SOURCE: Stiebel, Arlene. “Subversive Sexuality: Masking the Erotic in Poems by Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn.” In Renaissance Discourses of Desire, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, pp. 223-36. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Stiebel argues that Philips and Aphra Behn employed conventions of the day to protect their respectability while professing their homosexuality.

Although in recent discourses of desire there has been polite acknowledgment of the importance of relationships among women, much contemporary literary theory and criticism ignores the existence of lesbians.¹ Critics tell us that there are women who were “autonomous,” or unmarried; women who chose a “professional” or career mode rather than a familial allegiance; women who, because they were married, automatically qualify as heterosexual despite their primary emotional and erotic bonds with other women; and some anomalous women who had a hard time fitting in with societal expectations...