Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women by Leila J. Rupp
236 pages
Published 2009
Read from May 10 to May 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
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 hardline 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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