Global France Seminar presents, Tamara Chaplin “Becoming Lesbian in Modern France: Queer History for Troubled Times”

Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Research Associate at Université de Paris Panthéon-Assas

Abstract: Historian Tamara Chaplin has spent the last fifteen years researching what it meant to “become lesbian” in twentieth century France. Her book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024) argues that this process was inextricable from access to public space and public media. Contradicting the belief that WWII and the rise of Vichy quashed a golden age of lesbian emancipation in France, Becoming Lesbian reveals instead how the subcultural spaces of sapphic desire that emerged in the cabarets of interwar Paris outlasted the war and were instrumental to the politicization of lesbian identity in the decades after May ’68. The individuals implicated in this trajectory revolutionized lesbian life (expanding social access, cultural representation, and legal rights) while making possible new forms of sexual citizenship that have challenged the divisions between public and private that shape contemporary France. In so doing, their stories also contradict dominant understandings of the French past. At a moment when queer lives around the globe are increasingly under attack, join us for a conversation about what we can learn from lesbian history in these troubled times.

Bio: Tamara Chaplin, Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is also Research Associate at the Université de Paris Panthéon-Assas. A scholar of queer sexualities, social justice, and the media, her monograph, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France was published by U Chicago Press in 2024. It is forthcoming in French translation from Les Léonides (2027). A documentary film based on the book is under development with filmmaker Olivìa Pedroso. Chaplin’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Camargo Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study among others. Previous publications include Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (2007), and the co-edited, The Global Sixties: Convention, Contest, and Counterculture (2017). A former professional dancer and trained actor, she is committed to activist scholarship whose impact extends beyond the academy. Chaplin and Hannah Frydman (Harvard) are currently curating a forum on writing lesbian history for French Historical Studies.