Chapter 7- Allen: Sexual Offences Prosecutions in the Late Twentieth Century
[Note: I think I’m succeeding in a briefer, high-level summary for the remaining chapters. These notes may be more random and unconnected.]
20th c
The strict scope of this project cuts off at the 20th century, but this tag will occasionally be used when a source spills over.
LHMP entry
[Note: it is actually rather hard to do a very condensed overview of these chapters that are of less interest to the Project. I’m trying to get much more high-level for these last few chapters.]
A 1957 committee considered potential changes to the legal treatment of “vices”. One goal of the changes was to keep activities in this category, such as prostitution and homosexuality, out of public view. Even decriminalization was not intended for the benefit of the accused, but to suppress knowledge of the activities.
By the 1920s, certain sexual offenses between women were criminalized, but not the generic “gross indecency”. “Female husband” disappeared from the record with respect to sexual offenses, but the case of Victor/Valerie Barker signals a new direction of medicalized approaches, combined with anxiety over single women in the wake of World War I and the glimmerings of visibility brought by the obscenity lawsuit over The Well of Loneliness. This was a short-lived visibility ended by a rejection of sexological arguments for acceptance.
In 1921, Parliament debated, but did not pass, a bill that would have criminalized “gross indecency between female persons” as part of a general male reaction to the new freedoms and social power women were obtaining. There was a belief that if women engaged in lesbianism, they would never again be interested in men.
Derry begins by contradicting the myth that Queen Victoria was the reason there were no laws in England against lesbianism. There are three problems with this myth: no such law was proposed; if it had been, the queen wouldn’t have any power to block it; and such a blockage wouldn’t explain the earlier absence of such laws. But the lack of specific laws doesn’t equal the “benign neglect” suggested by some historians. The main policy against lesbianism was silencing. Laws would recognize lesbianism as “a thing,” whereas silencing was aimed at preventing it from being imaginable.
A brief survey article discussing how the author came to study lesbian themes in Chinese history. Around the turn of the 20th century, Chinese women studying in Japan formed a mutual support organization that also had feminist and nationalist goals. Leadership included the fascinating Qiu Jin, who transgressed gender in clothing and behavior. But the question arises whether such organizations and figures fit into lesbian history.
That takes care of all the chapters that cover pre-20th century material. Here’s what the rest of the book covers:
Part IV - Queer Modernisms
- Danius, Sara “Black Socks, Green Threads: On Proust and the Hermeneutics of Inversion”
- Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha “‘This Sudden Silence’: A Brief History of the Literature of Caribbean Women Who Love Women”
- Cole, Merrill “Modernist Poetry”
- Gurfinkel, Helena “Queer, Cosmopolitan”
Part V - Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World
This chapter looks at two creative movements that intersected strongly with queer representation. Of these, the decadent movement was more pervasive. While centered in France, it was international in scope, while the aesthetic movement was primarily British. The author is interested in these movements in how they expressed the complexities and contradictions of developing “queer modernity.”
This article works through a lens of the sexualization of Black identities and Black bodies, as well as how desire is constructed in Black writing. The content is not limited to writers with same-sex desire and covers up through 1930, looking at three distinct eras: antebellum, later 19th century, and Harlem Renaissance. [Note: the Harlem Renaissance is a rich historic and social era, but falls outside the time scope of the Project.]
This chapter begins with a discussion of what is known about Sappho, her poetry, and her reputation among her contemporaries in ancient Greece. The tragically fragmentary nature of the written legacy of her work is traced, including the nine volume collection lost in the 9th century and the recovery of fragments of her work from papyrus sources in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
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