Submitted by jnaylor_6346 on
Join us as we welcome
COOKIE WOOLNER
with
K.T. EWING
on
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
at
6:00 pm
to celebrate the launch of Woolner's new book
THE FAMOUS LADY LOVERS: BLACK WOMEN & QUEER DESIRE BEFORE STONEWALL
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ABOUT THE BOOK:
Black queer women have shaped American culture since long before the era of gay liberation. Decades prior to the Stonewall Uprising, in the 1920s and 1930s, Black "lady lovers"—as women who loved women were then called—crafted a queer world. In the cabarets, rent parties, speakeasies, literary salons, and universities of the Jazz Age and Great Depression, communities of Black lady lovers grew, and queer flirtations flourished. Cookie Woolner here uncovers the intimate lives of performers, writers, and educators such as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Gladys Bentley, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Lucy Diggs Slowe, along with the many everyday women she encountered in the archives.
Examining blues songs, Black newspapers, vice reports, memoirs, sexology case studies, and more, Woolner illuminates the unconventional lives Black lady lovers formed to suit their desires. In the urban North, as the Great Migration gave rise to increasingly racially mixed cities, Black lady lovers fashioned and participated in emerging sexual subcultures. During this time, Black queer women came to represent anxieties about the deterioration of the heteronormative family. Negotiating shifting notions of sexuality and respectability, Black lady lovers strategically established queer networks, built careers, created families, and were vital cultural contributors to the US interwar era.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cookie Woolner is a cultural historian of race, gender, and sexuality in the modern U.S. She is an Associate Professor in the History department at the University of Memphis and the author of The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire before Stonewall (UNC Press, September 2023) which explores the lives of Black women who loved women in the Interwar era.
ABOUT THE THE CONVERSATION PARTNER:
K.T. Ewing is an Associate Professor of Gender and Race Studies at The University of Alabama. She is an alum of Xavier University of Louisiana and a proud third generation HBCU graduate. Her research interests include Black history, women and gender studies, sexuality, and the influence of blues culture in American society. Her current book project, REMEMBER MYNAME: ALBERTA HUNTER AND THE TWO-FACED ARCHIVE, is a biography examining the life of Alberta Hunter, a twentieth-century blues and cabaret singer from Memphis, TN.
