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

Notes

Introduction 1. Feinberg, “Anti-war Message to Pride Marchers.” 2. “The Vulgarity of Lesbianism: Extraordinary Women by Compton Mackenzie ,” 614. 3. In Citizen, Invert, Queer, I primarily use the term homosexual to describe erotic relations between members of the same gender when referring to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although terms such as invert and Sapphist were also used at that time (and will be used here, as appropriate, to indicate debates about specific terms), the inconstancy and incoherence of representations of same-sex erotics (the very subject of this book) make any unified historical accuracy impossible. Homosexual has the grammatical benefit of implying acts or identities , depending on context, and is sufficiently out of use today (unlike the term lesbian, which was also in some use in the early twentieth century) to remind readers of the historically contingent nature of the language of sexual classification. 4. On the transformation of lesbian and gay communities in the United States during and after World War II, see Berubé, Coming Out under Fire. Boyd, in Wide Open Town, and Chauncey, in Gay New York, both complicate Berubé’s thesis by elaborating the continuities, as well as ruptures, produced by World War II in urban gay subcultures in the United States. 5. See Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank, as well as her “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism,” 183–203; and Scott, Refiguring Modernism. 6. In her study of interwar British “Sapphic modernity,” Laura Doan similarly warns against an overreading of modernist cosmopolitan lesbian communities: “It is a mistake to presume too great an interconnectedness of national cultures in relation to a lesbian subcultural style. . . . Such attempts to ‘internationalize’ lesbianism often result in misunderstandings and in the development of myths, such as the myth that situates Radclyffe Hall in the [interwar] Parisian lesbian scene” (Fashioning Sapphism, xix–xx). notes 215 216 notes for chapter 1 7. For foundational work on “imperialism and motherhood,” see Anna Davin’s essay of that title. See also McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat, Dangerous Liaisons; and Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem, BetweenWoman and Nation, on questions of nation, gender, and modernity. 8. Garrity, Step-daughters of England, 3. 9. My use of the phrase and thinking about “female masculinity” is deeply indebted to Judith Halberstam’s groundbreaking 1998 monograph of that title. 10. Some key histories of lesbian and gay identity that explore a sexological foundation (for better or for worse) include Weeks’s Coming Out; Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men; Hart’s Fatal Women; and Bland and Doan’s Sexology in Culture, in which an essay by Jay Prosser also considers the relation of transsexual identities in sexology. On sexological inversion in relation to transsexual or transgender identities, Halberstam writes, “The history of homosexuality and transsexuality was a shared history at the beginning of the [twentieth] century and only diverged in the 1940s, when surgery and hormonal treatments became available to, and demanded by, some cross-identifying subjects” (ibid., 85). 11. Noble, Masculinities without Men? xxix. 12. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 9. 13. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43. 14. Foucault describes bio-power as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (ibid., 140). 15. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 6–7. 16. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 105. 17. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 36. 18. Allatini, Despised and Rejected, 220. 1. Imperialist Classifications 1. In 1894, Grand and Ouida both published essays naming the “New Woman” in the North American Review. For accounts of the term’s genesis, see Ledger, New Woman, 8; and Katz, Impressionist Subjects, 43. 2. Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 190–1920, 4. 3. Spivak, “Globalicities,” 75. 4. See Soloway, Demography and Degeneration; and Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood.” 5. Ledger, New Woman, 64. See also Jusová’s New Woman and the Empire. In her introduction, Jusová writes, “As present-day feminist scholars have begun to acknowledge, many British fin-de-siècle women were actually deeply invested in the maintenance of the British empire, and their work was often steeped in their imperial culture’s racial bias” (5). 6. See Said, Orientalism. notes for chapter 1 217 7. See, to name but a few examples, Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”; Burton, Burdens of History; and Grewal, Home and...