The House of Lords Library only loans items to parliamentary users.  If you are a parliamentary user please log in using the link above. For more information on the House of Lords Library, visit the Parliament website.

Amazon cover image
Image from Amazon.com

LGTB Victorians : sexuality and gender in the nineteenth-century archives / Simon Joyce.

By: Joyce, Simon [author.]Series: Oxford Academic: Publisher: Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2022]Publisher: ©2022Edition: First editionDescription: 1 online resource (304 pages) : illustrations (colour)Content type: text Media type: computer Carrier type: online resourceISBN: 9780191949197Subject(s): Sexuality | LGBT people | Transgender VictoriaGenre/Form: Electronic books.Additional Physical Form: Print version: 9780192858399DDC classification: 306.76 LOC classification: HQ73Online resources: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192858399.001.0001 Also available in Print and PDF edition.
Contents:
List of Illustrations -- 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. Toward 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?" -- Works Cited -- Index.
Abstract: 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. This book 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.
List(s) this item appears in: Pride 2024
Holdings
Item type Current library Class number Copy number Status Date due Barcode
ebook House of Lords Library - Palace Online access 1 Available

Includes bibliographical references and index.

List of Illustrations -- 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. Toward 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?" -- Works Cited -- Index.

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. This book 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.

Also available in Print and PDF edition.

Description based on Publisher website; title from home page (viewed on July 18, 2022).

Contact us

Phone: 0207 219 5242
Email: hllibrary@parliament.uk
Website: lordslibrary.parliament.uk

Accessibility statement