the day to day.

[subjective]

we watched a documentary called flag wars last night on pbs & i woke up this morning thinking about it. towards the beginning i felt so angry, but as the film went on i felt more & more dejected & hopeless. i know that the broad trend of history is upward: more progressive, more civil rights, more justice. but somehow that big picture doesn't offer much comfort in this particular historical moment. i've been feeling desperate lately.

Comments

[srl.livejournal.com]

At the conference I went to in January, Liz Kennedy (author of boots of leather, slippers of gold) gave a talk on this family study she's been doing. It was about a woman in the 1920s in upstate NY who lived as a relatively out lesbian, and her daughter, also a lesbian, whose life was much more constrained by living during the Cold War. It was a neat talk, but the general idea of it was "historians, be careful; assuming a progressive narrative of history obscures some very real lived experience to the contrary." If/when she publishes more about it, you might track her work down.

[subjective.livejournal.com]

yes, definitely, that's what i was trying to get across. i'll keep an eye out for her stuff, thanks.

[srl.livejournal.com]

here's some more detail on this. You might email her in that "I'm a scholar, you're a scholar, can you point me to where I can read about this more?" way. When I met her, she seemed very accessible.