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Abstract
When we fix our gaze on a sexual object in the context of queer remembrance the pull toward a linear narrative of homosexual emancipation is hard to resist. The use of queer portraiture in the Tate Britain’s exhibition (‘Queer British Art, 1861–1967’), marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act (1967), provides a good opportunity for reflecting on the limits and possibilities of expecting resemblance across time. Identifying the sitter as an X binds us to a past remembered which condenses all the messiness of sexual desire into the modern categories prevalent today, though this approach to pastness entails risk in increasing rather than decreasing the distance between then and now. Looking specifically at the portraits of two women prominent in London’s bohemian circles in the interwar era (Radclyffe Hall and Una, Lady Troubridge) I wonder what is at stake in imagining the object as like us.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, 28.
3. Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 8.
4. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality, 21; Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 8.
5. For an extensive overview of LGBT and queer historicizing practices across the disciplines see my recent monograph, Disturbing Practices. In a sustained critique of David Halperin’s How to Do the History of Homosexuality, I acknowledge that his ‘attempt to harness the power of a Foucauldian genealogical practice for tracing back a queer subject has been highly effective and deeply influential in activating and animating historicizing markedly different from lesbian and gay practices’ (15). Nonetheless, in Halperin’s approach ‘there remains at least some of the impulses and structuring habits’ of LGBT history writing (16). While politically useful, this ‘lingering conceptual investment in the discursive logic’ of modern homosexuality obscures other ways in which the sexual past might be known, an argument I illustrate through numerous case studies. Disturbing Practices also builds on the arguments of queer scholars such as Jennifer Doyle, as seen in my call for differentiating between queerness-as-being and queerness-as-method; see Doyle, ‘Queer Wallpaper’.
6. Historians as well as literary and cultural critics interested in the past have explored the epistemological consequences of timescales in relation to queer identification across and through time; see Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, Puff, ‘After the History of (Male) Homosexuality’, and Traub, Thinking Sex.
7. For a discussion of the tensions in these two different engagements with the past – history and memory – see my essay, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’.
8. Drayton, ‘Imperial History and the Human Future’, 167.
9. For a cogent overview of these shifts in history writing see the first chapter (‘Historicizing Theory’) of Gunn’s History and Cultural Theory, 1–25.
10. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 55.
11. Ibid., 7.
12. Scott, ‘History-Writing as Critique’, 29; Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’, 126.
13. Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’, 896; Scott, ‘History-Writing as Critique,’ 35.
14. Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, 28.
15. Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 23.
16. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 43.
17. Ibid., 44
18. Ibid., 11.
19. Ibid., 11.
20. Ibid., 41.
21. Ibid., 1.
22. Ibid., 9; Armitage and Guldi, ‘The History Manifesto: A Reply’, 548.
23. For a sense of the immediacy of the backlash see the rapid response of historian Matt Houlbrook, et al: https://mbsbham.wordpress.com/responding-to-the-history-manifesto/
24. ‘AHR Exchange: On The History Manifesto’, 527.
25. Cohen and Mandler, ‘The History Manifesto: A Critique’, 541.
26. Ibid., 542.
27. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 121.
28. Ibid., 84.
29. Ibid., 4.
30. Ibid., 11.
31. Ibid., 9.
32. Ibid., 7.
33. Ibid., 8.
34. Ibid., 10.
35. Dinshaw et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities’, 187.
36. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 11.
37. Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’, 125, 126. See also, for example Cooper, The Sexual Perspective. Leila Rupp surveys a huge expanse of time from 40,000 BCE to the present; see her Sapphistries. Other examples include Lanser, The Sexuality of History.
38. Traub, ‘The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’, 21; Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’, 126.
39. Casey, Remembering, 256.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, 45.
43. Ibid., 28.
44. West, Portraiture, 45; Ambrose, Heroes and Exiles.
45. Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 144, 138.
46. Baker, Our Three Selves, 1.
47. For a discussion of lesbian signifiers see the entry by Jan Laude under ‘Folklore, Lesbian’, 416.
48. Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian, 290.
49. Cassandra Langer in interview with Rule, ‘Defying Convention’.
51. Cooper, The Sexual Perspective, 91.
52. Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart, 24.
53. Press release by Rod Macneil for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, October 11, 2000, see http://bampfa.org/press/amazons-drawing-room-art-romaine-brooks; Bade, Lempicka, 65; Cooper, The Sexual Perspective, 91.
54. Langer, Romaine Brooks, 125.
55. See http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/its-time-acknowledge-romaine-brooks-early-20th-century-artist-180959725/; http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2016/brooks/
56. Langer, Romaine Brooks, 124–5.
57. Ibid., 125.
58. Ibid., 131.
59. Langer refers here to a self-portrait painted by Romaine Brooks in 1923; Langer in interview with Rule, ‘Defying Convention’.
60. Lucchesi in interview with Rule, ‘Defying Convention’; Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’, 131–2.
61. For a cogent introduction to the field of trans studies see Stryker and Whittle.
62. Hall, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, no page number.
63. Stryker, ‘Transgender Feminism’, 62.
64. Ormrod, Una Troubridge, 29; Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 137.
65. West, Portraiture, 87.
66. For a sustained discussion of these spectatorial effects, see Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, especially 95–125.
67. Ribeiro, The Gallery of Fashion, 208. For a thoughtful discussion of lesbianism and ‘dandy chic’, see Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart, 62.
68. Beerbohm, ‘Dandies and Dandies’, 12; Schaffer, ‘Fashioning Aestheticism’, 47.
69. Ormrod, Una Troubridge, 91.
71. Identitarian, in this context, refers to organizing sexual knowledge in relation to modern categories of identity, such as lesbian, gay or bisexual.
72. Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 144.
73. Ormrod, Una Troubridge, 103.
74. Letter dated May 20, 1924, Romaine Brooks/Natalie Barney Correspondence, box 1, folder 1, McFarland Library, University of Tulsa. Cited by Chadwick, ‘Amazons and Heroes’, 35.
75. Langer, Romaine Brooks, 129.
76. Souhami, Gluck, 63.
77. Brittain, Radclyffe Hall, 157.
78. Ormrod, Una Troubridge, 313.
79. See http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/location.php?locid=50; personal correspondence with Paul Cox, Associate Curator, NPG (2016).
81. ‘AHR Exchange: On The History Manifesto: Introduction’, 527.
82. Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’, 126.
83. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 123.
84. West, Portraiture, 44.
85. Lucchesi in interview with Rule, ‘Defying Convention’.
86. Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, i.
87. Ibid., 30.
88. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 117.
90. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 107.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Laura Doan
Laura Doan is Professor of Cultural History and Sexuality Studies at the University of Manchester, England. She is the author of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality and Women’s Experience of Modern War (2013) and Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (2001).