This collection was not particularly fruitful in terms of LHMP content, with barely two articles speaking to the topic of women's same-sex desire. This is, alas, all too common in general collections, as well as all too common under the umbrella of Queer Studies. This tendency creates what I have come to call the "Little Red Hen Problem." You know the story about the little red hen? She finds a grain of wheat and asks help to plant it, then to tend it, then to harvest the wheat, then to grind it to flour, then to make bread out of it, all along the way encountering indifference and turned backs. So at every step she says, "Well, then, I'll do it myself." And at the end of the story when she asks, "And who would like to eat the bread?" then everyone is eager to join in, but the little red hen spurns them all, saying "I'll do it myself."
So what do I mean about something being a little red hen problem in historical research? When academics interested in the place of women in history found nothing but indifference and turned backs in the academy, they created the field of Women's Studies. When academics interested in the study of female same-sex relations in history found themselves largely shut out of the history of sexuality and queer studies, they said, "Well then, I'll do it myself" and created the field of lesbian history. But if time and again you have to create a field of study that is narrowly focused on your topic of interest, simply in order for that topic to be represented at all, then the act of narrowing the focus simultaneously results in progressive exclusion within your narrowed field, as well as failing to challenge the de facto exclusion in the larger field.
It's understandable. People get tired of begging for a place at the table and go off to build their own table. Or grow their own wheat. Or run their own mill. And if it results in an increasing separation from the "default" version of the academy, well, let someone else put in that work. You're tired and you just want a place where you're able to do the work you care about. But now you're part of a separate economy of research, just as the little red hen set up her own vertically-siloed economy of bread production. It's much more fragile than an integrated economy. And yet...you didn't feel like you had a choice. No one was letting you participate in an integrated economy. You had some wheat, but nobody was offering to help you turn it into bread.
I tend to feel that the lesfic publishing community is dealing with the late stage of a Little Red Hen Problem. When no one else was willing to publish fun, sympathetic genre fiction about women loving each other, the flock of little red hens came together and created the books no one else would touch. But what had originally been necessity developed into a way of life. We're going to grow wheat, not oats or barley, because that's what little red hens do. We're going plant and harvest it in specific ways because that's the little red hen tradition. And we're going to grind it to flour to make a specific type of bread. This is the bread we've always made. We're not going to make croissants or tortillas. We're not going to mix in olives or add eggs or top with caraway seeds, because that's the the little red hen way. We must respect the struggles and traditions of our fore-hens!
OK, I confess this metaphor has strayed a bit off the rails. And it no longer has much to do with why, in an entire collection of articles about queering the Renaissance, I could only find two about women loving women. But the point I'm reaching for is that sometimes even structures and systems that were about survival when first developed can turn around and become barriers. If I share my bread with you, will you share your polenta?
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