Fashioning Sapphism - The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture

The highly publicized obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) is generally recognized as the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian culture, marking a great divide between innocence and deviance, private and public, New Woman and Modern Lesbian. Yet despite unreserved agreement on the importance of this cultural moment, previous studies often reductively distort our reading of the formation of early twentieth-century lesbian identity, either by neglecting to examine in detail the developments leading up to the ban or by framing events in too broad a context against other cultural phenomena.
Fashioning Sapphism locates the novelist Radclyffe Hall and other prominent lesbians -- including the pioneer in women's policing, Mary Allen, the artist Gluck, and the writer Bryher -- within English modernity through the multiple sites of law, sexology, fashion, and literary and visual representation, thus tracing the emergence of a modern English lesbian subculture in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on extensive new archival research, the book interrogates anew a range of myths long accepted without question (and still in circulation) concerning, to cite only a few, the extent of homophobia in the 1920s, the strategic deployment of sexology against sexual minorities, and the rigidity of certain cultural codes to denote lesbianism in public culture.

List of contents

Introduction: "It's Hard to Tell Them Apart Today''
1 The Mythic Moral Panic: Radclyffe Hall and the New Genealogy
2 "That Nameless Vice Between Women'': Lesbianism and the Law
3 Outraging the Decencies of Nature? Uniformed Female Bodies
4 Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in the 1920s
5 Lesbian Writers and Sexual Science: A Passage to Modernity?
6 Portrait of a Sapphist? Fixing the Frame of Reference

About the author

Laura Doan

Summary

An in-depth study of early 20th century social conditions and cultural trends in Britain that constructed the popular image of the "modern lesbian"

Product details

• Authors: Laura Doan, Laura L Doan, Laura L. Doan, Doan Laura
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 03.01.2001
• EAN: 9780231110075
• ISBN: 978-0-231-11007-5
• No. of pages: 288
• Series: Between Men~Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies; Between Men~Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies; Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; England, Education, LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General, Relating to lesbians, LGBTQ+ / Gay and Lesbian Studies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / LGBTQ+ Studies / Gay Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / LGBTQ+