Tribadism, Historical

Tribadism in contemporary terminology designates female same-sex practices involving genital rubbing or penetration. The term entered English through the French tribade, derived from the Latin tribas, a direct transliteration of Greek τριβάς, from Greek τρίβειν, "to rub." In a parallel development to the Greek source, the French term fricatrice derived from the Latin fricatrix. Colloquial English in the Renaissance often used the term rubster for tribade.

Early constructions of tribadism, for example in ancient Greek society, linked the act to a masculinized woman who penetrated a woman or a man using a dildo, or who herself had an enlarged clitoris. Romans often attributed such behavior back to the Greeks, beginning a tradition that would construct the tribade as Other. In an epigram, the first-century-bce Latin poet Martial categorizes the courtesan Philaenis as "tribadum tribas" (famous among all tribades) and refers to her penetrating both females and males. Later antiquity would narrow the scope and limit tribadism to female homoerotic relations.

Any attempt to understand the construction of female same-sex relations in Western culture must look closely at the Renaissance. With the revival of classical literature and discovery of lost texts during that period, the practice of tribadism became more widely known to those men who could read Latin. In his Apologie d'Hérodote (1566), the celebrated humanist printer Henri Estienne (1531–1598) first used the term in a contrastive paradigm: a cross-dressed woman who lived as a man and married was not the same as those "shameful creatures" earlier known as tribades. Estienne thus establishes a model that foregrounds the distinction ultimately based on women who usurp male social roles and women who also usurp male sexual roles. The intention of simulating a male sexual role becomes linked to tribadism, distinguishing it from the neutral etymological meaning of rubbing. Thus, although Brantôme (c. 1540–1614) in his Vie des dames galantes (Fair and gallant ladies, 1665–1666) may exhibit some ambiguity in his definitions, his description of the tribade or fricatrice reinforces a specific gender role. Tribades are the active "male" gendered partner. The problematic, at least in terms of a French linguistic context, is that tribade becomes linked to a sexual practice that focuses on only one half of the female couple. Frequently sixteenth-century sources also associated tribadism with the non-Christian Other, locating the most widespread occurrences of the practice in the Middle East or Africa.

The question of the clitoris and its role in tribadism preoccupies medical texts. This is evident first through the 1573 treatise Des monstres et prodiges (On monsters and marvels) of French surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), and in English through, for example, Helkiah Crooke's Microcosmographia (1615), which stated that an enlarged clitoris would cause unnatural desires and designated those women as tribades. The anatomical feature that assimilated them to male-sexual practices (penetration), then, defined tribades. Unlike Egyptian and Ethiopian women who were cited as all having an enlarged clitoris, European women only rarely suffered from this disorder. Tribadism then became rooted in a specific anatomical attribute that engendered same-sex desire. Despite its close association with anatomy, tribadism did not exclude the use of a dildo for penetration. Thus, a parallel existed between those women whose anatomy made them tribades and those women who supplemented the "defect of their sex," to use the description of essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). Tribadism, then, centered on the woman acting the sexual role of a man.

As tribadism became more widely known, the tribade became a figure signifying uncontrollable female desire and a threat to the stable order of society. Legal proceedings multiplied. The crime of female sodomy privileged the hypertrophic clitoris as the locus of presumed guilt. The discourse constructing the tribade marked her out anatomically from other women. Although linked with a specific attribute throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the term tribade was often also used interchangeably with other terms. Anatomical variance and gender variance were subsumed into hermaphrodite (which could also indicate a male with homoerotic desires). Other terms such as "female husband" highlighted an early vision of the "mannish" woman. As medical science continued to develop in the eighteenth century, the insistence on an enlarged clitoris as the source for same-sex desire began to diminish. Further, distinctions between hermaphrodism and hypertrophy of the clitoris, built upon earlier definitions, began to be more clearly delineated. Tribadism then was categorized as a particular erotic practice—genital rubbing—and not an identity linked to an anatomical type.

Tribadism persisted as a term used in legal proceedings and medical texts, as well as pornography. In the well-known Scottish libel case of 1811, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods were accused of tribadism. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) denounced the corruption of the Catholic Church, incarnated in the figure of the tribade mother superior in La religieuse (The nun, 1760). In the years preceding the French Revolution of 1789, political satire distributed in salacious pamphlets accused Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) of tribadism. By the mid-nineteenth century, partially as a result of changes brought about in society through the industrial revolution, tribadism was frequently associated with women of the lower class, prostitutes, and criminals. Colonialism also reintroduced the notion of tribadism as a non-Western practice.

In the late nineteenth century, the definition of female homoeroticism espoused by sexologists, psychologists, and criminologists drifted away from one of a woman with an enlarged clitoris toward a reconfiguration involving psychosexual sources. An earlier notion of anatomical destiny was discarded and replaced by the modern psychological discourse that constructs the clitoris as the lack of a penis. Tribade was supplanted by terms such as "invert," "sapphist," or "(mannish) lesbian." The "mannish lesbian," embodied by author Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), may have shared a gender role with the tribade, but the tribade's origin was rooted in a distinct vision of the female anatomy. The uneasy relation of the tribade to the modern lesbian points to questions of lesbian identity, raised in Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity (1998).

The linkage between anatomy and tribadism was no longer in place in twentieth- and twenty-first-century lesbian culture. Rather, tribadism refers to the act of genital rubbing and clitoral stimulation. A range of English colloquial terms from "scissoring" to "bumping donuts" to "making tortillas" all denote the act of tribadism.

see also Lesbianism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonnet, Marie-Jo. 1997. "Sappho, or the Importance of Culture in the Language of Love: Tribade, Lesbienne, Homosexuelle." In Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall. New York: Oxford University Press.

Brooten, Bernadette J. 1996. Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Park, Katherine. 1997. "The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570–1620." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies in Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York: Routledge.

Traub, Valerie. 2002. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

                                     Edith Joyce Benkov