Hidden in plain sight: The reconstruction of lesbian modernist sexual histories

The recuperation of lesbian modernism as a set of aesthetic experiments within literature, the visual arts and architecture, and as a catalogue of instances of cultural production, has constituted a body of work, and set of critical interventions, undertaken by feminist, lesbian and queer scholars since the late 1980s. This work has been necessary, restorative and often challenging. Prising open the definition of modernism to reveal the hidden and the neglected practitioners on the ‘periphery’ of this explosive and canonised period has focused on the pressures that including lesbian, queer and dissident sexual identities and desires brings to bear upon...