Reading Incognito: Periodicals, Sapphic Fictions, and Lesbian Communication

ABSTRACT The lesbian past is difficult to recover because traces of it are sparse in the archives. This archival absence, however, is not a straightforward effect of silencing. This paper shows how lesbian invisibility was a conscious production, a shield to protect queer women's lives. Using the often misogynist nineteenth-century French sapphic canon, women seeking women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found ways of communicating privately in public in newspaper classifieds and correspondence sections using characters, details, and tropes from these works and turning them away from their original moralizing ends.