Deborah Cohler’s Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Twentieth-Century Britain charts the emergence of representations of lesbian identity in early twentieth-century British public culture and argues convincingly that national and imperial discourse was critical to its creation. Through an examination of race, nation, empire, citizenship, and sexuality in public documents produced between the 1890s and 1928, Cohler concludes that a modern identity was produced as a result of the period’s racial and imperial anxieties and the shifting gender roles made possible by the First World War. Concerned primarily with representation rather than practice, Cohler suggests that a public lesbian identity did not exist prior to the Great War.

The text’s five main chapters chart the meanings and representations of sexual and gender identities from the end of the nineteenth century to a moment in 1928 when female same-sex desire had “become a clear category in the public imagination” (195). By starting her study prior to the Great War, Cohler is able to illustrate the absence of prewar representations of female same-sex desire in public discourse and the moment of its emergence. It also allows her to problematize prior claims about the importance of sexology in the creation of modern sexual identities. Additionally, in using a combination of well-known and more obscure texts, Cohler is able to focus on the “representational possibilities” with which she is concerned (xi).

In chapter 1 Cohler suggests that sexology should be seen as just one of many discursive sites that challenged traditional ideas about Victorian sexuality and gender roles, and she points to the role of imperial politics in radical texts on British sexuality. Combining an analysis of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897), Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1891), and Victoria Cross’s “Theodora: A Fragment” (1895), she explains that the discourse of empire infused the creation of both normative and deviant sexuality in the 1890s. For example, Ellis relied upon anthropological evidence to support his idea that congenital inversion was a universal phenomenon.

In chapter 2 Cohler turns to well-examined prewar women’s suffrage documents to scrutinize the meaning of gender inversion as perceived by pro- and antisuffrage advocates. She finds that rather than signaling homosexuality, gender inversion was perceived as “social deviance” (32) and should be seen as symptomatic of a moment of national anxiety. Indeed, Cohler points out that equating gender inversion with sexual inversion was rare at this time, despite sexological claims and the availability of such writings. Rather, antisuffrage debates that derided prosuffrage women as masculine, bad mothers, or oversexed presented them as “heterosexual deviants” (43). She notes that representations of female same-sex desire can only be inferred in these debates, but doing so “points to emergent cultural possibilities for women’s same-sex sexuality” (46). For example, she argues that the suffragist selling papers in the street in Evelyn Sharp’s sketch “Filling the War Chest” (1910) could be perceived as the absent mother, “man hating,” or “she may desire women” (46). As women battled over notions of their proper role in the body politic and contended with a gender identity bound up with imperial, national, and domestic ideologies, Cohler asserts that both sides contributed specifically to the fashioning of modern gender and sexual ideologies and a reconfiguration of women’s citizenship.

Turning her attention to prewar female sexuality more specifically in chapter 3, Cohler finds a near absence of references to female homosexuality among sexual freethinkers, including Edward Carpenter, Stella Browne, and the members of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP) in the period, despite the “hypervisibility and clear legibility of male homosexuality” (109). Focused on such issues as birth control, marriage, and free love, these reformers sought to redefine women’s sexuality. Yet the silence on female same-sex desire in the sources Cohler examines illustrates the limitations of these prewar discourses: “The scarcity of a language for female homosexuality in contexts in which it might be retroactively expected suggests the impossibility of a coherent public category of female homosexuality” (73). At moments when female homosexual identity is seen as an emerging category, as in papers given to the Eugenics Education Society and BSSSP by Edith Lees Ellis and Browne, it is bound up with eugenic and sexological discourses.

Despite the lack of representations of female homosexuality in the prewar era, Cohler explains in chapter 4 how homophobia, shifts in British wartime culture, and anxieties about imperial and national power created the possibility for the emergence of modern lesbian subjectivity. This chapter’s examination of Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (1918), banned under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act, Maude Allan’s very public libel trial, and parliamentary debates over the criminalization of female homosexuality reveal that lesbianism had not just entered public discourse but had become a topic of national significance. These insertions of representations of female same-sex desire into the public sphere, though not yet aligned, as Cohler notes, with specific sexual practices or a defined social position, were such that by 1928 lesbianism was a “comprehensible category in the British cultural lexicon” (152).

The final chapter seeks to explore three novels published in 1928 that offer differing models of same-sex desire. Pointing out that an overabundance of scholarship on Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness has led to a privileging of Hall’s model of the “mannish lesbian” (xx), Cohler reads Hall alongside Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Her interrogation of these narratives illustrates the various representations of lesbianism and, importantly, the “mutual dependence of constructions of sexual subjectivity and the politics of nationhood and citizenship” (195) during the interwar years. A concluding discussion on the reception of each text allows Cohler to emphasize both the state’s concern over the circulation of such texts and the way that female homosexuality was deemed more acceptable in less conventional novels, such as those offered by Mackenzie and Woolf.

Each chapter is a testament to the strength of Cohler’s methodological approach—“reading sexual and gendered representations around the Great War through their stakes in nationalism” (xxi). Its applicability across time is illustrated in the afterword. Turning to another moment of homefront conflict Cohler examines Leslie Feinberg’s 2006 novel Drag King Dreams and emphasizes the importance of her work to scholars of sexuality, race, and transnational feminist cultural studies. In sum, this expertly researched and well-written text forces us to rethink the importance of nationalism to British women’s sexual and gender identities and will be valuable to scholars of many disciplines.