Natalie Barney’s Missed Marriages

Although a coeval of Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney (1876-1972) managed to steer a happier middle course in which she openly embraced a lesbian identity while avoiding (for the most part) questions of national belonging. The celebrated hostess of an international salon in interwar Paris, Barney retained more autonomy by remaining unmarried and nationally unattached. She flirted with marriage proposals, others claimed she was married, and she indeed once signed a marriage contract with another woman (though a legally unenforcable one), but she remained unattached, a status reflected in her transnational situation as an American citizen living as a denizen of Paris.

Women, Citizenship, and Sexuality

Until well into the twentieth century, the claims to citizenship of women in the US and in Europe have come through men (father, husband); women had no citizenship of their own. The case studies of three expatriate women (Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, and Natalie Barney) illustrate some of the consequences for women who lived independent lives. To begin with, the books traces the way that ideas about national belonging shaped gay male identity in the nineteenth century, before showing that such a discourse was not available to women and lesbians, including the three women who form the core of the book. In addition to questions of sexually non-conforming identity, women's mediated claim to citizenship limited their autonomy in practical ways (for example, they could be unilaterally expatriated). Consequently, the situation of the denizen may have been preferable to that of the citizen for women who lived between the lines. Drawing on the discourse of jurisprudence, the history of the passport, and original archival research on all three women, the books tells the story of women's evolving claims to citizenship in their own right.

Lesbian Poetics

Inspired by women’s emotional and sexual desires, lesbian poetics offers a passionate and lyrical tradition of prose, poetry, experimental literatures, and critical analysis that both celebrate women’s relationships to women and consider the patriarchal, heteronormative pressures that have silenced lesbian art and expression in dominant cultures. As an aesthetics addressed to women by women, lesbian poetics combines art and politics as an aesthetic practice that expresses fervor, devotion, passion, resentment, and a sense of pushing back against oppressive institutions. Emerging during the second wave of feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s, the work of such writers as Rita Mae Brown, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Nicole Brossard, Judy Grahn, Dionne Brand, Olga Broumas and others linked a specifically lesbian aesthetics of cultural critique simultaneously to the investments of the women’s movement and to a more overt declaration of the presence and power of lesbian desire. Inheriting a tradition of modernist lesbian expression from such writers as Natalie Barney, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, and Violette Leduc, the lesbian writers from the latter part of the twentieth century more openly celebrated a specifically lesbian set of aesthetic and cultural concerns, extolling lesbian existence and developing modes of narrative, poetics, and criticism that combined lyricism, a consciousness of struggle, and an expansion of the possibilities of literary forms as a means for proclaiming lesbian intensity and liberation. Ever mindful of both the women’s community and the pleasures of broad connection, lesbian poetics avoided iterating the limiting binaries that sustained heteronormative ways of thinking, offering instead multiplicity, diversity, and a variety of new ways of thinking and expressing the ardent, erotic, and communal relations among women.

Barney, Natalie Clifford (1876–1972)

Natalie Barney was an expatriate American writer who lived in Paris. In her home at 20 rue Jacob, Barney established a salon that for over sixty years brought together intellectuals and artists. In 1927, in response to the exclusively male French Academy, she formed the Académie des Femmes to organize and promote women writers.