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

Acknowledgments

I could not have completed this book without the support of numerous colleagues, comrades, and institutions. First, warm thanks to Richard Morrison at the University of Minnesota Press, an ardent advocate for this project from very early stages. With Adam Brunner, Tammy Zambo, Alicia Sellheim, and Laura Westlund, he shepherded the manuscript through the publication process with care, intelligence, and good humor. San Francisco State University provided me not only with the time and resources necessary to complete this project but also with a vibrant intellectual community in which to work. I gratefully acknowledge a 2003 summer stipend award, a 2004 assigned-time grant, a 2006 faculty minigrant that supported research in London, and a 2006 Presidential Award for Professional Development, which gave me a semester of uninterrupted writing time. Librarians at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley; and excellent special collections in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, and at Stanford University, the British Library, the Women’s Library in London, and the British Public Records Office made this project richer. This project can be traced back to an undergraduate honors thesis on Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness for women’s studies and English at Wesleyan University. At Wesleyan, I was mentored by an outstanding faculty, particularly Gertrude Hughes, Henry Abelove, Christina Crosby, Ann Cvetkovich, Ann duCille, and Richard Ohmann. In the English department at Brown University, David Savran, Tamar Katz, and Ellen Rooney supervised my doctoral dissertation and taught me a great deal. Nancy Armstrong, Carolyn Dean, and Elizabeth Weed also helped me to acknowledgments 211 212 acknowledgments become a better scholar, teacher, and colleague. My fellow graduate students at Brown, especially Elisa Glick, Faye Halpern, Meegan Kennedy, Gautam Premnath, Kasturi Ray, and Annette Van, created a crucial intellectual community. While completing my dissertation, I worked with two other graduate students in a feminist dissertation group that Tom Metcalf once infamously called the “ladies knitting circle.” I am the third “lady” to publish her book from our “circle”: Michelle Elizabeth Tusan’s Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain and Durba Ghosh’s Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire form the first two parts of our trilogy. Durba and Michelle are outstanding readers and critics, and they taught this literary scholar to think historically. I am continually grateful to them for their friendship and intellectual generosity. I have had the incredible good fortune to work with Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Caren’s and Inderpal’s groundbreaking work in transnational feminism challenged me to reconceptualize my work on early twentieth-century British culture in a transnational frame. Their mentorship , collegiality, support, and intellectual challenges provided me with the critical tools to center questions of nationalism and citizenship in my work on queer subjectivity. I thank them for their friendship and for the models of their teaching and scholarship. At San Francisco State University I have colleagues and students who care passionately about intellectual work and who have supported the writing of this book in many ways.This project would not be complete without the encouragement of my colleagues in the Department of Women and Gender Studies and especially without the support from my former chair, Minoo Moallem, and from dean Paul Sherwin. Within and beyond my home department, many colleagues read my work and provided crucial feedback and essential deadlines. Jillian Sandell and James Martel read every page of this manuscript: I cannot thank them enough for their incisive engagements. Thank you also to Nan Alamilla Boyd, Jessica Fields, Julietta Hua, Kasturi Ray, Loretta Stec, Amy Sueyoshi, and Gust Yep. My meticulous graduate research assistant, Sharon Miller, helped pull it all together. Invitations from the Sexuality Studies Department and the Women’s History Month committee to present early versions of this work on campus created important opportunities for the development of the project. I also acknowledge my students at San Francisco State University, whose passion for social justice helps me to think about the stakes of academic work on sexuality, war, and identity. acknowledgments 213 Conversations with many colleagues sharpened my work on sexuality , nationalism, gender, and cultural studies. By reading portions of this manuscript, offering advice about publication, sharing their expertise, and encouraging my research, Lucy Bland, Melissa Bradshaw, Laura Doan...