Professor Rebecca Jennings: Inaugural Lecture

‘I simply rejected femaleness’: Diana Chapman’s narratives of gendered and sexual selfhood in mid-twentieth-century Britain

This inaugural lecture will take the personal testimonies of Diana Chapman (1928-2015) as a case study for opening up questions about the entangled nature of gendered and sexual subjectivities in mid-twentieth-century Britain. As a founding member of Minorities Research Group, which published Britain’s first lesbian magazine in the 1960s, Diana Chapman narrated her story to several lesbian oral history collections. While Chapman explicitly claimed a lesbian identity, her accounts contain several trans themes which point to a more complex understanding of her own gender and sexual identity.  Teasing out some of these moments of discomposure and paying attention to the subtle differences between the versions of her story, I will suggest that her testimonies provide evidence of the tensions in categories of gender and sexuality in the mid-century. Chapman’s attempts to narrate her self to others indicate that, far from being a historical moment characterised by clear, binary gender and sexual norms, as popular narratives have portrayed the 1940s to 1960s, post-war British society was in fact grappling with shifting and uncertain cultural modes of understanding gendered and sexual selfhood.

Dr. Antonio Sennis, Head of the History Department at UCL, will deliver the welcome address, followed by an introduction from Professor Matt Cook, Chair of the History of Sexuality at the University of Oxford.

Lecture: Room 106, Roberts Building (6:30-7:30pm)
Reception: G02, Roberts Building Foyer (7:30-9pm)

Image: Portrait of Diana Chapman by Lynne Connolly, in Hall Carpenter Archives Lesbian History Group, Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories (Routledge, 1989).