Episode Details

Book Appreciation with Anna Clutterbuck-Cook (part 2) The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 110 with Heather Rose Jones

In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting. This time we had so much to talk about we split it into two episodes.

In this episode we talk about:

• What is Anna looking for in f/f historical romances?
• Rich backstories and complex social networks
• The default assumption that women’s lives can only exist in relation to men, and how this affects even f/f fiction
• What were the shapes of women’s lives in history and how could f/f stories fit into those spaces
• The ways in which many popular m/f and m/m historical fiction tropes don’t fit f/f lives and relationships
• Constructing a “ladder of intimacy” for female characters that feels true to women’s lives
• How do historic definitions of “sex” affect how we imagine f/f sexuality in historical fiction?
• Why is actual sex so often absent in f/f fan fiction?
• Embedding sex scenes in the particularity of the characters’ lives and experience
• The conflicting tensions in reader reactions around sex scenes--is it “romance novels without sex” or “non-romance novels with romantic elements”?
• Embedding queer historic characters in a community of marginalized identities
• K.J. Charles and Cat Sebastian as authors creating series of connected novels that build queer community over time
• The misperception that queer “happily ever after” is unhistorical
• Writing characters as part of an existing queer historical continuum--the example of Charlotte Cushman
• Looking for stories with feminism and intersectional identities: non-white characters, disabled characters, non-privileged characters *
• Promoting diversity as readers and identifying our own biases
• Are women inherently uninteresting? The problem of “himpathy”.
• Books mentioned
  • All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister
  • ”A Sweet Yuletide” by E.E. Ottoman
  • Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
  • Beauty and the Clockwork Beast by Nancy Campbell Allen (m/f)
  • Kiss of the Spindle by Nancy Campbell Allen (m/f)
  • The Soldier’s Scoundrel by Cat Sebastian (m/m but has secondary f/f couple)
  • RWA racism and homophobia letters controversy (blog by Ivy Quinn)
  • LHMPodcast on Charlotte Cushman
  • Sins of the Cities series by K.J. Charles (m/m)
  • Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan