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

Deborah Cohler's Citizen, Invert, Queer makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the history of sexuality—and especially lesbian sexuality—in Britain, emphasizing the ways that public representations of lesbianism were produced not only via sexology but also in and through the frameworks of eugenics, empire, and nation. "'Lesbianism,'" Cohler argues, "emerges not as an innocent or purely oppositional category but as a field of representation complicit with and produced through discourses of imperialist nationalism" (xii). Cohler's focus is on public discourses of lesbianism, not on a history of same-sex desire or of sexual subjectivities or behaviors, and she explores the emergence of these public representations via readings of a range of texts, from novels and newspapers to legal and medical texts, parliamentary debates, and literary reviews. In this account of how, why, and when gender inversion—epitomized by Radclyffe Hall's "gentleman invert"—became central to the "representational space" occupied by the lesbian subject, Cohler convincingly argues that nationalism and citizenship played critical roles in the process (34, 196). The work thus complicates existing accounts, which have tended to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on medical and sexological models of gender and sexual deviance, "decenter[ing] sexology as the origin story for modern sexual identities in Britain" and emphasizing instead the "dependence of self-styled sexual renegades on more culturally conservative tropes of racial citizenship and empire" (xviii-xix).

In making these arguments, Citizen, Invert, Queer moves back and forth across multiple texts, "both marginal and influential, from the obscure or banned to the widely reprinted and mass distributed," modeling "a reading practice that centers questions of empire and nation in the analysis of sexual subjects" (xi). So, for example, in the first chapter she reads Oscar Wilde's Salomé and its critical reception alongside short stories by Victoria Cross as well as the classic sexological account Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis and J. A. Symonds (1897). Similarly, a fascinating chapter on war, nationalism, and gender deviance brings Rose Allatini's pacifist novel Despised and Rejected (1917)—banned under the Defense of the Realm Act early in 1918—into dialogue with Maud Allan's infamous "Cult of the Clitoris" libel trial and with parliamentary debates over attempts to revise the Criminal Law Amendment Act to cover lesbian activity. Here again Cohler uses the material to demonstrate that "we cannot understand sexual politics apart from geopolitics and biopolitics; we must read the ideological and material consequences of citizenship for modern queer identities" (149). The final chapter, which explores the publication and reception of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women, and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (all of which appeared in the second half of 1928), brings Cohler's conclusions out clearly: "All these novels struggle to represent a relatively new cultural phenomenon—homosexuality in women—through an oblique, direct, or metaphoric leverage of Britain's decreasing global dominance as referents for their representations of female homosexuality. 'England' becomes the almost invisible signifier of sexual and cultural normativity" (153). As a result, Cohler is able to read these supposedly "'domestic' debates over the rapidly changing status of English women . . . through the rapid challenges to British political and cultural imperialism in the 1920s and 1930s," repositioning such debates within a global geopolitical frame (157).

Cohler's focus on the eugenic/national/imperial as opposed to the medical/sexological is a welcome shift and an important reminder of the importance of being attentive to this wider context. At the same time, the concern to demonstrate the central thesis occasionally outruns the available evidence as, for example, when France and the Spanish possessions in the Canary Islands are pressed (without much nuance) into service as stand-ins for British imperial spaces (164-65). Similarly, the singular focus on the eugenic/national/imperial leads to some misinterpretations and missed opportunities. Some attention to religious discourse (which is...