#because my situation with this person is contextually very similar to that of two 19th century women

[sassmill]

I’ve had this part of the back of my mind fixating on queer dynamics in history for like a month but specifically

The dynamic of women in the 19th c that were activists or academics or like. Just intelligentsia right. Who we look back at evidence of them never marrying and being vocal about why they don’t marry (ie married to their work, needing to focus on their Cause or some such). Alongside the evidence of intense emotional relationships with other women like them that from a modern lens looks like they were probably in a queer relationship. But I’m thinking of like.

In their frame of reference, without the same language for queerness or set and visible structures of queerness (and no explicit evidence a la Anne Lister to make it anything but conjecture to say that they were romantic partners) there must have been an entire identity within that unspecified otherness. Like uh. Like an understood intellectual relationship between two women who maybe never kissed or expressed any physical affection, wether they desired it or not, but they both understood each other as the same kind of other—what we would call queerness today—and they might’ve considered themselves partners or spouses in that sense even if they never consummate the relationship or live together like a Boston marriage.

Like yes obviously asexuality and aromanticism conceptually but. I don’t know something beyond that of understanding that this person is for you both despite societal limits and also within societal limits. The only transgression is mental, in the way they work together and think about each other. Not suppression but an acceptance of what they can realistically be to each other within their station in life as well as their devoted path.

I don’t think any of this is coherent but the part that I am fixating on is this: conceptually, there have to be queer relationship dynamics that can never exist again because the exact situations they evolved from will never exist in the same way again and it’s such a damn shame that we don’t have more documentation of “queer identities” before it was an identity. I want to know how my ancestors thought about their relationships in the context of their desires, you know?