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

Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain, by Deborah Cohler, builds on the work of scholars such as Jean Walton (2001) and Jane Garrity (2003), who have given good accounts of modernist sexual cultures through the prism of race, nation, and empire.¹ The practices of literary modernism are, however, a distant concern in a project more interested in tracking—from the 1890s to the interwar period—the modern formations of female sexual deviance across several domains, especially sexology's role in categorizing the sexual and racialized body, eugenics as a force of ideological change. As a contribution to the cultural history of modern British lesbianism, this study is a welcome addition to a distinguished body of genealogical scholarship (pioneered in its earliest phase by Lillian Faderman and Jeffrey Weeks²) that typically starts in the 1890s with a discussion of the great sexological project of classifying the body, in conjunction, with early feminist debates around women's suffrage at the turn of the last century. That story continues with an investigation into how the First World War allowed some upper and middle-class women to take on jobs that had more often been performed by men, employment opportunities that accelerated the unsettling of so-called conventional gender roles and led to greater fluidity in gender expression (vividly demonstrated in the realm of fashion) through the 1920s. What distinguishes Cohler's intervention in accounting for "lesbian origins" is its insistence on analyzing gender deviance and female same-sex sexuality not as isolated phenomena, but as integrally connected to discourses of eugenics, race, nation, and empire—an angle that, intriguingly, both reinscribes and disrupts this progress narrative.

The book's key argument—that female masculinity (or gender inversion/deviance) was not read as homosexuality until the mid-twentieth century—has been made before, most notably by Alison Oram in Her Husband Was a Woman! Women's Gender-crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (2007).³ Even so, Cohler's approach in tracing the etiology of this pervasive cultural myth operates in very different ways. Unlike Oram, who focuses primarily on the popular press, Cohler searches for sapphic family resemblances in both familiar and unfamiliar corners. No study of the history of modern British lesbianism would be complete without some consideration of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) or Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928). Equally predictable are the passages that examine either the infamous 1918 "cult of the clitoris" trial involving the dancer Maud Allan and the right-wing MP Noel Pemberton-Billing or the 1921 debates in the House of Commons, which considered the question of whether to insert in the Criminal Law Amendment Bill a "lesbian clause" to legislate same-sex relations between women. However, alongside these canonical texts and well-known topics there are some interesting new angles, such as close readings of Maria Corelli's Woman, or—Suffragette (1907), Christabel Pankhurst's The Great Scourge (1913), antisuffrage tracts, and suffrage newspapers, and even a few surprises, as evident in a lengthy discussion of Leslie Feinberg's Drag King Dreams (2006).

This highly readable text, in its careful synthesis of previous scholarly work, literally puts sexuality in its proper place as only one power relation in a constellation of several others. In this way, Cohler provides readers (students especially) with a coherent decade by decade account of the rise of modern lesbian identity that foregrounds the imbrication of the sexed body, gender, sexuality, race, and (national and global) citizenship. The use of sexological writing on the female body is a particularly good example of how a more situated reading sheds new light on gender and cultural change during the Great War and its immediate aftermath, as Cohler argues: "registers of racial health and cultural citizenship joined languages of morality and sexology to produce multiple competing models of female homosexuality" (xiii). Somewhat under-played, perhaps, is the important differentiation of...