After 1999, Turkish–Greek relations entered a promising process of rapprochement, also referred to as detente, which lasted until 2016. The terms ‘detente’ and ‘rapprochement’ can be used interchangeably, as their definitions are quite similar. While ‘detente’ defines an improvement in the relationship between two countries that in the past were not friendly towards and did not trust each other, ‘rapprochement’ refers to the development of friendlier relations between countries or groups of people who have been enemies (Oxford Dictionary, 2006). Although all early attempts at easing the tension between Turkey and Greece had failed, earthquakes in both Turkey and Greece, in August and September 1999, respectively, created empathy and solidarity among Turks and Greeks and provided fertile ground for decision-makers to implement their already launched initiatives towards dialogue. The process started with ‘low politics’ – including economy, trade, energy, tourism and so on – rather than the traditional ‘high politics’ since there existed great suspicion due to core issues such as the Aegean and Cyprus (Lesser, 2001, 5; Oniş, 2001, 42; Liaropoulos, 2008, 28–29). However, both sides believed that it would be much more meaningful to focus on the core issues if the current dialogue- and confidencebuilding measures were consolidated and extended. With the initiation of the rapprochement process, Turkey and Greece have made serious progress in fields such as energy, economy and minority rights.

The rapprochement period has found overwhelming support on both sides, with 89 percent of the Turkish elites in favour, in contrast to 63.5 percent of their Greek counterparts, according to elite surveys jointly conducted by Triantaphyllou, Ifantis and Dizdaroğlu in both Greece and Turkey in 2015 and 2016, respectively. This support is quite valuable considering that the level of trust towards each other is relatively low. According to the surveys, only 28 percent of the Turkish elites think that Turkey can trust Greece, while the level of trust towards Turkey is much lower (11.4 percent) among the Greek elites. Despite their lack of trust, both countries’ elites are in favour of the rapprochement. The focus on elites rather than public opinion is crucial since ‘the competition among elites not only shapes public opinion but helps to formulate policy as well’ (Triantaphyllou, 2017).

Introduction

On 20 November 1928, the American Margaret Goldsmith (1894–1971) wrote to her lover, Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962), absolving her of any remaining sense of duty. ‘You owe me nothing,’ Goldsmith wrote, ‘except that which gives itself.’ Their affair, albeit short-lived, began in March 1928 in Berlin. Sackville-West arrived in the city in February to visit her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was already acquainted with Goldsmith and her British journalist husband, Frederick Voigt (whom she divorced in 1935). Writing to Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West claimed that Goldsmith, whose ‘morals I strongly suspect,’ was her ‘one amusement.’ By early March their friendship had evolved: as Sackville-West suggestively wrote on 10 March, ‘Margaret Voyt [sic] came in the morning with results I had foreseen.’ Although Sackville-West and Goldsmith shared what Victoria Glendinning calls an erotic ‘fantasy loveworld at Long Barn’ in the early summer of 1928, in which ‘Margaret played the “peasant” to Vita's aristocrat, and Vita was “David” to Margaret,’ by July the affair had dwindled with Sackville-West telling Nicolson in September that there were ‘no misunderstandings or false positions between them.’ Whether Goldsmith was quite this stoic remains to be seen. Unlike Sackville-West, Goldsmith left no records, diaries or letters (other than those in Sackville- West's possession) that I am able to locate, so we can only presume her feelings on this topic. Hilda Matheson, the BBC producer and Goldsmith's romantic successor, did write to Sackville-West of the ‘legend that you are so detached about people,’ something which ‘Margaret Goldsmith elaborated,’ which perhaps suggests a less than clean emotional break.

The above is the extent of Goldsmith's recorded significance in our literary history of the period. If recalled as a writer, it is for her novel Belated Adventure (1929), said to include a character based on Sackville-West. Goldsmith is a bit part player in another woman's biography. Yet, if we probe further, we find a literary contribution that is significant in its own right and a woman who was well connected to leading cultural and political female figures. Goldsmith's career and interests were diverse and prolific: she had a significant economic advisory career with the US government, including a role as the first woman Assistant Trade Commissioner at the US Embassy in Berlin, but she also worked as a journalist, translator, literary agent and writer.

