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Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Online ISBN:
9781452946009
Print ISBN:
9780816649754
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Book

Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Deborah Cohler
Deborah Cohler
Deborah Cohler is Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies at San Francisco State University
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Published online:
24 August 2015
Published in print:
30 August 2010
Online ISBN:
9781452946009
Print ISBN:
9780816649754
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? This book illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture. Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, the text maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. It integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

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