Passion and (Margaret) Sweat: Reconsidering Ethel's Love-Live (1858)
Prof. Dorri Beam, English
Like critics such as Christopher Looby and Sharon Marcus, I am intrigued by the possibilities of unfamiliar models of sex and gender in a period prior to the institutionalizing of a heterosexual/homosexual binary. In this paper, I’d particularly like to treat Margaret Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life, 1858, occasionally cited as the “first American lesbian novel”, but seldom analyzed. Margaret Sweat was primarily a reviewer for the North American Review (often considered now as a male bastion). Her novel, an intriguing literary experiment that also taps into radical sexual reform, is composed as a series of introspective letters from Ethel to her fiancé, Ernest, about her past loves, women included. My sense is that this novel cannot be talked about exclusively in terms of homosexual panic, or a retreat from the queer possibilities it raises, as its single important critic has argued. My paper will explore the tension, and sometimes the play, between the novel’s conservative form (its trajectory toward marriage, its element of spiritual autobiography that monitors the self) and its model of passion as electric and flowing.
Becoming Lesbians: Reading Cross-dressing in Early US Film
Laura Horak, Film Studies
Although lesbian viewers of recent decades have been eager to claim the cross-dressed women of the American silent screen as early representations of lesbianism, it is remarkable how late US films and their critics made a connection between cross-dressing and same-sex desire. Dressing women like men was a popular trope in US silent film, with a wide variety of meanings, ranging from vigorous frontier femininity, to pre-sexual adolescence or fashionable androgynous modernity. Laura Doane has documented how the “severely masculine look” in women’s fashions of the 1920s only became a publicly recognized code for lesbianism in England after the highly-publicized trial of Radclyff Hall’s *Well of Loneliness* in 1928. Likewise, I have found that cross-dressing did not provoke suspicions of lesbianism in US film and film criticism until the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this talk, I trace the shift through the changes in gender inversion comedies and descriptions of masculine women in the film press, and new anxieties around cross-dressing films in censorship documents. I attribute this new connection between cross-dressing and lesbianism in US films not only to the *Well of Loneliness* trials in London and New York in the late 1920s, but, more immediately, to the importation of sexually knowing films, filmmakers and actors from Europe to the United States in the early 1930s. Once cross-dressing became publicly legible as a lesbian signifier, it soon became readable as little else.
More details:
http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/decoding-desire
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