Overview

A landmark analysis of how a marginalized subculture used modern media to transform public attitudes toward sexual desire. In Becoming Lesbian, historian Tamara Chaplin argues that the history of female same-sex intimacy is central to understanding the struggle to control the public sphere. This monumental study draws on undiscovered sources culled from cabaret culture, sexology, police files, radio, TV, photography, the Minitel (an early form of internet), and private letters, as well as over one hundred interviews filmed by the author. Becoming Lesbian demonstrates how women of diverse classes and races came to define themselves as lesbian and used public spaces and public media to exert claims on the world around them in ways that made possible new forms of gendered and sexual citizenship. Chaplin begins in the sapphic cabarets of interwar Paris. These venues, she shows, exploited female same-sex desire for profit while simultaneously launching an incipient queer female counterpublic. Refuting claims that World War II destroyed this female world, Chaplin reveals instead how prewar sapphic subcultures flourished in the postwar period, laying crucial groundwork for the politicization of lesbian identity into the twenty-first century. Becoming Lesbian is filled with colorful vignettes about female cabaret owners, singers, TV personalities, writers, and activists, all brought to life to make larger points about rights, belonging, and citizenship. As a history of lesbianism, this book represents a major contribution to modern French history, queer studies, and genealogies of the media and its publics.

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9780226710983

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Reviews

“Chaplin’s phenomenal research has uncovered more complex, enduring, and visible lesbian social spaces across twentieth-century France than previously imagined, from the sapphic cabarets of Paris and Toulouse to postwar television and feminist communication networks. Her sweeping arguments about the relationship between lesbian publicity and subjectivity make this a major historiographic intervention sure to be pondered and debated for years to come.” * George Chauncey, Columbia University * “Brimming with fresh historical findings and conclusions, this book is a major contribution to the history of lesbianism in modern France. Based on years of extensive archival research and interviews with over one hundred women, there is no other historical study in any national context that has been so assiduous in addressing questions relating to public perception of ‘nonnormative’ behaviors and desires.” * Laura Doan, emeritus, University of Manchester *

Author Information

Tamara Chaplin is professor of modern European history and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar (2023–2026) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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