‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain

Murder at the 'Love Hut': at home with Elvira Barney

“…Harry Cocks, for example, has argued that the binaries of homo/heterosexual are recent, echoing Foucault's assertion that sexuality as selfhood is peculiar to the present (Cocks, 2006;Fou cault, 1976). These arguments are supported by other recent histories of sexuality that have argued that mapping our present understanding of sexual identity based on same-sex desire and physical acts of sex onto sexual identities in the past is reductive (Cook, 2014;Hall, 2016;Harris, 2010).…”

Beyond the boundaries of home: interdisciplinary approaches

“…Harry Cocks, for example, has argued that the binaries of homo/heterosexual are recent, echoing Foucault's assertion that sexuality as selfhood is peculiar to the present (Cocks, 2006;Fou cault, 1976). These arguments are supported by other recent histories of sexuality that have argued that mapping our present understanding of sexual identity based on same-sex desire and physical acts of sex onto sexual identities in the past is reductive (Cook, 2014;Hall, 2016;Harris, 2010).…”