IMC 2006: Sessions

Session 708: Lesbian Studies and the Premodern: At the Intersections, III - Germanic and Non-Western Sources

Organisers:	Noreen Giffney, Women's Studies, University College Dublin Diane Watt, Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University
Moderator/Chair:	Michelle M. Sauer, Department of English, Minot State University, North Dakota
Paper 708-a	Tracing Affective and Sexual Desire between Women in the Mongol Empire: Some Preliminary Historiographical and Theoretical Questions (Language: English) Noreen Giffney, Women's Studies, University College Dublin Index terms: Gender Studies, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Sexuality, Women’s Studies
Paper 708-b	No Through Road: Lesbian Presentism and the Anglo-Saxon Past (Language: English) Diane Watt, Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University Index terms: Gender Studies, Women’s Studies
Abstract	This session focuses on historiographical and theoretical issues pertaining to the writing of histories of same-sex affective and sexual desires between women. Noreen Giffney explores some of the historiographical and theoretical issues necessary to consider before scholars begin making forays into primary sources to look for traces of intimate relations between women in the Mongol Empire. In this, she concentrates on the Yasa or law-code of Chinggis Khan, the first ruler of the Empire, and the Persian official, Ala-ad-Din Ata-Malik Juvaini's contemporary account of the empire's rulership.