Configurations of the Female Closet: 1800-1930

Abstract

Since the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, the closet has become one of the most crucial theoretical frameworks of queer studies. Sedgwick and critics following in her footsteps have conceptualised the closet as a quintessentially male construct. Configurations of the Female Closet: 1800-1930 offers a counterpoint to this tendency by paying attention to the female closet in the period from the closet’s development in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the ‘outing’ of the female (lesbian) closet in the late 1920s. In doing so, this thesis does, however, not exclusively focus on a female homosexual closet: Instead, it also investigates other forms of female closetedness that were prominent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and may still be relevant today. The terminology of the ‘closet’ is thus widened to include three central configurations of the female closet: the criminal closet, the victimisation closet and the lesbian closet.