Heavily vignetted to the point of obscurity, the image of a woman's torso, as viewed from behind, emerges out of a shadowy background (Figure 5.1). Reminiscent of a fragment of antique statuary, this truncated form is in fact the subject of a black and white photographic reproduction of an original handcoloured etching (Figure 5.2) by the Austrian painter and illustrator Mariette Lydis (1887–1970). Fêted in her lifetime as a ‘great artist, with the fatal lyricism of Sappho,’ the now largely forgotten Lydis unequivocally and unapologetically articulated lesbian intimacy and desire in a large body of paintings, drawings and prints that she produced in Paris between 1926 and 1939, the year that she, a bisexual woman of Jewish heritage, fled mainland Europe. Far from reticent when it came to visualising female same-sex intimacy, Lydis defiantly depicted women as desirable and desiring Sapphic subjects. Yet one gets little sense of Lydis's artistic audacity from this strangely censorial reproduction of her original lesboerotic etching.

One of a series of 375 photographs of Lydis's work captured by the Parisian photographer Marc Vaux (1895–1971) during the 1920s and 1930s, the darkness and indistinctness of this particular image is entirely at odds with Vaux's customary technique for faithfully translating graphic images into photographic ones. Lydis's original hand-coloured print, one of the twenty-five signed and unbound etchings comprising her deluxe print portfolio Lesbiennes [Lesbians] (1926) (Figures 5.2–5.4), had focused upon a dancing female couple, their naked bodies locked in a close embrace. The viewer of Vaux's black and white photographic reproduction could be forgiven for missing such lesboerotic content. Rather than focusing the viewer's attention upon the actual subject of Lydis's intaglio print – the lesbian couple – the extreme vignetting serves to transform the subject of the image altogether.

Entirely effacing the secondary female from the image, as well as the background dancing couples, the lesbian is, to quote Terry Castle on the subject of the apparitional lesbian, relegated to a ‘recessive, indeterminate, misted-over space,’ simultaneously there but not there.

Haunting the margins of the modernist canon, the 1930 novel The One Who Is Legion or A.D.'s After-Life, written by Natalie Clifford Barney, sporadically appears in publications on lesbian modernism as an example of lesbian representation in early twentieth-century fiction.1 In comparison to works by other lesbian authors of the period, however, this novel is rarely discussed, its afterlife possibly compromised by a hardly legible, ambiguous prose of which its very title is an example: the singular ‘one’ is simultaneously a plural ‘legion,’ a possible name remains shrouded in the mysterious initials of ‘A.D.’ and the finality of the title is suspended by the conjunction ‘or.’2 Uncertainty over the possibility of a stable and distinctive identity across time and space not only animates the text's plot but also pervades its bewildering form. While the body of the protagonist morphs into different shapes throughout the story, the pages of the book change through typographical alterations. Similarly, the readerly conundrum of who and how many constitute the protagonist is further complicated by a narrative voice alternating between a plural ‘we’ and a singular ‘I.’ As the novel recounts the phantasmagorical story of the recreation of a woman's body and life in ways that radically depart from her previous mode of being in the world, content and form coalesce: the attempt to reimagine a new being outside of familiar identity categories of gender and sexual orientation is constantly re-enacted by the text's attempt to forgo narrative conventions of depicting a protagonist and relating a plot.

