A Short History of Queer Women

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As we all know, things didn’t quite work out for Marie, as she famously met a grisly end with the guillotine during the French Revolution. But, before her death, Marie was allowed one final goodbye with her lover, not Louis XVI, but Marie Thérèse Louise. Marie Thérèse Louise had earlier been arrested and put on trial, where she refused to swear hatred to the King and Queen. She was then taken outside to a baying mob who murdered her. They cut off her head, took it to where Marie was being kept and demanded that she give her one-time lover a final kiss. Bloody hell, that’s unnecessary! Yolande was dubbed the most beautiful woman in France. Marie showed her affection by paying Yolande’s debts, moving her into a massive apartment in Versailles and eventually making Yolande’s husband a duke and therefore Yolande a duchess. This encouraged the French media to pipe up again, releasing thousands of pamphlets depicting the two in a range of sexual positions. The second issue I have is the bigger one, namely the decision detailed at the start of the book which I shall lay out here in the author’s own words:

However, the biggest issue with this book is that there are ZERO REFERENCES! Not one piece of information has a source cited nor is there an actual reference list at the end (only a further reading list, which is not the same thing) and I'm sorry but that is absolutely appalling or something proclaiming to be a history book. As my first foray into learning about queer female history, this book was a flop, I'd advice anyone who wants to learn more about this topic to try literally any other book than this one - and specifically one written by an actual reputable academic or similar who understands the value and importance of REFERENCING.As we submerge into the depths of winter, it’s only natural that we look for some warm, cosy comfort, and what’s better than snuggling up in a big blanket with some hot tea and a variety of interesting queer books? i keep seeing that this book is getting a lot of hate for the humorous tone, millennial jokes, lots of swearing, and endless comments about having sex. i invite everyone to lighten up!!!

Loehr attempts to infuse a comedic tone throughout the book and it's quite frankly extremely bizarre. I can see what she was aiming for but it was very poorly executed to the point that it just made certain parts confusing. Honestly not one attempt at comedy was remotely funny - but I guess humour is subjective. But I’ve momentarily digressed here. We were discussing the author’s decision to call all of the people who feature in this book women. These are not what you might call ambiguous examples. There are individuals who dressed as men, who lived and married as men, and who were punished for it. (There is an example of someone who wore a leather dildo (outside of sex), for crying out loud. What exactly strikes you as cis woman about that?) Loehr even decides that Radclyffe Hall, despite noting that “Radclyffe identified as male and almost always wore men’s attire”, is going to be included in this book as a woman. Even if you’re going to stop short of using trans terminology to describe them, you can at least admit that they’re not cis women as we understand those terms in a modern world (and therefore, should either not be part of this book, or the remit of this book should be expanded). Some use of modern terminology is inescapable in a book like this, but it’s interesting to see what the author chooses on a more selective basis. But it was the nineteen-year-old widow Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy who was Marie’s personal favourite. Marie was so charmed by Marie Thérèse Louise that she regularly showered her with gifts and made her the superintendent of the royal household, which sounds more like a punishment than anything else. Marie may not have been interested in her husband, but she was most certainly into the ladies, and at one time was caught drooling over English writer Mary Robinson’s tits. The incident was later reported in Mary’s memoirs: “She appeared to survey, with peculiar attention, a miniature of the Prince of Wales, which Mrs. Robinson wore on her bosom …” Marie and Louis were hardly love’s young dream, and initially got together to form a political alliance between France and Marie’s home country, Austria. The pair were utterly ill-suited. Louis was painfully shy, indecisive and cold. On the other hand, Marie was lavish, outgoing and extremely shallow. They were so uninterested in one another that it took them a whopping seven years to consummate their marriage.It’s confusing to try to superimpose gender theory, as it’s taught today, on a society that didn’t operate as such. Also, I can’t be arsed. Kirsty Loehr comes to Bristol to discuss her book A Short History of Queer Women, with Noreen Masud (A Flat Place).

This is where I think this book falls short. I don’t think you can purport to write a “short history of queer women” and neglect an analysis of gender within that. No, we don’t know how these people might have identified, whether they thought of themselves as women or not, whether they even had the words to express not-womanhood—we are likely never to know, unless they wrote about it (although I maintain we might make educated guesses, such as those individuals who elected to live as men). But even in writing such a book, we are subconsciously imposing our modern ideas of gender onto it, whether we mean to or not. To act like we might remove the concept of it entirely defeats the point. Can lesbianism itself, for example, not have a dimension of gender, as much as it does sexuality? There were a few interesting bits of information but again I failed to even fully enjoy those bits because ?? is it even true or did she just pull this info out of thin air - and yes, of course, I can do my own research but A. a few times I tried and found zero to corroborate what she was saying and B. That defeats the purpose of this book, I wanted to read it to learn not to serve as Google inspiration. I debated whether to write this review of A Short History of Queer Women once I finished it. It’s a book I have very mixed feelings about and I’m still not entirely sure that I have my thoughts straight on it, but I’ll give it a go. Given Loehr’s propensity for labelling AFAB non-women as women, you might be wondering about the reverse: does she recognise the existence of trans women in the past? The answer would be no, at least not up until the Stonewall riots, when she brings up Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Perhaps this is unsurprising.Queen Anne wasn’t the only royal dabbling in the dark arts of lesbianism. Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, was at it too. Marie wasn’t exactly beloved by her people; she spent a lot of money, ate a lot of food and didn’t seem too bothered that her subjects were starving in the streets. Although to be fair, Marie didn’t really have a say in the matter, as that was the job of her husband, King Louis XVI.