Tirza True Latimer: 2002 REVIEW by Tirza True Latimer, Stanford University. This review originally appeared in the Newsletter of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, issue 16/1(Spring 2002), and is reprinted with thepermission of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History at www.usc.edu/isd/archives/clgh online.
If the figure of the male homosexual took shape in modern England's popular imagination as a consequence of Oscar Wilde's 1895 trials for "acts of gross indecency," the figure of the lesbian, Laura Doan argues, coalesced a generation later around the publication of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Taking her cue from Alan Sinfield—who, in The Wild Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (1994), represents Wilde's trials as pivotal in the formation of the modern male homosexual subject—Doan identifies the 1928 obscenity proceedings against Hall's novel as "the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian subculture" (xiii).
For some readers, including myself, watershed narratives of the historical process set off alarms. Doan effectively appeases this critical reflex, however, by setting the obscenity trial, as the primal scene of lesbian legibility, against a backdrop of historical and rhetorical events that incrementally brought the modern lesbian subject into focus. Doan's account is anything but simplistic. She traces her "alternative genealogy of modern English lesbian culture" (xvii) within a complex discursive field to which the emergent "science" of sexology, photo-journalism, fashion, caricature, portrait photography, popular literature—as well as the law—contribute.
With each word of the book's title Doan lays out the terms and establishes the parameters of her rigorously historical analysis. The word "Fashioning" evokes not only the creative agency of Hall and the other lesbians featured in this study but also suggests the importance of costume as a site of both self-representation and modernity. Two of the chapters—3, "Outraging the Decencies of Nature? Uniformed Female Bodies" and 4, "Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in the 1920s"—deal in depth with the sexual politics of dress. The word "Sapphism," a dated expression for desire between women, "reminds us that the 'lesbian' as a reified cultural concept or stereotype, was, prior to [Hall's] 1928 obscenity trial, as yet unformed in English culture beyond an intellectual elite" (xvii). Chapter 2, "'That Nameless Vice Between Women': Lesbianism and the Law," establishes the unintelligibility, invisibility, and unspeakability of the lesbianism England of the 1910s and 20s, while chapter 5, "Lesbian Writers and Sexual Science: A Passage to Modernity," explores the shifting terms of lesbian subjectivity within the scientific texts consulted (and embroidered upon) by literary and artistic lesbians of Hall's era.
The word "Origins" announces the genealogical thrust of Doan's initiative. Chapter 1, "The Mythic Moral Panic: Radclyffe Hall and the New Genealogy," wryly acknowledges that quests for origins often seek to validate contemporary, not historical, perspectives. Here, Doan challenges a few of the myths "generated by scholarly accounts of lesbianism" such as the "widespread belief concerning moral panic about the lesbian menace" in England of the 1920s (xx-xxi). The word "Modern" locates the lesbian subject squarely within a "society undergoing radical change in ways that continued the rupture of the separate spheres, public and private, which had hitherto excluded women from modernity" (xviii). Chapter 6, "Portrait of a Sapphist? Fixing the Frame of Reference," explores photography as a quintessentially modern site of self-imaging and self-promotion for women (homosexual and heterosexual alike) aspiring to cultural recognition.
The word "English" alerts us to the particularity of English national culture, English modernity, and therefore English lesbian culture. "To align Hall," Doan cautions, "with women such as Stein, Cather, and Barney, as is commonplace in the critical literature, neglects how the English engagement with modernity developed certain unique features" (xix), the rigid imprint of class-based values, for instance. Doan aligns Hall, instead, with other prominent English lesbians (the painter Gluck, the writer Bryher, the pioneer in women's policing Mary Sophia Allen) whose professional activities kept them in the forefront of English cultural life during the interwar period. Last but not least, the words "Lesbian Culture" bring us back to our own time, our own vocabulary, our own preoccupations with identity and its cultural transmission. With these words Doan makes visible, in the feminist tradition, her own vantage point as a contemporary scholar of lesbianism.
Doan's carefully worded title provides not only the outlines of this interrogation, as a title should, but also suggests the strengths that make the book stand out in the historiography of lesbian culture. (Doan's impressive grasp of that historiography is not, however, adequately represented by the bibliography, which could be productively expanded—as could the book's index—should the opportunity arise.) The book's strengths include—in addition to a scrupulous respect for historical specificity—a rare emphasis on visual forms of lesbian cultural discourse (fashion in particular), a nuanced understanding of the ways in which competing notions of lesbianism circulated and underwent modification within a wide range of discursive genres, and, finally, a constructive skepticism vis-à-vis the foundational texts of lesbian studies and their underlying assumptions. This book, with its in-depth case studies and its sweeping interdisciplinary scope, offers a model for cultural-historical investigation.
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