Lesbian subjectivity and the sciences of sexuality, 1920--1970

This dissertation explores how lesbians in the United States deployed the discourse of science to locate themselves in the social landscape from 1920 to 1970. While sexology constructed lesbian subjects as deviant, it simultaneously created opportunities for women with same-sex desire to develop alternative narratives of identity and difference. This work examines four major sites where medical science and lesbian self-representations intersect: Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness and its readers; psychiatrist George Henry's Sexual Variants and the women who volunteered to be studied; the sexual science of lay researcher Barrie Berryman; and the 1950s lesbian publication, The Ladder. Widely interpreted as evidence of lesbian capitulation to the medical model, these connections, on the contrary, reveal that the discourse of science actually enabled lesbians to contest medical notions of sexual deviance and develop new social locations for themselves outside the discourse of science.