Lesbophilia

Sweel Charity, like other backstage musicals, finds women in dressing rooms, sharing stockings and make-up, stories and sympathy in a setting that ideologically conveys rampant lesbophilia in the history of sexuality and offers spectatorial pleasures for feminist audiences.

It is his lesbophilia that sets Proust's narrator apart from the author, that marks the novel as a novel rather than a perverse exercise in selective autobiography.

More broadly, we might ask to what extent French literature, with its twin associations of high culture and lesbophilia, came to be an oblique but acceptable signifier for lesbianism in the popular imagination of the twentieth century.