merits something of its "global history" title halfway through, when historical sources become numerous enough to predominate over modern fictionalizations. The book becomes rather engrossing by the time it visits the cabaret culture of Weimar Germany or the jazz clubs of 1920s Harlem. If Sapphistries had confined all the myth-making and literary speculation to a concluding chapter on the ideologies of recent lesbian feminists, and concentrated more on the eras with substantial primary documentation, I would have gotten much more useful knowledge from its pages. Unfortunately, this scintillation of actual scholarship comes as too little, too late.
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