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A review by coltyn
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present by Lillian Faderman
No one read this. For my eyes only.
what a fascinating book! This author is alive and kicking and I would be terrified to hear her views today because her contempt for trans people and butch lesbians in the text is pretty intense. The amount of research and history she compiled is overwhelming, and thinking about the lived experience of the individuals written about is heavy, sometimes tragic, sometimes deeply heartwarming. The number of women who lived full lives with immense pain and depression and devotion is impossible to conceptualize for me, and these lives have to be reduced down to a few paragraphs a hundred times over...it's a lot to deal with emotionally. I guess there's something to be said for seeking representation of modern experiences and feelings in historical texts as a source of validation of the queer experience in the 21st century, but that isn't the whole story with this book. Faderman's view of lesbianism and its relationship to patriarchy is radical and powerful, but it does not hold up in today's world of queer studies and queer living. Her repeated insistence that sexual/romantic attraction to women is secondary to the rejection of male domination and prescribed gender roles simply does not make any sense just 40 years after the writing of this book. The idea that all women can and should choose to become lesbians and that straight women are not as evolved as lesbians is funny but also insane. Out of context, a few of these arguments are outright homophobic by today's standards. Just a weird moment of the book was her claim that wlw and mlm should not be grouped together in terms of experience because they don't experience attraction/gender the same way and THAT is true, but she skips over the shared political marginalization of both groups and is pretty dismissive of non-lesbian queerness as a whole. The way she speaks about gender and what today MIGHT be called trans-ness is especially confusing.
The biggest downfall in my opinion is that she insists on defining lesbians and love between women within the terms of patriarchal gender relations rather than critiquing the way gender is perpetuated and reinforced as a means of gaining control and power. Faderman's view of womanhood and her experience and research into the lives of wlw in Western history is rigid and essentialist. The book is valuable for its information and many of the author's insights are moving, but this is not a progressive text by today's standards (which is perfectly ok, but it should be pointed out).
what a fascinating book! This author is alive and kicking and I would be terrified to hear her views today because her contempt for trans people and butch lesbians in the text is pretty intense. The amount of research and history she compiled is overwhelming, and thinking about the lived experience of the individuals written about is heavy, sometimes tragic, sometimes deeply heartwarming. The number of women who lived full lives with immense pain and depression and devotion is impossible to conceptualize for me, and these lives have to be reduced down to a few paragraphs a hundred times over...it's a lot to deal with emotionally. I guess there's something to be said for seeking representation of modern experiences and feelings in historical texts as a source of validation of the queer experience in the 21st century, but that isn't the whole story with this book. Faderman's view of lesbianism and its relationship to patriarchy is radical and powerful, but it does not hold up in today's world of queer studies and queer living. Her repeated insistence that sexual/romantic attraction to women is secondary to the rejection of male domination and prescribed gender roles simply does not make any sense just 40 years after the writing of this book. The idea that all women can and should choose to become lesbians and that straight women are not as evolved as lesbians is funny but also insane. Out of context, a few of these arguments are outright homophobic by today's standards. Just a weird moment of the book was her claim that wlw and mlm should not be grouped together in terms of experience because they don't experience attraction/gender the same way and THAT is true, but she skips over the shared political marginalization of both groups and is pretty dismissive of non-lesbian queerness as a whole. The way she speaks about gender and what today MIGHT be called trans-ness is especially confusing.
The biggest downfall in my opinion is that she insists on defining lesbians and love between women within the terms of patriarchal gender relations rather than critiquing the way gender is perpetuated and reinforced as a means of gaining control and power. Faderman's view of womanhood and her experience and research into the lives of wlw in Western history is rigid and essentialist. The book is valuable for its information and many of the author's insights are moving, but this is not a progressive text by today's standards (which is perfectly ok, but it should be pointed out).