Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France

A landmark analysis of how a marginalized subculture used modern media to transform public attitudes toward sexual desire. In Becoming Lesbian, historian 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.Re