In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homo... more In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture.
Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.
An exhibit at the Museum of the American Military Family provides a springboard from which to inv... more An exhibit at the Museum of the American Military Family provides a springboard from which to investigate spray starch. The exhibit elicits recollections of military ironing as a masculine labor of precision, rather than unskilled feminized work. A starched and ironed uniform signals military conformity and discipline; the illusion of race-and gender-blind meritocracy; and sanitized, honorable warriors. Braiding together the military roots of this Cold War-technology with its cultural history reveals the domestic labor that produces spray starched militarized masculinity.
ABSTRACT This article analyses Lifetime Television’s scripted drama Army Wives with related cultu... more ABSTRACT This article analyses Lifetime Television’s scripted drama Army Wives with related cultural texts, social media platforms, and marketing campaigns. Through a refashioning of ‘domestic’ concerns, these texts generate a double narrative which overtly embraces a welfarist model of nationalist sacrifice and reward, while simultaneously promoting individualist neoliberal narratives of self-reliance that underpin defunding state programmes, both military and civilian. This interdisciplinary reading of subjectivity, political economy, and militarism demonstrates how mass cultural ideologies function in relation to neoliberal structures of public and private; highlights widespread failures of the liberal economic social contract and the rise of neoliberal definitions of citizenship; troubles distinctions between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ positions in US cultural politics; and illustrates how representations of US military culture rely on liberal nineteenth-century ideologies of gender and race while simultaneously engaging in a project of neoliberal restructuring.
Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a s... more Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a suite of political essays and fiction at the turn of the twentieth century that explored questions of racial citizenship, reproductive politics, and women’s rights through the discourse of eugenics. Reading Ellis’s 1906 My Cornish Neighbours in relation to current debates surrounding queer theory reveals an important relationship between the history of eugenics and current queer theories of futurity and abjection. By examining early twentieth-century discourses of reproduction, kinship, and citizenship through the lenses of feminist geopolitics and queer temporality, the article illustrates how Ellis’s articulations of alternative kinships and queer eugenics might move current work in queer theory to consider the embedded structure of racial hierarchies in discussions of futurity, and the relationship of normative and oppositional kinship structures to the geopolitical.
This essay interrogates the representational violence that accompanied the material violence of t... more This essay interrogates the representational violence that accompanied the material violence of the US-led war in Iraq (2003−2011) by examining how ideological constructions of “home,” war waging, and child-rearing function in the memoir and subsequent lm American Sniper by Chris Kyle and the memoir by his wife, Taya Kyle. Read in public debates as uncontroversial, lauded from ideologues left and right, the role of the military spouse in the American Sniper oeuvre shores up a politics of redemption that venerates American exceptionalism while claiming a status of universalized and depoliticized womanhood. Highlighting the role of Taya Kyle as a military spouse and war widow illustrates how the trope of nationalist white womanhood becomes key to the operations not only of homefront biopolitical projects, but also of warfront necropolitical projects of empire.
This article analyzes Lifetime Television’s scripted drama _Army Wives_ with related cultural tex... more This article analyzes Lifetime Television’s scripted drama _Army Wives_ with related cultural texts, social media platforms, and marketing campaigns. Through a refashioning of ‘domestic’ concerns, these texts generate a double narrative which overtly embraces a welfarist model of nationalist sacrifice and reward, while simultaneously promoting individualist neoliberal narratives of self-reliance that underpin defunding state programs, both military and civilian. This interdisciplinary reading of subjectivity, political economy, and militarism demonstrates how mass cultural ideologies function in relation to neoliberal structures of public and private; highlights widespread failures of the liberal economic social contract and the rise of neoliberal definitions of citizenship; troubles distinctions between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ positions in US cultural politics; and illustrates how representations of U.S. military culture rely on liberal nineteenth century ideologies of gender and race while simultaneously engaging in a project of neoliberal restructuring.
The central goal of this proposed special issue is to bring feminist analyses of militarism to be... more The central goal of this proposed special issue is to bring feminist analyses of militarism to bear on the production of homefronts: the militarized ideologies that identify some spaces as those of active warfare as distinct from other locations of civilian safety and support. When we interrogate how some militarized spaces are deemed “frontlines” and others “homefronts”, geopolitical and gendered vectors of power collide, often reasserting histories not only of gendered nationalisms, but also of colonial and imperialist logics and the production of differential citizenships. This special issue seeks to call attention to the production and reproduction of militarized structural inequalities by studying how designations of “homefront” and “frontlines” function in a range of geopolitical, cultural, and historical contexts.
Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a s... more Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a suite of political essays and fiction at the turn of the twentieth century that explored questions of racial citizenship, reproductive politics, and women’s rights through the discourse of eugenics. Reading Ellis’s 1906 My Cornish Neighbours in relation to current debates surrounding queer theory reveals an important relationship between the history of eugenics and current queer theories of futurity and abjection. By examining early twentieth-century discourses of reproduction, kinship, and citizenship through the lenses of feminist geopolitics and queer temporality, this article illustrates how Ellis’s articulations of alternative kinships and queer eugenics might move current work in queer theory to consider the embedded structure of racial hierarchies in discussions of futurity, and the relationship of normative and oppositional kinship structures to the geopolitical.
In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homo... more In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture.
Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.
