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This chapter historicizes queer theory’s insight that lesbianism is often linked to a problem of representation by focusing on links between questions of reading and Platonic-inflected female-female erotic love. It first establishes the complicated discursive context of this larger hermeneutic question through the reception of Sapphic sexuality and, especially, of the female-female being who makes a brief appearance in Aristophanes’s myth of the origin of love from the Symposium. The chapter then turns to one of the very few Neoplatonic representations of female-female eros in the Renaissance, a series of poems by male poets written in the voice of a woman in love with another woman. Embedded within the poems by Jodelle, Tyard, and Ronsard are Neoplatonic commonplaces as well as references to male-male love. The poems are not so much inscribing same-sex female sexuality in the Neoplatonic tradition as much as they are writing it out by decorporealizing love between women. But also, the poets who write about female-female love are also inherently evoking male-male homoeroticism as a way to experience it vicariously, and for this reason, the “lesbian” poems can be taken as a newly-developed and rather sophisticated way to set Plato straight by detour.

Humour and radical politics are often seen as antithetical. When it comes to lesbian radicalism, this perception is even more extreme. Utopias, on the other hand, are most often places of, if not necessarily humour and pleasure, than at least harmony and contentment. Utopian politics in which the comedic is key have figured as an integral part of the most successful strains of French lesbian radicalism since the early 1970s. This chapter brings three “moments” in the history of French lesbian radicalism into dialogue: 1974, via a utopian manifesto written by a member of the Gouines Rouges (one of the first French lesbian radical groups); 1980, via the Lesbian Radical Front; and 1989, via a socio-cultural initiative now known as BagdamEspaceLesbien. These moments show not only the importance of “utopian gaiety” as “a political value for progressive social activism,” but also demonstrate that without attention to the pleasure, French lesbian radicalism, whether as a political agenda or as a social movement, has—thus far—simply not been sustainable. This chapter suggests that paying attention to lesbian humour and pleasure can help us better understand the complicated relationship between radicalism and queer utopias, writ large.

This chapter situates Murry's first novel, Still Life, within the frameworks of his friendship with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and his intimate relationship with Katherine Mansfield. It discusses the impact of Lawrence's ideas about sexuality on Murry's treatment of sex in Still Life, and also takes up the issues of repressed homosexuality and homosocial desire in his friendships with Lawrence, Gordon Campbell, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Mansfield's bisexuality is discussed in relation to Murry's treatment of lesbianism in his novel. The chapter analyses Murry's writing process and his difficulty in following nineteenth-century narrative conventions to write a modernist novel.

Using Bad Boys II, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Alexander, Spider-Man 3 and 300 as illustrative case studies, this chapter maps out homosexuality's status as both structuring presence and structuring absence in contemporary action cinema, as well as documenting how action movies speak to this presence/absence. After a brief history of homosexual screen representations, the chapter argues that the imposition or regulation of a straight-gay binary remains readable in contemporary action cinema, and that as a violent, risk-filled homosocial space the action ?lm provides a fertile ground for the anxieties about losing one's proper gender that Judith Butler has described. Representation of and performance of homosexuality, current practices of presenting and policing homosocial space, and patterns of knowing avaowal and disavowal, are historicized and analysed. The chapter explores how homosexuality operates as metaphor in the superhero action cycle, and as an indicator of villainy in films like Gamer, 300 and Watchmen, and also points up the persistent invisibility of female homosexuality in contemporary action cinema.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian character in the television series The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009). Through a deconstructive reading of the gossip that imagines Moennig’s real-life lesbian gender identities and homoerotic relationships in one of the largest cross-cultural fandoms in Chinese cyberspace, The Garden of Eden (Yidianyuan), the author reveals that, rather than simply assimilating or rejecting the normative understandings of the West as a civilized, queer-friendly haven and China as a backward, heterocentric nation, the fans’ intricate fantasies about the Western queer world reflect their subjective, hybridized reappropriation and reinscription of the Chinese queer Occidentalist imaginations. Ultimately, she argues that the queer Occidentalism exemplified in this cross-cultural gossip functions as a survival strategy for queer fans to interrogate the depressing, heteropatriarchal realities in contemporary mainstream Chinese society.

Women exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable female characters are absent from the narrative. Before the First World War, a sexually conservative reform movement called Social Purity was bringing male sexuality under particular scrutiny, making this a difficult time for Forster to be claiming that homosexuality was not morally wrong. Interpreted against this background, Maurice can be read not as a rebellion against attenuated Victorian attitudes or against women but as a challenge to the contemporary social purity movement. In this context – the difficulty of talking about homosexuality, of which the novel explores the effects – the willingness of Forster’s friend and confidante, Florence Barger, to discuss homosexuality also needs to be seen as significant. She contributed to Forster’s ability to represent homosexuality as a valid alternative to bourgeois masculinity that equated heterosexuality with morality, health and economic success.

This considers the crossovers between lesbian and spinster identities in the interwar period. Lesbian novels by Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamond Lehmann, and Clemence Dane are scrutinized in the context of sexological debates about perversity and abnormality, advice literature on female friendship and arguments about lesbian modernism and female masculinity. I develop queer readings of the ‘apparitional lesbian’ and question whether the lesbian heroine can be rescued from isolation. Such arguments are related to the normalising and coding of same-sex desire in autobiographical accounts.

This also considers the crossovers between lesbian and spinster identities but focuses on the 1930s, and incorporates debates around the older woman. It examines female professionalism and tracks cross-generational female alliances, seen as essential, if precarious, in the progress of feminism. Novels by Virginia Woolf and Winifred Holtby are used to reflect on the progress of the professional spinster and the new older heroine. The 1930s novels of Vita Sackville-West are read as widows' stories through Terry Castle's concept of the post-marital.

The conclusion revisits debates about female singleness and argues that new conceptualisations of lesbianism, spinsterhood and widowhood had helped to trouble and ultimately transform social norms by the end of the 1930s. It links these debates to ongoing concerns about abortion, female promiscuity, celibacy and adoption. It shows how queer readings of novels and autobiographical accounts in this period can help us to rethink our notions of modernity, gender and the family.

Arguing against critical views of Lawrence, which regard him as a sexual conservative, this chapter suggests that his questioning of the coherence of sexual identity anticipates contemporary queer theory. It considers recurrent tensions in Lawrence’s writing between a desire to affirm the supremacy of sexual relationships between men and women and his persistent fascination with same-sex desire and same-sex love. The chapter argues that despite Lawrence’s tendency to disparage lesbianism, his 1923 short novel The Fox contains a tender portrayal of love between women. It closes with a discussion of a range of works in which Lawrence aestheticises love between men, while respecting the taboo against homosexuality. The persistent queer aesthetics in Lawrence’s work are seen as undermining his metaphysical championing of ‘true phallic marriage’.