Sapphists and Tribades

Abstract

This chapter explores the process of creating homoerotic subjectivities based on physical and bodily experiences. The body, in both its anatomical and symbolic dimensions, constituted a territory of sexual exploration that gave rise to processes of subjectivization. The aim is to observe how these subjectivities, articulated through gender, were produced from the intervention of institutional discourses and practices on bodies, but also from the bodily practices through which desiring subjects articulated sexuality, pleasure, and desire. For this purpose, I will survey doctrinal sources, such as legal, theological, and medical treatises that made pronouncements upon affection and sexual practices between women, as well as the judicial practices that repressed them. This study will focus fundamentally on the Hispanic world, although it will also engage in a dialogue with other European contexts of the same period.