‘My Mind on Paper’: Anne Lister and the Construction of Lesbian Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anne Lister (1791–1840) of Shibden Hall near Halifax, kept a diary for 34 years. It eventually extended to over four million words, in 27 quarto volumes, about a sixth of which are in code. In this chapter I argue that Lister’s coded diary was an important tool in the construction of her sexual identity. By providing her with a safely enclosed textual space, it gave her the ability to assert a desire for women that offers a challenge both to the alleged absence of discourse on female homosexual experience and identity in the early part of the nineteenth century, and to the categorization of intimate relations between women of this period by the asexual term, ‘romantic friendship’. Lillian Faderman notes that the eighteenth-century fashion for romantic friendship ‘dictated that women may fall in love with each other, although they must not engage in genital sex’ (Faderman, 1981: 74). She concludes that ‘most love relationships between women during previous eras … were less physical than they are in our times’ (19). However, Lister’s explicit documentation of her sexual activity provides a refreshing alternative to what Terry Castle calls ‘the lugubrious myths of lesbian asexuality’ embodied by the idea of romantic friendship (Castle, 1993: 106). The conceptual possibility of physical relations between women has been problematized as much by the historical suppression of female sexuality in general, as by epistemological concerns; as Martha Vicinus warns, lesbian history consists largely of ‘nuances, masks, secrecy, and the unspoken’ (Vicinus, 1996: 235). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".