She Wolves: Feminine Sapphists and Liminal Socio-Sexual Categories in the Urban Entertainment Industry, 1920-1940

Authors

  • Anastasia Jones University of Toronto

Abstract

This article, “She Wolves: Feminine Sapphists and Liminal Socio-Sexual Categories in the Urban Entertainment Industry, 1920-1940” examines the role of socio-sexual categorizations in show business and bawdy circles in the interwar United States. Utilizing entertainment industry tabloids, I sketch an overview of the representations of various feminine lesbian-inclined women that proliferated throughout the era. Such women, labeled here as sapphists, were simultaneously conspicuous, cunning, inscrutable, and mercenary. Sapphists earned respect by reappropriating the commodification of female bodies, embodying the fraught mores of theatrical circles. The prevalence and prominence of these feminine women in urban subcultures challenges the historiographical emphasis on mannish lesbians and, more generally, gender deviance within queer history. Feminine sapphists also suggest the necessity of broadening genealogies within the history of sexuality beyond the question of sexual taxonomies. 

Author Biography

  • Anastasia Jones, University of Toronto

    Anastasia Jones earned a PhD in History from Yale University in 2013. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled ’She’s That Way’: Female Same-Sex Intimacy and the Growth of Modern Sexual Categories in the U.S., 1920-1940.” She teaches at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto. 

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Published

2017-04-05

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 2 (2017)

Section

Studies