"Making Girls into Women" offers an account of the historical
emergence of "the lesbian" by looking at late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century women's writing. Kathryn R. Kent proposes
that modern lesbian identity in the United States has its roots not
just, or even primarily, in sexology and medical literature, but in
white, middle-class women's culture. Kent demonstrates how, as
white women's culture shifted more and more from the home to the
school, workplace, and boarding house, the boundaries between the
public and private spheres began to dissolve. She shows how, within
such spaces, women's culture, in attempting to mold girls into
proper female citizens, ended up inciting in them other, less
normative, desires and identifications, including ones Kent calls
"protolesbian" or queer.
Kent not only analyzes how texts represent queer erotics, but
also theorizes how texts might produce them in readers. She
describes the ways postbellum sentimental literature such as that
written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Emma D.
Kelley eroticizes, reacts against, and even, in its own efforts to
shape girls' selves, contributes to the production of queer female
identifications and identities. Tracing how these identifications
are engaged and critiqued in the early twentieth century, she
considers works by Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore,
and Elizabeth Bishop, as well as in the queer subject-forming
effects of another modern invention, the Girl Scouts. "Making Girls
into Women" ultimately reveals that modern lesbian identity marks
an extension of, rather than a break from, nineteenth-century
women's culture.
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