Female Masculinity in Radclyffe Hall's Novel The Well of Loneliness

This paper aims to analyze Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness from the perspective of female masculinity. For that purpose, it uses the concept of female masculinity developed by Judith Halberstam. Seen from the angle of female masculinity forwarded by Habersham, the present paper comes to the conclusion that masculinity falls into crisis as we compare it to how it was defined and understood traditionally. Most of the female characters in the novel show boldness, strength and ability to face and tackle different situations filled with danger and hopelessness. A young woman named Stephen Gordon pursues her passions and embarks on her own subjective world. Her activities and choices are anomalous to the established mores concerning the role and position of women. This is what goes against the conventional paradigm of gender and supports the idea of subversive female masculinity.

“Even unto this Bitter Loving”: Unhappiness and Backward Feelings in Ruth

Feminist and queer readings of the Hebrew Bible frequently treat the book of Ruth as a “happy object.” At the same time, contextual readings have suggested that Ruth is a narrative of exploitation, including possible sexual exploitation or trafficking. Building on recent scholarship about queer feelings and affect, this article negotiates a reading that takes seriously both the history of lesbian and queer readings of Ruth and Naomi and the critical attention on structures of exploitation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward (2007), I argue for the importance of feeling, especially unhappy or backward feeling, in reading Ruth. My reading also frames the biblical book in conversation with Radclyffe Hall’s classic 1928 lesbian novel (and source for lesbian and queer theory) The Well of Loneliness. By following unhappiness and backwardness in and around Ruth, we are able to snatch a glimpse of queer feeling, and the space of promise it opens.

«Preferiría verte (muerta) a mis pies». Eróticas maternas e infancias butch en Radclyffe Hall

We will analyze the counterpoint versions of motherhood and butch childhoods in those novels by Radclyffe Hall addressing “sexual inversion,” the lesbian bestseller The Well of Loneliness (1928) and The Unlit Lamp (1924), which present significant differences regarding the conditions of possibility and the misfortunes of a queer life. We will concern ourselves with the representations of maternal abjection, in the light of the importance that Radclyffe assigns to this deeply disturbing erotic bond (whether aversion or attraction) for the development of butch childhoods. We will argue that a careful reading of the perversions of this bond makes clear that Radclyffe’s perspective –for all of its morality, sexual shame and desire to be admitted within the privileges of heterosexuality– allows for a critique of exclusivist, monogamous, and unconditional emotional pacts, as well as of the conception of happiness they give rise to.

‘We’ve called her Stephen’

This article aims to contribute to the still largely unexplored intersection of translation and non-cisgender identities through a comparison of three reeditions of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) in Czech translation. While the novel is considered by many to be the most famous lesbian story published in the 20th century, it can also be read as a narrative with a transgender protagonist. This is in part supported by the fact that the hero of the story is born with a female body but is named Stephen, creating a sense of gendered dissonance throughout the novel. This article asks what happens when this masculine name changes into a feminine one in translation, and explores the sociopolitical circumstances and publishing norms that have motivated this change.

Queer Reflections on Childhood, Boarding School, and the Nation in Rosemary Manning’s The Chinese Garden

This article explores the relations among childhood innocence, queerness, and nation-building in Rosemary Manning’s boarding school narrative, The Chinese Garden (1962). Recent scholarship by Lee Edelman and Kathryn Bond Stockton has questioned the innocence we invest in the figure of the child, and how this innocence has become a precondition for generating heteronormative models of nation-building and imagined futures. Analyzing the boarding school community in The Chinese Garden, this article examines how the figure of the child is used to confirm the compulsory narrative of nation-building even as it queers the very concepts of place and belonging. In the narrative, set in 1928, the year of the publication of The Well of Loneliness, the protagonist witnesses an erotic relationship between two girls without wanting to acknowledge what is happening; it examines both the yearning for innocence and a desire for sexual knowledge within a context of repressive normalization and antihomosexual panic. The Chinese Garden is also a fictional autobiography, foregrounding Manning’s own resistance to her pre-Stonewall historical present, and her fascination with the queer past.

“A Boy Inside It”

This essay explores Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp series “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles” through the lens of trans studies, placing her eponymous hero in conversation with the inversion rhetoric of sexological discourse and the transgender pulp novels that circulated alongside Bannon’s texts in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the prominence of Beebo’s masculine identification, and the fact that Bannon draws heavily from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness—now widely read as a transgender text—Beebo has yet to be read as a character that resonates within both the trans and the lesbian literary canons. Revisioning Beebo as a transmasculine character transforms our understanding of an unfolding trans-gender literary tradition, offering a bridge between Hall’s Stephen Gordon and later twentieth-century articulations of transmasculine identity and embodiment. Further, the essay suggests that Bannon’s series provides a vital intervention in the “case study” framing that dominated both transgender pulp novels and The Well by offering a vision of trans experience that, presented in the romance genre, exists outside medical authority. If we broaden the context for studying Beebo to include other contemporary trans literary genealogies, Bannon’s work becomes integral to understanding the pulp genre’s treatment of transgender themes and the reach of transgender plots and possibilities at midcentury.