ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the ways that gender and sexuality shaped and, in turn, were shaped by the search for social change or political order during the interwar period, and then turns to the processes by which sexuality became a source of identity and a focus of state intervention and management. A sense that prewar gender roles had been unsettled—reproduced through the global circulation of popular culture and compounded by rapid urbanization and the Depression—inspired efforts to restore supposedly traditional gender norms as well as revolutionary alternatives to them. Masculinity and femininity were not necessarily linked to adherence to heterosexuality, and individuals’ sexual practices defied easy categorization as exclusively homosexual or heterosexual, but the interwar period marked a watershed moment in the transformation of sex from something one did to an essential part of who one was. Gender and sexuality were not only politicized during the 1920s and 1930s; they became the terrain of political struggle.
