Category:Historiography

Studying the History of LGBTQ History

The historiography of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history is the self-reflexive study of the processes by which knowledge of LGBTQ history is hypothesized and theorized, empirically researched, and analyzed, interpreted, written, cited, published, and received.

The historiographer examines the history of LGBTQ history, and analyses the implications of naming and conceptualizing a specifically LGBTQ history, as opposed to, for example, a "homosexual" (and "heterosexual") history, a history of "same-sex sexual relations," a history of "same-sex love or "intimacy," or a history of "queer" (and "normal") sexuality in general.

The historiographer examines historians' explicit and implicit starting assumptions, and the implications of those assumptions for their work. The historiographer studies how a historian's definition -- in the present, at a specific point in time, in a particular society -- of a specific past object of study affects how that historian understands and presents her/his findings about the past.

The historiographer of LGBTQ history touches on such elements as authorship, sources, evidence, bias, perspective, interpretation, judgment, causation, style, and audience.

Interconnections in LGBTQ history among gender, race, class, ethnicity, religion, and politics have also been major areas of concern to historiographers, as have connections between the history of sexual and gender terminology and the social-historical organization of sexual and gender behaviors and identities.

Historiography is often broken down topically, such as the historiography of a particular nation state (the history of LGBTQ life in the United States, or within the Islamic nations, or in Chine, or within particular cities or geographic regions). The rise of globalism and of newly perceived deep interconnections between countries and nations is leading to a new stress on international LGBTQ history.

Historiographers study different approaches or genres of history, such as LGBTQ oral history, LGBTQ social history, or LGBTQ economic history.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, and the coming out of independent scholars and and academy-based historians, a body of writing on on LGBT historiography has begun to emerge.^[1]

For specific problems in the historiography of LGBTQ history, see the following list:

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