The One Who Is Legion presents text and world as mutually constitutive sites across which normative relational and sexual practices are constructed. Canonical texts of religion, science, philosophy and literature, the novel suggests, produce and reproduce the dimorphic human body and its heterosexual couplings. Predicated on the assumption that the human body is never just matter, but always already an embodiment of established ideas delineated in authoritative discourses, the text's as well as the protagonist's mission is to fashion a paradoxically non-human and disembodied human body liberated from pre-determined paths through life. To interrogate the ontological distinction between representations and beings to be represented, the novel has a genderless protagonist, whose existence is based on an aggregate of material fragments held together by a corporeal frame, relive the life of a woman dead by suicide. In this way, matter itself becomes a character in a story which casts doubt on the knowledge contained in and continued by representational forms. Constituted of a multitude of discrete entities yet in a state of becoming, the main character struggles against the limitations of available representations. That a person comes to matter, physically and linguistically, as either a woman or a man and is embedded in a patriarchal structure sustained by procreative heterosexuality animates this undoing and redoing of the body effected in The One Who Is Legion.

Introduction

‘Inverting the Gaze’ is a homage to Radclyffe Hall's self-identification as an invert, but it also signals that the central aim of this chapter is to explore how Hall used sight and vision to indicate difference in relation to male sexual identities. This is a shift in critical perspective concerning Hall as their work is more commonly associated with female identities and sexuality, because of their own sexual relationships with women and the representation of Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness (1928). However, the term ‘sexual inversion’ did encompass the sexuality/gendered identity of both women and men, and Hall's oeuvre, including the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, reveals that they were psychologically interested in all human sexuality and gender. Acknowledging that lesbian modernism can (and does) explore masculinity and male sexuality, this chapter focuses on Hall's representation of heterosexual male characters who share a common literary motif that is connected to their vision. The chapter argues that Hall developed and used this motif throughout their career to indicate nonconforming cis masculinity and male sexuality during the interwar years.

Written during the modernist period, The Well of Loneliness has a traditional chronological narrative style and is melodramatic, sentimental and overtly religious in its tone. Judged through a modernist lens and based mainly on the critical reaction to The Well of Loneliness, the assumption is that all of Hall's work is non-experimental and middlebrow. However, Elizabeth English contends that modernism and middlebrow

As such, framing Hall's work as middlebrow overlooks their ability to be subversive within a conventional space and dismisses their contribution to the concerns that were being discussed by modernist writers – for example, the impact of the war on men and its relationship to their identities. Hannah Roche also argues that The Well of Loneliness may appear traditional, but its subject matter is progressively modern and that Hall uses the romantic genre to explore a space ‘previously reserved for heterosexuals.’ Roche's challenge to how Hall and The Well of Loneliness have previously been read and interpreted opens up the possibilities of using lesbian modernism to revisit and review texts from alternative perspectives.

In April 2018, we organised two panels on lesbian modernism as part of a conference at the University of Oxford entitled Queer Modernism(s) II: Intersectional Identities. During our panel sessions, we asked several questions with the aim of interrogating lesbian modernism from various angles, including in the context of queer modernist scholarship and in relation to the potential inclusions and exclusions of this term. What do scholars mean when we use the term ‘lesbian modernism’? What is the relationship between lesbian modernism and queer modernism? Are these overlapping, mutually informative categories, or does one effectively displace the other? Have we, for example, moved on from lesbian modernism, into the era of queer modernism? If so, what might we lose and what might we gain in leaving lesbian modernism behind? What are our personal and affective investments in lesbian modernism as a field and how do they shape our work? As these discussions provoked lively debate between our panels and our audiences, we realised that our enquiries into lesbian modernism extended beyond the confines of a conference programme and required space for further consideration in a volume. We also understood how timely these interrogations were, both within modernist studies as an ever-evolving field and within our present-day cultural and political contexts, in which terms like ‘lesbian,’ ‘queer’ and ‘transgender’ are often contested. In writing about lesbian modernism, we wanted to keep these discussions, disjunctions, affinities and intersections in play; to avoid taking either ‘lesbian’ or ‘modernism’ for granted, to probe and examine these categories, both in tandem and apart. Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres is the result of this endeavour, presenting twelve chapters that address and challenge lesbian modernism from a variety of perspectives.

What Is Lesbian Modernism?

