Someone to Love
Someone to Love
Teenage Girls, Queer Desire, and Contested Meanings of Immaturity in the 1950s
This chapter analyzes the prevalence of homosexuality in the 1950s and how this was considered to be a sign of immaturity. Psychologists claimed lesbians were psychologically immature, frozen in a state of permanent adolescence. This contributed to the portrayal of female homosexuals as sinful, immoral, and disgraceful. As a result, they were isolated, shamed, and punished by the decade's social forces and institutions. However, there are also accounts of same-sex-desiring girls and women experiencing the decade as dynamic, navigable, and even pleasurable. Many teens and young women pursued their interests and created a place for themselves in postwar society. Lesbian couples managed to articulate subjectivities as women-loving adolescents on the path toward satisfying, mature, lesbian adulthood. They connected through intimacy and sexuality, and were successful in crafting a sense of lesbian identity.
Keywords: homosexuality, immaturity, permanent adolescence, female homosexuals, postwar society, women-loving adolescents, lesbian adulthood, lesbian identity
North Carolina Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
