Gender and modernism

This entry traces the ways in which gender and sexuality were located at the heart of modernism’s encounter with the law. Beginning with examples of how transgressive female characters led to the censorship of modernist fiction, I go on to note that censorship had a dual effect: encouraging some writers to ever more obscenity while convincing others that some sexualities were too transgressive to publish. The entry then explores the relationship between censorship and copyright and the role of gender in relationship to libel and slander. I conclude with a brief look at legal contexts recently brought to bear on modernism and how critical approaches such as media studies reveal that modernism itself policed gender through obscenity.