Lesbian Broadway: American Theatre And Culture, 1920-1945

Lesbian Broadway: American Theatre and Culture, 1920-1945 is a project of reclamation that begins to document a history of lesbianism on Broadway. Using drama about lesbianism as its vehicle, this study investigates white, middle-class, female homosexuality in the United States from 1920 to 1945 and explores the convergence of Broadway drama, lesbianism, feminism, sexology, eugenics, and American popular culture. While the methodologies employed here vary by chapter, the project as a whole reflects a cultural excavation and analysis of lesbian dramas in their appropriate socio-historical contexts and suggests new critical approaches for studying this neglected collection of plays. Chapter One re-visits the feminist possibilities of realism, specifically lesbian realist drama of the 1920s and 30s, in order to reconsider how genre, feminist criticism, and historical context can inform socio-sexual readings of lesbian drama. Building on this foundation, Chapter Two explores a series of lesbian characters on Broadway that undermines and frequently reverses dominant sexological assumptions about the nature of and threats posed by lesbianism. These plays, when read comparatively, reveal a hierarchy of threatening lesbian types built on theoretical and historical constructions of masculinity. Chapter Three highlights how sexological and eugenic readings of lesbian antagonists dovetail to reveal a shared cultural perception of lesbians as abnormal, base, and immoral females and, consequently, as a threat to social order. A dramaturgical reading suggests how one might complicate understandings of these threats to the social order to view them as progressive depictions of lesbian power and departures from traditional love-triangle tropes. Chapter Four offers a literary and historical reading of Christa Winsloe's Girls in Uniform (1932) that reveals how Winsloe draws parallels between authoritarianism and heteronormativty in a multivalent critique of repressive social structures that were, in 1931, on the rise in Germany. The conclusion explores the contested terrain of feminism and realism and the potential ramifications of grouping these plays together to write a lesbian theatre history