Reframing female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern European history

This historiographical essay presents different approaches in the realm of gender and sexuality studies that have been and can be used by historians of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to female same-sex relationships, especially focusing on the long nineteenth century before the widespread understanding of sexuality as medicalized and politicized categories of individual and collective identity emerged. It also explores the distinct challenges of writing such histories in the region, and ways those challenges might be overcome. Scholarship on the history of women's sexuality in CEE is brought into dialogue with interdisciplinary studies from elsewhere in Europe and North America in an effort to exchange ideas about ways of writing such histories, including addressing common definitional and conceptual questions related to historicizing women's relationships with each other that take into account erotic possibilities that have often been ignored or dismissed. The study takes as a starting point the problem faced by many historians who work on sexuality in CEE: the invisibility of female same-sex sexuality in historical records. This problem stems from phallocentric legal, cultural, and confessional definitions of sex which rendered a fuller public discussion of female-female sex (outside pornographic material) almost impossible until the first sexologists appear in the early twentieth century. Even then, such conversations remained highly specialized and confined to the elite. This essay explores scholarly approaches to female same-sex sexuality, how it appeared (or didn't) in nineteenth--century discourses in CEE, and the sexual politics underlying the framing of female same-sex sexuality then and now.