The highly publicized obscenity trial of Radclyffe
Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) is generally
recognized as the crystallizing moment in the
construction of a visible modern English lesbian
culture, marking a great divide between innocence and
deviance, private and public, New Woman and Modern
Lesbian. Yet despite unreserved agreement on the
importance of this cultural moment, previous studies
often reductively distort our reading of the formation
of early twentieth-century lesbian identity, either by
neglecting to examine in detail the developments leading
up to the ban or by framing events in too broad a
context against other cultural phenomena. Fashioning
Sapphism locates the novelist Radclyffe Hall and other
prominent lesbians -- including the pioneer in women's
policing, Mary Allen, the artist Gluck, and the writer
Bryher -- within English modernity through the multiple
sites of law, sexology, fashion, and literary and visual
representation, thus tracing the emergence of a modern
English lesbian subculture in the first two decades of
the twentieth century. Drawing on extensive new archival
research, the book interrogates anew a range of myths
long accepted without question (and still in
circulation) concerning, to cite only a few, the extent
of homophobia in the 1920s, the strategic deployment of
sexology against sexual minorities, and the rigidity of
certain cultural codes to denote lesbianism in public
culture.
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