About this Event
Tamara Chaplin has spent the last fifteen years researching what it meant to “become lesbian” in twentieth century France. Her recent book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France reveals how the subcultural spaces of sapphic desire that emerged in the cabarets of interwar Paris revolutionized lesbian life during the decades after May ’68 (expanding social access, cultural representation, and legal rights) while making possible new forms of sexual citizenship. At a moment when queer lives around the globe are under attack, Chaplin’s talk—focused on lesbian representation on French postwar TV—invites us to explore what we can learn from lesbian history.
Speakers: Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Tamara Chaplin is a scholar of queer sexualities, social justice, and the media. Her publications include Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (2007), and the co-edited The Global Sixties: Convention, Contest, and Counterculture (2017). Comments by Caitlin O’Keefe, Ph.D. candidate in French Studies and History (NYU), completing a dissertation on the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare & Co., blending book history, transnational feminist activism, and the flow of cultural movements between France and the U.S.
Event venue & nearby stays
La Maison Française NYU, 16 Washington Mews, New York, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.