Postwar French Media, and the Struggle for Gay Rights

FAIN: FT-248681-16

Tamara Chaplin
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)

A book-length study of the history of French lesbian activism since World War II.

In 2013, France legalized gay marriage. Desiring Women: Lesbians, Media, and the Struggle for Gay Rights in Postwar France argues that lesbian engagement with the media helped liberalize French attitudes towards sexual difference in the postwar era. My book insists that we look at lesbians both because they achieved this end by using new forms of social media, and because wider French support for gay rights only surfaced in the 1990s after alternative and mainstream media reframed "deviant" homosexual desire as maternal and familial. Drawing on text, radio, TV, the Internet, and extensive filmed interviews, Desiring Women offers a rich rendering of a previously undocumented French lesbian past. In so doing, it provides the first postwar history of an understudied French sexual minority, shows how lesbians challenged the republican model of French citizenship, and prefigures the ways in which oppressed groups use social media (e.g., the Arab Spring) to drive political change.