Nicola Denzey's The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women — Book Notes

My last posting was, in some respects, a piece of historiographical commentary. It was a meditation of sorts on how historians might face the challenge of the lacunae, the aporias, the silences (along with the lies and secrets, to echo Adrienne Rich) buried within historical documents, artifacts, texts, etc. My posting pointed you to a recent Salon essay by openly gay Irish novelist Colm Tóibín in which he argues that the pro-marriage equality side prevailed in the Irish referendum about same-sex marriage because gay Irish people — and the families of gay Irish people — chose to make themselves visible in a new way in Irish society, so that many of their fellow citizens could fill in a blank that had not been filled in previously, and recognize that they knew gay people, that they had close ties to families with gay sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers. Tóibín's essay is an excerpt from his foreword to a forthcoming book by Charlie Bird — A Day in May (Dublin: Merrion, June 2016)— about how the marriage equality battle was won in Ireland.

Unearthing Hidden LGBTQ Stories in Family History Research: The Mirror That Reflects Nothing Back

A warning before you dive in: this is one of those postings about one of my particular interests, tracking family history. And so it may not be of interest to all readers. It's also, however, about the challenge of unearthing buried stories about LGBT relatives, in particular, as we pore over historical records.

More Adrienne Rich: We All Lose When We Force Others into Boxes

And there's this: here's an excerpt discussing Adrienne Rich's work from a posting of mine on 9 December 2009:

Celebrating Adrienne Rich: The Refusal to Live Split and Closeted

During the week on which I was on a blogging hiatus, poet-essayist-feminist thinker-activist Adrienne Rich died.  To commemorate Rich, whose work has influenced me significantly, I want to retrieve an observation of hers I posted on 18 June 2009.  It's about the damage that oppressive authority structures do to stigmatized minorities, to minorities stigmatized because of some aspect of their humanity that the stigmatizing authority structure wants to regard as defective.

Thought for the Day: Adrienne Rich on Living Split

It is an extremely painful way to live—split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also as possibly unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (NY: W.W. Norton, 1979), p. 175.