Lots of thinky thoughts on this book, but they're all in the commentary below. Due to length, I've split this entry up into several parts, though my coverage of the chapters is uneven so I've clustered the shorter ones together.
While this book does provide some useful analysis of pre-20th century practices and attitudes around cross-dressing, it is even more enlightening on how much has changed around the topic in the last two decades. Readers today may find some of Garber's discussions as alien as a 100-year-old book would be.
(This is a reprise of episode 7, aired 2017/02/25)
This is a reprise of an earlier episode from the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. I hope you enjoy revisiting the topic, or perhaps this is your first chance to listen to it.
The concept and legacy of the salon movement deeply unpins several character dynamics in my Alpennia series. Of the central characters, Jeanne de Cherdillac is the only one old enough to have been part of pre-French-revolution society. She was mentored by a prominent Rotenek salonnière and was expected to take up a similar role for herself, except for the intervention of the French occupation and personal tragedy.
Every once in a while, a researcher thinks, "I'd really like to know what the author of this text thinks about it now." And sometimes--though rarely--that request is answered. I know that there are things I've written in the past, in the context of this blog, that I might word differently today, or look at from a different angle. Every sociological study is a reflection not simply of its content, but of the place where the researcher is standing at the time of writing.
