Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain

Review "Through an impressive and stimulating array of sources ranging from letters to Marie Stopes, readers' correspondence in the glamour and 'queer magazine' London Life, and court cases, historian Sigel charts the making of sexual identities in interwar Britain. Emphasizing the agency of individuals, Sigel convincingly makes the argument that sexology was less important than popular ephemera in the evolution and construction of personal sexual narratives and identities. In placing agency at the core of her argument, Sigel helpfully explores the processes of reading as individuals interpreted and folded popular sources into their own sexual stories... Clear, accessible, and dispassionate, this book makes important interventions in queer scholarship and the study of sexual identities. Summing Up: Highly recommended."--Choice, July 2013 "Making Modern Love is a fascinating contribution.... Sigel successfully achieves one of the principal aims of her book: to show how ordinary people (as opposed to sexologists, sex reformers, and writers) wielded agency in the articulation of sexual stories and in framing their own 'sexual selves.'... There are many specific things to praise in Making Modern Love. Sigel's empathetic and nuanced reading of a variety of sources is one.... Sigel's book remains an important intervention in our understanding of sexual lives in twentieth-century Britain." --American Historical Review "When Stopes asked her readers to write to her with evidence to support her theory that women had a 'cycle' of desire - feeling more amorous at certain times of the month than others - she was inundated with thousands of letters from men and women women desperate for information desperate for information about sex... Other men and women were writing letters sharing their sexual experiences, fantasies and bizarre proclivities to magazines such as London Life. These were published alongside racy pictures of chorus girls disrobing. An American academic has unearthed these letters to Stopes and the risque magazines, drawing on them for an intriguing new book about British sex lives between the wars and how people communicated their sexual problems and desires." - Daily MailM, Dec 2012 Product Description After the Great War, British men and women grappled with their ignorance about sexuality and desire. Seeking advice and information from doctors, magazines, and each other, they wrote tens of thousands of letters about themselves as sexual subjects. In these letters, they disclosed their uncertainties, their behaviors, and the role of sexuality in their lives. Their fascinating narratives tell how people sought to unleash their imaginations and fashion new identities.Making Modern Love shows how readers embraced popular mediaOCoself-help books, fetish magazines, and advice columnsOCoas a source of information about sexuality and a means for telling their own stories. From longings for transcendent marital union to fantasies of fetish-wear, cross-dressing, and whipping, men and women revealed a surprising range of desires and behaviors (queer and otherwise) that have been largely disregarded until now.Lisa Sigel mines these provocative narratives to understand how they contributed to new subjectivities and the development of modern sexualities." From the Back Cover "Making Modern Love provides an exciting account of the ways in which hundreds of ordinary people structured narratives that explained and helped construct their sexual identities. Sigel has advanced the stimulating idea that by analyzing the writings of countless 'ordinary' people, we can gain some sense of their notion of having a specific sexual identity and, therefore, their membership in a community of sorts. She has the enviable ability to provide a dispassionate account of what many would consider sensational acts and ideas, and she skillfully exploits it to provide a fresh account of the interwar fetishist." --Angus McLaren, Prof