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Between the Sheets

Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France

Hannah Frydman

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Hardback

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English
Cornell University Press
15 July 2025
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.
By:  
Imprint:   Cornell University Press
Country of Publication:   United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm, 
Weight:   907g
ISBN:   9781501782176
ISBN 10:   1501782177
Pages:   330
Publication Date:  
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Further / Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Hannah Frydman is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

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