Nicholas Barnard
Intro. to Lesbian and Gay Studies
Sarah Chinn
Evidence of Experience
“The Evidence of Experience” by Joan W. Scott beats to death a concept that I feel I have had a firm grasp on for several years, specifically know your source. To say one would take “Delany[`s] (a gay man, a black man, a writer of science fiction) [Recounting of] ... his first visit to ... [a] bathhouse in 1963” at face value is a total failure of any historian to properly consider their source information.
To consider a source first you must ascertain the setting, specifically America in 1963. Second interpolating that Delany belongs to two minorities who were repressed in 1963. Finally he is a writer that relies on fanciful detained imagery and elaborate fictitious environments. One should expect this level of detailed description and possibly a slight departure from the actual events by Delany, to create the image of the feelings and environment that he experienced in the reader's mind.
In my humble college freshman's opinion she has wasted fifteen pages and a great deal of time on what two phrases sum up, one is “Know your source.” The second is that “Experience is ... not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain.” Elaborating on these simple concepts doesn't make them clearer it just confuses your reader.
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg was in need of some of Joan Scott's wisdom from Evidence of Experience. While her essay defiantly is an excellent study of middle class to the social elite women between 1760 and 1880, It attempts to imply that platonice love should be trnslated into sexual love is a ludicrus idea. Not once does she mention any actual Lesbian actions between these women. While they do mention intimacy, our 1980's or 1990's charged brain convolutes this into sexual intimacy, when it is my belief in actuality and intense emotional intimacy that these women are referring to, and nothing more.
I think Carroll Smith-Rosenberg went looking for historical examples of Lesbian women and found historical examples of Lesbian women in her tainted viewpoint. In other words she went looking and found what she set out to find.
The statistical principle, “Figures never lie, but liars figure” applies here. I must accept that Victorian women had a strong bond for one and other, they state this explicitly within their diaries. I believe Rosenberg went past valid interpretation and crossed into modifying her source to fit her intended argument. This is the practice of motion picture advertising, chopping and cutting movie reviews to portray only the positive pieces of the reviewer's comments, the whole review portrays a different opinion than is presented by the opinion.