New CCWH Member Book – Between the Sheets by Hannah Frydman

Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, a new book by CCWH member Hannah Frydon, was recently published by Cornell University Press. A cultural historian of modern France with a special interest in the relationship between textuality and sexuality, Dr. Frydman is an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Between the Sheets is her first book. Congratulations to Dr. Frydman!

Book description:

Between the Sheets reveals a space, hidden in plain sight in Third Republican Paris, where deviant sexualities and lives could be experimented with and financed, despite republican attempts at growing and norming the population through the heterosexual family. That space was the newspaper, which was not simply a tool of normalization and a site of “dominant discourse,” as it has frequently been imagined. Reading between the lines, Hannah Frydman shows how, through the Belle Époque classifieds, the newspaper became a tool for living lives otherwise as information flowed from it not just vertically but also laterally, facilitating person-to-person communication.

The sexual relationships, exchanges, and services enabled by this communication were far from utopian: Surviving and thriving outside of social norms often required exploiting others. Yet by attending to the lives and livelihoods enabled by the classifieds, ethical or otherwise, Between the Sheets demonstrates that, thanks to new innovations in media technologies, queer and nonnormative lives in this period were lived in the center as well as on the margins. It was this centrality, however, that inspired efforts to place new (moral) controls on mass cultural forms and technologies. After World War I, in an interwar moment often characterized as one of sexual liberation, the press’s queerness was subjected to ever-increasing surveillance and control, with repercussions for press freedom writ large. These repercussions echo into our age of social media, with its promise of unfettered connection, which inspires repressive legislation to keep sexuality (and with it, freedom) in its crosshairs.

Accolades:

“Hannah Frydman knits together arguments about the media, economics, censorship and free speech, gender, and sexuality—and in doing so, offers genuinely new insights on them all. This is a methodological tour de force written with intelligence, humor, and unusual flair.” – Judith G. Coffin, author of Sex, Love, and Letters

“Abortion, sex work, lesbianism: Between the Sheets finds these allegedly taboo topics hiding in plain sight in nineteenth-century newspaper advertisements. Frydman reads classifieds for traces of lives otherwise lost to history. Her impeccable scholarship provides a fresh take on the histories of press freedom, female sexuality, and women and work.” – Sharon Marcus, author of The Drama of Celebrity

This book is on sale now!