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

Introduction: Queer Nationalisms

In June 2002, transgender author and activist Leslie Feinberg circulated a broadsheet at U.S. gay pride parades seeking to incite antiwar activism among participants. “When World War I broke out,” it reads in part, “gay and trans movement leaders backed their own [nation’s] rulers in that bloody inter-imperialist war and it derailed their struggle.”1 In 1928, an anonymous review of Compton Mackenzie’s novel Extraordinary Women headlined “The Vulgarity of Lesbianism” asserted that female homosexuality “is impossible to dismiss . . . quite so confidently in these post-war days of boy-girls and girl-boys.”2 Whereas Feinberg critiques the nationalist capitulations of early twentieth-century “gay and trans movement leaders,” the 1928 review attributes the increasing visibility of gender and sexual variations in the interwar period to “wider causes arising out of the war.” These polemics, separated by more than seventy years and two nations, connect homosexual identity and gender variation both to wartime cultural transformations generally and to World War I specifically.3 Citizen, Invert, Queer takes seriously this rhetorical connection and argues that in early twentieth-century Britain, discourses of lesbian identity emerged through the nationalist transformations of World War I (“the Great War”). This book examines the discursive emergence of “boy-girls and girl-boys” through examining the rhetorical and ideological intersections of nationalism and sexuality in the early years of the twentieth century. The production of modern lesbian subjectivity in the interwar years stems from racial and imperialist anxieties as well as from shifts in wartime gendered possibilities for women. Whereas in 2002 activist Feinberg distinguishes “gay and trans” identities from one another, the 1928 book review links the two categories under the rubric “boy-girls and girl-boys.” The review reflects a i n t r o d u c t i o n queer nationalisms ix x introduction common twentieth-century assumption: that women’s gender deviance (female masculinity) is a necessary symptom, signal, or sign of their sexual deviance (female homosexuality). Yet this equation of female masculinity and female homosexuality is a relatively recent, rather than a transhistorical , phenomenon. Citizen, Invert, Queer brings questions of racial, national, and gendered otherness to bear on the construction of whiteness and masculinity in the rise of lesbian identity in Britain. In late nineteenth-century England, gender inversion was primarily a sign of cultural, rather than sexual, transgression . It was not until after the Great War that masculine or mannish women were consistently labeled “homosexual” in British culture. This signification of gender deviance becomes clear when read through public discourses of geopolitics and racial citizenship: at the turn of the twentieth century, masculine women signified a national or eugenic threat more often than a homosexual symptom. The intimate relationship between representations of sexuality and those of empire and nationhood reveals how women’s masculinity and female homosexuality became linked in the public imagination . In this book, I read Feinberg’s “bloody inter-imperialist war” in relation to the discursive development of a “gay and trans movement,” and I parse the connections, in the anonymous 1928 reviewer’s words, among “the vulgarity of lesbianism,” the Great War, and “boy-girls and girl-boys.” Historians of sexuality have established how conditions in the United States during World War II enabled the formations of lesbian and gay communities during and immediately after that war (through the homosocial environments of home-front industry and urban aggregation, homoerotic intimacies among deployed military men and women, and the formation of postwar gay enclaves at ports of call in San Francisco and New York).4 Citizen, Invert, Queer makes a distinct yet related argument: that the ideological and discursive conditions of home-front England enabled the emergence of a language of female homosexual identity during and immediately after the Great War. Whereas the case study of the United States during World War II takes up the reorganization of individuals into homosocial clusters and is an argument about practices, identity, and community, my case study of the years before, during, and after the Great War in England focuses primarily on ideological change and discursive possibilities. Mine is an argument, in other words, not about lesbian sexual practices but about shifting language and the emergence of new categories through which those practices were classified, organized, resisted, or embraced. introduction xi Citizen, Invert, Queer builds on the work of Laura Doan, Jane Garrity, and Gay Wachman...