Makiko Minow is often credited with coining the phrase ‘lesbian modernism’ in a review article on ‘Versions of Female Modernism’ in 1989. Minow was responding to a wave of feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that had significantly expanded the predominantly male modernist canon and drawn attention to the important contributions lesbian, bisexual and queer women had made to the formation and development of modernist literature and culture.

Nicholas Johnson [NJ]: First, thank you so much for speaking with us about your design practice. For our readers, it would be helpful if you would open by talking a little bit about your career, just to position the stages you have gone through to become a working artist in the contemporary Irish and international theatre. What does that trajectory look like so far, at the point you find yourself in your practice?

Aedin Cosgrove [AC]: Well, I actually haven't ever done anything else. Gavin Quinn and I set up Pan Pan as a partnership company straight after college. In order to fund the work, of course, I did lots of other small jobs. But it's essentially my all – all my working has been in the theatre. Occasionally I would get paid for lighting – it was easier to be paid as a lighting designer then, even while you were quite young and not very good! The company was just: ‘find some money, put something on’ for a long time.

NJ: Was your focus, even from education forward, always on design and scenography, mainly the visual elements? How do you see design linked to the other art forms that are involved in making theatre work, and do you accept the role of ‘designer’ as a title in and of itself, or do you have another way of thinking about it?

AC: It was 100 per cent collaborative between Gavin and me, with the ideas for performance influencing and speaking to the scenography. At the time he was more interested in working with the actors, and I was more interested in making the scenography concrete and doing the sort of work that makes that happen. But we didn't have strict lines – the two things were always together, sort of like in an amateur way, when you’re working on student projects, and also because it is 100 per cent collaborative. We were sure about the idea that Pan Pan should be a different theatre experience than what was happening in other companies that we were seeing: we wanted to have our own voice, so we fell into the roles of ‘you work with the actors, because you have the words and skills for that, and I’ll work with the scenography’.

Introduction

In the 1980s, the waning of communism led to sub-state terrorism becoming ‘public enemy number one’ in the Western world (Said 1988, 149). The early postwar idealism that had fostered social welfare vanished in the wake of decolonisation struggles, Cold War polarisation and economic decline, leading individuals to feel alienated from political institutions and incapable of shaping historical events (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 17–19). In this context, a generation of mostly middle-class, educated young people embraced left-wing activism such as the civil rights, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in search for ‘a meaningful cause’ which, paired with a willingness to use violence for the achievement of their political ends, gave rise to a new revolutionary terrorist tradition (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 19–20). Inspired by the late nineteenth-century anarchist principle of ‘propaganda by the deed’, which adopted violence as the most effective weapon to encourage workers to revolt, many post-war revolutionary movements such as the Red Brigades (Italy) and the Angry Brigades (Britain) exhibited a similar disenchantment with the power of words to bring about socio-political change and turned to a reliance on acts of terrorism to communicate their views. Influenced by the rise of mass communications, the decline of conventional warfare and the spread of modern liberal democratic values such as freedom and self-determination, post-war revolutionary terrorists discarded mere propaganda as futile, adopting instead the shock of violent action to manipulate public opinion and coerce states into accepting their demands (Ganor 2004, 34–5).

Terrorism can be defined as ‘the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change’ (Hoffman 2006, 40). Terrorism does not primarily seek material damage and human fatalities; instead, a ‘physical act affecting a limited group of immediate victims serves the greater aim of producing psychological reactions among a larger audience, namely fear’, which is exploited to achieve the ‘political aim’ of ‘exercis[ing] pressure on power holders, who must respond to the disruptive and destabilising effects of the violence’ (Frank 2015, 92). To accomplish this goal, terrorists often employ the methods of state-sanctioned psychological warfare, which seeks ‘to influence attitudes and behaviour affecting the achievement of political or military objectives’ (Taylor 1999, xii).

