ABSTRACT
The stock image of the 1950s housewife may seem an unlikely place to look for radical sexuality. And the post-war kitchen, with its connotations of gender conformity and conservative family values, an unlikely backdrop against which queer lives can flourish. Rebecca Jennings has argued that in lesbian pulp fiction ‘the search for a lesbian identity is represented as a process in which the heroine must abandon such emblems of female security as family and home, embarking instead on a journey through the public spaces of the city’. The lesbian pulp fiction boom provided sufficient marketability for lesbian authors to access their audience, and publishing houses willing to cash in. The domestic, the criticism suggests, can only ever be restrictive in its conventionality, inextricably linked with heteronormativity and heterosexuality and so completely at odds with the urban/e landscape the successful lesbian protagonist must navigate.
