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

320 Pages·2010·3.116 MB·English

by  Deborah Cohler

citizen, invert,
queer
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Citizen, Invert,
Queer
Lesbianism and War
in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
deborah cohler
university of minnesota press
minneapolis london
•
Chapter4wasfirst published as “Sapphism and Sedition: Producing Female Homosexuality
in Great War Britain,” Journal of the History of Sexuality16, no. 1(2007):68–94.
Copyright2007by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright2010by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohler, Deborah.
Citizen, invert, queer : lesbianism and war in early twentieth-century Britain / Deborah Cohler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn978-0-8166-4975-4(hc : alk. paper) — isbn978-0-8166-4976-1(pb : alk. paper)
1. Lesbianism—Great Britain—History—20th century. 2. Nationalism and feminism—
Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. War and society—Great Britain—History—
20th century. 4. World War, 1914-1918—Social aspects—Great Britain. I. Title.
hq75.6.g7c57 2010
306.76´63094109041—dc22
2009045683
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Barb
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contents
Introduction: Queer Nationalisms ix
1. Imperialist Classifications: Sexology, Decadence, and
New Women in the 1890s 1
2. Public Women, Social Inversion: The Women’s Suffrage
Debates 31
3. “A More Splendid Citizenship”: Prewar Feminism,
Eugenics, and Sex Radicals 73
4. Around 1918: Gender Deviance, Wartime Nationalism,
and Sexual Inversion on the Home Front 111
5. Boy-Girls and Girl-Boys: Postwar Lesbian Literary
Representations 151
Afterword: Drag King Dreams Deferred 197
Acknowledgments 211
Notes 215
Works Cited 251
Index 269
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introduction
queer nationalisms
In June 2002, transgender author and activist Leslie Feinberg circulated
a broadsheet at U.S. gay pride parades seeking to incite antiwar activism
among participants. “When World War I broke out,” it reads in part, “gay
and trans movement leaders backed their own [nation’s] rulers in that
bloody inter-imperialist war and it derailed their struggle.”1 In 1928, an
anonymous review of Compton Mackenzie’s novel Extraordinary Women
headlined “The Vulgarity of Lesbianism” asserted that female homosexual-
ity “is impossible to dismiss . . . quite so confidently in these post-war days
of boy-girls and girl-boys.”2Whereas Feinberg critiques the nationalist cap-
itulations of early twentieth-century “gay and trans movement leaders,” the
1928 review attributes the increasing visibility of gender and sexual varia-
tions in the interwar period to “wider causes arising out of the war.” These
polemics, separated by more than seventy years and two nations, connect
homosexual identity and gender variation both to wartime cultural trans-
formations generally and to World War I specifically.3
Citizen, Invert, Queertakes seriously this rhetorical connection and argues
that in early twentieth-century Britain, discourses of lesbian identity emerged
through the nationalist transformations of World War I (“the Great War”).
This book examines the discursive emergence of “boy-girls and girl-boys”
through examining the rhetorical and ideological intersections of national-
ism and sexuality in the early years of the twentieth century. The produc-
tion of modern lesbian subjectivity in the interwar years stems from racial
and imperialist anxieties as well as from shifts in wartime gendered possi-
bilities for women. Whereas in 2002 activist Feinberg distinguishes “gay
and trans” identities from one another, the 1928book review links the two
categories under the rubric “boy-girls and girl-boys.” The review reflects a
ix