Designing Sapphic Modernity

Abstract

This article addresses the question of why so many of the women involved in the practice and profession of interior design during the early part of the twentieth century were what we might now identify as lesbians. While design historians have acknowledged these women's non-heterosexualities, the connection between female sexual dissidence and modern interior design has been left largely underexplored and undertheorized. In the spirit of historical inventiveness which characterizes most work on the aesthetic cultural history of sexuality I argue that these women's designs were importantly involved in creating the historical spaces of sapphic modernity, and that the growing field of sapphic modernity has itself been designed by these women's works. Overall, I suggest that modern interior design was a critical site for the regulation and contestation of sexuality, and generate a speculative theoretical framework for understanding the centrality of women's design works to the generation of a sexually dissident, sapphic modernity.

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