Kathryn Kent:
Making Girls into Women

Kent begins her book by proposing that "modern lesbian identity has its roots in the United States not just or even primarily in sexology and medicalization, but in white, middle-class 'women's culture,' distinguished in part by its central focus on the mother."

Kent argues that in the late 19th century, when women stepped into the public realm, the distinction between public and private and the separation between the mother figure and other female models became blurred. Kent discusses girls' desire to identify with female role models. She argues that where there is a desire to be, there is a desire to have; she terms this "identificatory erotics." In such semipublic, semiprivate spaces as the school or the Girl Scout troop, girls began not only to want to emulate, but to desire, their role models. It was in these spaces that lesbian identity could emerge.

Kent examines both theory and literature. Choosing as subjects for her study Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emma Dunham Kelley, the early Girl Scout Handbooks and Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, Kent writes that these authors and works not only captured and critiqued female-female relations, they helped develop a queer female identity.

Kathryn Kent received her BA from Williams in 1988 and has taught at Williams College since 1997