“Becoming Lesbian” in Modern France: Queer History for Troubled Times

Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered. Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of the event.

This event will be held in English. Book sales courtesy of feminist, lesbian, and LGBTQIA+ bookstore Violette and Co.

Organized by the Columbia Global Paris Center. To be notified of our upcoming events, we invite you to sign up for our twice monthly newsletter.

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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.

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. It reveals how the subcultural spaces of sapphic desire that emerged in lesbian cabarets in interwar Paris outlasted the war and were instrumental to the politicization of lesbian identity in the decades after May ’68. 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.

Tamara Chaplin is Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A scholar of sexualities, gender, social justice, and the media in contemporary France, Chaplin’s latest book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (U Chicago Press, 2024), is forthcoming in French translation from Les Léonides/ Les Nouveaux Éditeurs in January 2027. A documentary film based on the book is under development with filmmaker Olivìa Pedroso. An internationally respected scholar recently interviewed in Le Monde, Chaplin is the author of Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (U Chicago Press, 2007), and The Global Sixties: Convention, Contest, and Counterculture (co-edited with Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney, Routledge, 2017). A former professional dancer and trained actor, she is committed to activist scholarship whose impact extends beyond the academy.

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