The French History Podcast · Evergreen Podcasts

Lesbianism in France with Dr. Tamara Chaplin

·1 hr 39 min·5 clips

Lillian Robert stops Chaplin from leaving because “I haven’t sung for you yet.”

1. The French History Podcast episode centers on lesbianism in France through Dr. Tamara Chaplin’s book Becoming Lesbian, A Queer History of Modern France. 2. Dr. Tamara Chaplin is a modern European historian at the University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas, and her guest role matters because the episode draws on her own interviews and archival research. 3. The episode asks how lesbian history in France was hidden, reconstructed, and made visible through oral history, police files, cabarets, and media. 4. Chaplin traces her interest in sexuality history to Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 and its argument that sexual identity is historically produced. 5. She connects that intellectual background to graduate work with Bonnie Smith and Joan Scott at Rutgers University, where gender history shaped her approach. 6. Chaplin says Julian Jackson’s Living in Arcadia and encouragement from her partner Angie Estes pushed her toward lesbian history in 20th-century France. 7. She explains that when she arrived in France in 2010, she found very little prior scholarship on lesbian life. 8. To build sources, Chaplin conducted oral-history interviews with over 100 women from many countries and backgrounds. 9. She says she prioritized elderly interviewees so oral memory could reach further back in time. 10. She describes Lillian Robert, a 92-year-old musician in Cannes, as one of her central sources and later documentary subjects. 11. Robert’s room, her stuffed animals, her toy poodle, and her accordion become part of Chaplin’s account of how memory survives in ordinary spaces. 12. Chaplin says Robert sang “Falletil,” a song she understood as one woman asking another whether they “had to” separate. 13. She uses that performance to show how marginalized women can appropriate a gender-neutral song as a lesbian love song. 14. Another key figure is Catherine Gonnard, whom Chaplin identifies as an archivist at the National Television Archive and a participant in feminist, lesbian, and gay-rights movements. 15. Gonnard helped create Les Gouttes d’Element on the French Minitel in 1984, which Chaplin describes as the first lesbian website. 16. Chaplin links that project to later French legal milestones including PACS in 1999, same-sex marriage and adoption in 2013, and medically assisted pregnancy in 2021. 17. The interview style is conversational, with the host prompting Chaplin to move from theory to story and then back to historical argument. 18. The tone stays explanatory and archival, with Chaplin shifting between personal anecdotes, book chapters, and longer historical timelines. 19. Listeners interested in French gender history, queer archives, and oral history will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a short celebrity-focused survey of French queer culture may skip it.

As heard by us

A careful look at how lesbian history in modern France was made visible, contested, and understood in public.

This episode treats lesbian history in modern France as a story about how identity gets made in public, through media, performance, and repetition. Dr. Tamara Chaplin keeps the focus calm and exact, and the result is thoughtful without feeling blurry.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want French queer history told through media, performance, and public identity.

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