Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $110.00

Format:
Hardback
304 pp.
12 b/w illustrations, 156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780192858399

Publication date:
September 2022

Imprint: OUP UK

LGBT Victorians

Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives

Simon Joyce

It has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink "the repressive hypothesis" and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term "Victorian" still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians argues for re-visiting the period's thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying. We think of those whose primary self-definition is in terms of sexuality (lesbians, gay men, bisexuals) and those for whom it is gender identity (intersex and transgender people, genderqueers) as simultaneously in coalition and distinct from each other, on the assumption that gender and sexuality are independent aspects of self-identification. Re-examining how the Victorians considered such identity categories to have produced and shaped each other can ground a more durable basis for strengthening our present LGBTQ+ coalition.

LGBT Victorians draws on scholarship reconsidering the significance of sexology and efforts to retrospectively discover transgender people in historical archives, particularly in the gap between what the nineteenth century termed the sodomite and the hermaphrodite. It highlights a broad range of individuals (including Anne Lister, and the defendants in the "Fanny and Stella" trial of the 1870s), key thinkers and activists (including Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter), and writers such as Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds to map the complicated landscape of gender and sexuality in the Victorian period. In the process, it decenters Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment from our historical understanding of sexual and gender nonconformity.

Readership : Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; Academics and students of Victorian history and LGBTQ+ studies.

Introduction
PART ONE: COALESCING CONCEPTS
1. On or About 1820: Modalities of Lesbian Emergence
2. Ulrichs' Riddles
PART TWO: VICTORIAN SEXOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF EFFEMINACY
3. John Addington Symonds and the Problems of Ethical Homosexuality
4. Towards an Intermediate Sex: Edward Carpenter's Queer Palimpsests
PART THREE: GAY MEN/TRANS WOMEN
5. Two Women Walk into a Theater Restroom: The Trial of Fanny and Stella
6. Bodies in Transition: Trans-Curiosity in Late-Victorian Pornography
Coda: "And I? May I Say Nothing, My Lord?"

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Simon Joyce holds a BA and MA from the University of Sussex and a PhD from the University of Buffalo. He is a Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he teaches Victorian and modernist literature from Britain and Ireland and LGBTQI+ Studies.

Writing History - William Kelleher Storey and Mairi Cowan
Victorians and Numbers - Lawrence Goldman

Special Features

Gives equal consideration to historical people who defined themselves primarily in terms of gender identity or in terms of sexuality/sexual orientation
Draws upon original archival research in the legal records (in the case of the "Fanny and Stella" trial), and the unpublished writings and methodological revisions of the writer Edward Carpenter
Deploys the insights of transgender studies alongside queer theory and lesbian/gay studies
Reimagines and complicates our understanding of the Victorian period by thinking about how British thinkers and writers assessed and responded to larger international movements, including European sexology, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and late-century French erotica
Argues that Oscar Wilde should not be the only (or key) figure in our understanding of queer people in nineteenth-century Britain