Somewhere between Queer Imaginations and Lesbian Identities: Kimonomania in Belle Époque Paris

Exotic stereotypes in modern sexual identity politics in Euro-American contexts have been widely recognized in scholarship across disciplines. Fin-de-siècle Parisian lesbians, for instance, performed stereotypically Oriental femininities—hypersexual, sensuous, and power-hungry— to create theatrical personae under which their sexuality could be experimented and communicated. What has been glossed over is how Japonisme (the Western taste for Japan), a more popular iteration of the contemporaneous fascination with exoticism, provided non-heteronormative subjectification for women. This paper examines significations and limitations of performing femininity à la japonaise for Parisian lesbians and their identity politics during the belle époque. It pays particular attention to kimonomania, or the intense vogue for the kimono that enchanted the Parisian bourgeoises—but not the openly out lesbians. Analyzing visual and material representations of this cultural phenomenon in relation to the literary, artistic, and ethnographic imaginations on the kimono and the kimono-donning female body in the early 1900s, I suggest that the Japanese robe, in its exoticism, promised French women moments of non-heterosexual imaginations in the context of heteronormative bourgeois society. Nevertheless, the kimono-clad female body signaled—unlike its Oriental counterparts associated with primitivism, flesh, and carnality—artificiality, ornament, and passive thingness of the body. The kimono, I argue, fell short as effective political means for Parisian lesbians to mark and express the active sexual appetite and desires these women claimed as an important part of their lesbian identities. Thus, Belle époque kimonomania traced the slippery ways in which “queer” imaginations misaligned with the emerging concept of lesbian-as-identity.