Abstract

Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a number of women were diagnosed as sexual inverts in Britain and Europe. This book examines the ways in which female same-sex desires were represented across a wide range of Italian and British medical writings during this period. Chiara Beccalossi has undertaken extensive archival research to bring to light new documents and give a detailed account of how the female invert was positioned alongside other figures of same-sex desires, such as the tribade-prostitute, the fiamma (flame), the nymphomaniac, and women with abnormal genitalia or bodily dysfunctions. In this way this book shows the richness of medical representations of female same sex-desires that has previously been unexplored in historical scholarship.