Introduction

In 1909, the dramatist and actor Cicely Hamilton completed the script for A Pageant of Great Women, which would become one of the most successful plays of the British women's suffrage movement. Between 1909 and 1912, the spectacular performance was staged across Britain under the direction of costume designer and stage director Edith Craig, attracting large audiences and garnering significant press attention. Featuring a parade of great women from history, including Sappho, Hypatia, Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, the Rani of Jhansi and Florence Nightingale, A Pageant of Great Women aimed to counter anti-suffrage arguments by foregrounding the important contributions women had made to politics, the arts, warfare, science, religion and faith.

Unsurprisingly, given its feminist ambition to celebrate historical figures who challenged restrictive gender roles, A Pageant of Great Women includes several individuals who ‘move[d] away from the gender they were assigned at birth.’ Some of the performances featured Craig's life-long partner, Christopher St. John (1871–1960), in the role of eighteenth-century soldier Hannah Snell/James Gray. Snell/Gray, who was assigned female at birth, enlisted in the British armed forces to pursue life as a male soldier, later becoming a sailor. They fought and were wounded in battle. The 1910 edition of the play, issued by The Suffrage Shop, includes a striking photograph of St. John dressed as Snell/Gray. Katherine Cockin, author of pioneering scholarship on Craig and St. John, describes Snell/ Gray and St. John as ‘soul mates.’ Like other individuals who have, for a long time, been read as cross-dressing women, Snell/Gray has more recently been situated within trans history. Jen Manion, for example, reads Snell/Gray as a person who ‘trans[ed] gender’ in order ‘to carve out a social and cultural place for themself as a gender in-between.’

As her fascination with Snell/Gray in the context of suffrage politics indicates, St. John's life and work give insight into the deep entanglements of feminist, lesbian and trans culture that were central to many creative networks in the modernist period. St. John is a marginal figure in modernist scholarship and best known for her involvement in suffrage theatre as a member of the Actresses’ Franchise League and the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, and as a co-founder of the Pioneer Players theatre society.

Introduction

In a conference with journalists on 31 May 1985, Margaret Thatcher said that ‘these violent people must be isolated from society’ (qtd in Burgess 1985, 1). Thatcher was talking about football supporters whose behaviour a couple of days previously had contributed to the catastrophe at Heysel Stadium in Brussels leading to the death of 39 mostly Italian spectators. Before the European Cup Final between Liverpool F.C. and Juventus, Liverpool fans charged towards Juventus supporters in an adjacent block, causing a huge number of Italians to press against a wall which collapsed and buried many bodies. The behaviour of Liverpool fans was only one factor contributing to the disaster, however; the ruinous state of the ground and failure on behalf of the authorities to properly segregate rivalling fan groups were also to blame (Frosdick and Marsh 2005, 23). Yet, concern about violence in football stadiums was so common in 1985 that the catastrophe seemed to confirm what many observers, both at home and abroad, had come to expect from English fans. With more than 40 serious incidents in UK stadiums involving deaths and multiple injuries since 1888, the history of football in England and Scotland had always been closely linked to narratives of disaster (Elliott, Frosdick and Smith 1999, 13–14). The reason for most of these incidents was the derelict state of grounds or bad planning, but the figure of the football fan, which for large parts of the public equated with ‘hooligan’ and ‘social pariah’ (Dunn 2020, xvi), made it easy for press reports or politicians to latch onto preconceived notions of football crowds whenever disaster struck (Sandvoss 2005, 2; Piskurek 2018, 2–3).

In her statement to journalists, Thatcher made an interesting link between hooliganism and two other forms of violence in the UK, namely ‘that on the picket lines and [that] in Northern Ireland’ (Burgess 1985, 1). Crucially, moreover, the Prime Minister contrasted the perpetrators of all three types of violence with ‘the good and decent citizens of our society’ (qtd in Burgess 1985, 1). Terrorist violence, especially in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, was an omnipresent threat in the Britain of 1985, and Thatcher herself narrowly escaped an attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton in October 1984.