Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 35c - Book Appreciation with Anna Clutterbuck-Cook (part 2)

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 110 (previously 35c( - Book Appreciation with Anna Clutterbuck-Cook (part 2)

(Originally aired 2019/06/15 - listen here)

Transcript pending.

Show Notes

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