“Inseparables”: Tobacco Workers in Seville and Female Homoeroticism at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, published for the first time in German in 1896 and later reissued in English in 1897, 1901, and 1915, was one of the most renowned and cited monographic discussions on sexuality of its time. The volume’s focus on homosexuality in general and female homoeroticism in particular captured the attention of the scientific and lay public in equal measure. Despite the fact that Ellis was accused of basing his analysis of lesbianism on very few actual cases—presented as part of the section on female sexual inversion—what is certain is that in successive editions of the work, Ellis added extensively to his repertoire. In this sense, he followed the tradition of German authors such as Krafft-Ebing who constantly augmented the number of case studies on a range of subjects germane to their books. In the 1901 English edition, Ellis described,over a number of pages, a case that had occurred in the Andalusian city of Seville during a trip he had made to southern Spain. The way in which Ellis described the case of the Seville tobacco workers, labeled as “tribades” or “sexual inverts,” anticipated somewhat the later butch-femme dyad, an arrangement common in working-class women’s relationships whereby one of the partners would be depicted as older, more “masculine,” and more “active” in the sexual role, while the other would be younger and more conventionally “feminine” and would take the “passive” role in sexual relations. In some histories of female homoeroticism, there is the assumption that butch-femme relationships today are somehow a reflection or development of past female same-sex relations in which the sexual object has not been differentiated from its gendered aspects and love between women was governed by an androcentric and hierarchical framework, thereby reproducing the dualistic and heteronormative schema of the “manly woman” who took the active role and the feminine partner who took the passive role. The butch-femme dyad, common though it was among working-class women, could sometimes constitute an inegalitarian and precarious expression of female same-sex eroticism and would occlude the “lesbian” reality of the relationship. Such associations entailed their rejection on the part of lesbian feminists of the 1970s. In contrast to this rather teleological approach, which also has elements of a colonialist interpretation as it suggests that the lack of difference between gender and sexuality in non-Western societies is evidence of an absence of sophistication or development, this article follows a strictly historicist argument. In this way, we avoid projecting the existence of a modern lesbian identity onto societies where one did not exist or was perhaps in formation, but we recognize at the same time that multiple schemas can exist simultaneously. We also suggest that there can be continuity between figures such as the virago and the tribade and the butch figure in today’s world. The “female masculinity” of the latter, as Jack Halberstam has suggested, is not a kind of residue from the past but simply an embracing of masculine attributes that are not confined to biological men.