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In Becoming Lesbian, Tamara Chaplin argues that the history of female same-sex intimacy is central to understanding the struggle to control the public sphere. This monumental study draws on undiscovered sources culled from cabaret culture, sexology, police files, radio, TV, photography, the Minitel (an early form of internet), and private letters, as well as over one hundred interviews filmed by the author. Becoming Lesbian demonstrates how women of diverse classes and races came to define themselves as lesbian and used public spaces and public media to exert claims on the world around them in ways that made possible new forms of gendered and sexual citizenship. Chaplin begins in the sapphic cabarets of interwar Paris. These venues, she shows, exploited female same-sex desire for profit while simultaneously launching an incipient queer female counterpublic. Refuting claims that World War II destroyed this female world, Chaplin reveals instead how prewar sapphic subcultures flourished in the postwar period, laying crucial groundwork for the politicization of lesbian identity into the twenty-first century.

Tamara Chaplin is Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chaplin is a scholar of sexualities, gender, and the media in modern France and the Francophone world. Her research interests include queer identities, social justice, war, and human rights. Chaplin’s latest book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024. Her first book was Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (U Chicago Press, 2007). Chaplin’s publications have appeared in French Historical Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and in edited collections in French, English, Spanish, and Catalan. Her co-edited volume The Global Sixties: Convention, Contest, and Counterculture (with Jadwiga E. Pieper- Mooney), appeared with Routledge in 2017. A former professional ballet dancer and trained actor, Chaplin received her doctorate in Modern European History from Rutgers University (NJ) and her BA from Concordia University (Montreal).

Julian Jackson is Emeritus Professor of Modern French History at QMUL. He is the author of a number of books on modern French history covering the defeat of France in 1940, the German Occupation, homosexuality in postwar France, the ‘events’ of May 1968, a biography of Charles de Gaulle and most recently on the trial of Marshal Petain.

Craig Griffiths is a historian of twentieth-century Europe, specialising in modern German history, queer history and the history of sexuality at Manchester Metropolitan University. His first book The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation won the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize and his current book project investigates the history of human rights through a queer historical lens. 


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