“Queering French History”: Illuminating Lesbian Experience in the Archive
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![Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France cover mockup](/sites/default/files/2023-11/Coby%20Blog%20Thumbnail.png)
On October 17, 2023, Professor Tamara Chaplin (History UIUC) presented her talk “Queering French History” as part of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory’s Modern Critical Theory lecture series.
“How do I name the queer past?” This is a question Tamara Chaplin grapples with throughout her book Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France. In her Modern Critical Theory (MCT) lecture, Chaplin demonstrated how queer theory has informed her work as a historian.
To begin uncovering how one might write a queer history of the past, Chaplin engaged the MCT...