Modern French Research Seminar
‘Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France’
Tamara Chaplin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
In 1791, France became the first European country to decriminalize sodomy. From the ancien régime to the present, however, people engaged in homosexual practices have been subject to harassment, discrimination, and violence. And yet they have also secured civil, economic, and political power in the French public sphere. For example: over twenty sapphic cabarets were established by women in Paris in the 1930s; queer women have been visible on French television since the 1950s ; magazines, radio broadcasts, and early internet sites were created for lesbian audiences in the 1970s and 1980s; and—more recently—female same-sex couples acquired the right to form civil partnerships (1999), marry (2013), and procreate via in vitro fertilization (2021). Meanwhile, lesbophobia is on the rise. How do we explain these contradictions?
Join us for a talk with historian Tamara Chaplin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) in which she explores this tension between persecution, presence, public rights, and private acts via a conversation about her new book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (U Chicago Press, 2024). This landmark analysis demonstrates how a marginalized subculture used the modern media to transform public attitudes toward sexual desire.
Tamara Chaplin is Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chaplin is a scholar of sexualities, gender, and the media in modern France and the Francophone world. Her research interests include queer identities, social justice, war, and human rights. Chaplin’s latest book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024. Her first book was Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (U Chicago Press, 2007). Chaplin’s publications have appeared in French Historical Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and in edited collections in French, English, Spanish, and Catalan. Her co-edited volume The Global Sixties: Convention, Contest, and Counterculture (with Jadwiga E. Pieper- Mooney), appeared with Routledge in 2017. A former professional ballet dancer and trained actor, Chaplin received her doctorate in Modern European History from Rutgers University (NJ) and her BA from Concordia University (Montreal).
The Modern French Research Seminar is convened by Jane Hiddleston (Exeter College) and Seth Whidden (The Queen’s College)