An exhibit at the Museum of the American Military Family provides a springboard from which to inv... more An exhibit at the Museum of the American Military Family provides a springboard from which to investigate spray starch. The exhibit elicits recollections of military ironing as a masculine labor of precision, rather than unskilled feminized work. A starched and ironed uniform signals military conformity and discipline; the illusion of race-and gender-blind meritocracy; and sanitized, honorable warriors. Braiding together the military roots of this Cold War-technology with its cultural history reveals the domestic labor that produces spray starched militarized masculinity.
ABSTRACT This article analyses Lifetime Television’s scripted drama Army Wives with related cultu... more ABSTRACT This article analyses Lifetime Television’s scripted drama Army Wives with related cultural texts, social media platforms, and marketing campaigns. Through a refashioning of ‘domestic’ concerns, these texts generate a double narrative which overtly embraces a welfarist model of nationalist sacrifice and reward, while simultaneously promoting individualist neoliberal narratives of self-reliance that underpin defunding state programmes, both military and civilian. This interdisciplinary reading of subjectivity, political economy, and militarism demonstrates how mass cultural ideologies function in relation to neoliberal structures of public and private; highlights widespread failures of the liberal economic social contract and the rise of neoliberal definitions of citizenship; troubles distinctions between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ positions in US cultural politics; and illustrates how representations of US military culture rely on liberal nineteenth-century ideologies of gender and race while simultaneously engaging in a project of neoliberal restructuring.
Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a s... more Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a suite of political essays and fiction at the turn of the twentieth century that explored questions of racial citizenship, reproductive politics, and women’s rights through the discourse of eugenics. Reading Ellis’s 1906 My Cornish Neighbours in relation to current debates surrounding queer theory reveals an important relationship between the history of eugenics and current queer theories of futurity and abjection. By examining early twentieth-century discourses of reproduction, kinship, and citizenship through the lenses of feminist geopolitics and queer temporality, the article illustrates how Ellis’s articulations of alternative kinships and queer eugenics might move current work in queer theory to consider the embedded structure of racial hierarchies in discussions of futurity, and the relationship of normative and oppositional kinship structures to the geopolitical.
This essay interrogates the representational violence that accompanied the material violence of t... more This essay interrogates the representational violence that accompanied the material violence of the US-led war in Iraq (2003−2011) by examining how ideological constructions of “home,” war waging, and child-rearing function in the memoir and subsequent lm American Sniper by Chris Kyle and the memoir by his wife, Taya Kyle. Read in public debates as uncontroversial, lauded from ideologues left and right, the role of the military spouse in the American Sniper oeuvre shores up a politics of redemption that venerates American exceptionalism while claiming a status of universalized and depoliticized womanhood. Highlighting the role of Taya Kyle as a military spouse and war widow illustrates how the trope of nationalist white womanhood becomes key to the operations not only of homefront biopolitical projects, but also of warfront necropolitical projects of empire.
This article analyzes Lifetime Television’s scripted drama _Army Wives_ with related cultural tex... more This article analyzes Lifetime Television’s scripted drama _Army Wives_ with related cultural texts, social media platforms, and marketing campaigns. Through a refashioning of ‘domestic’ concerns, these texts generate a double narrative which overtly embraces a welfarist model of nationalist sacrifice and reward, while simultaneously promoting individualist neoliberal narratives of self-reliance that underpin defunding state programs, both military and civilian. This interdisciplinary reading of subjectivity, political economy, and militarism demonstrates how mass cultural ideologies function in relation to neoliberal structures of public and private; highlights widespread failures of the liberal economic social contract and the rise of neoliberal definitions of citizenship; troubles distinctions between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ positions in US cultural politics; and illustrates how representations of U.S. military culture rely on liberal nineteenth century ideologies of gender and race while simultaneously engaging in a project of neoliberal restructuring.
The central goal of this proposed special issue is to bring feminist analyses of militarism to be... more The central goal of this proposed special issue is to bring feminist analyses of militarism to bear on the production of homefronts: the militarized ideologies that identify some spaces as those of active warfare as distinct from other locations of civilian safety and support. When we interrogate how some militarized spaces are deemed “frontlines” and others “homefronts”, geopolitical and gendered vectors of power collide, often reasserting histories not only of gendered nationalisms, but also of colonial and imperialist logics and the production of differential citizenships. This special issue seeks to call attention to the production and reproduction of militarized structural inequalities by studying how designations of “homefront” and “frontlines” function in a range of geopolitical, cultural, and historical contexts.
Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a s... more Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a suite of political essays and fiction at the turn of the twentieth century that explored questions of racial citizenship, reproductive politics, and women’s rights through the discourse of eugenics. Reading Ellis’s 1906 My Cornish Neighbours in relation to current debates surrounding queer theory reveals an important relationship between the history of eugenics and current queer theories of futurity and abjection. By examining early twentieth-century discourses of reproduction, kinship, and citizenship through the lenses of feminist geopolitics and queer temporality, this article illustrates how Ellis’s articulations of alternative kinships and queer eugenics might move current work in queer theory to consider the embedded structure of racial hierarchies in discussions of futurity, and the relationship of normative and oppositional kinship structures to the geopolitical.
Second-wave feminism has gotten a bad rap recently. In the 1990s, with the advent of poststructur... more Second-wave feminism has gotten a bad rap recently. In the 1990s, with the advent of poststructuralist feminism and queer theory in the academy and the more widely publicized if not widely embraced "postfeminism" of Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, et al., North American academics and ...
A short video profile of my research and current teaching. One in a series for the College of Lib... more A short video profile of my research and current teaching. One in a series for the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at SFSU. Directed by Silvia Turchin.
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Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.
Papers
Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.