Modernist Sexualities

Employing diverse theoretical approaches, the essays in this volume show how modernism intersects with historical developments such as the suffragette movement, technological change and its effects on women and labour, the growth of pseudo-scientific writings and the burgeoning lesbian and gay movement. They show how modernism questions the fundamentals of identity and upsets the fixities of gender and sexuality through a fascination with ambiguities, marginality and the crossing of borders. The book explores strategies of expressing same-sex desires in unexpected settings, modes of remaking sex and the body, relations between writing and reading, between public and private, between performer, performance and audience in a modernism broadly conceived to include political demonstrations, political essays and the visual arts alongside narrative and poetry.

Sex reformers and sex-changers, unsexed storytellers, typewriters, femme and butch experimenters, suffragettes in wide-brimmed hats, musical and dramatic pageants, adolescent deliquents, sunbathers and dancing indigenes, all play a role in the heterodox and varied modernism revealed in this exciting volume of essays.