LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives

Description

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. Cover LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives Copyright Acknowledgments Contents List of Illustrations Introduction PART ONE: COALESCING CONCEPTS 1: On or About 1820: Modalities of Lesbian Emergence Romantic Friendship and Genital Sex “Certainly a Man”? Class, Community, and Same-Sex Desire 2: Ulrichs’ Riddles Uranian/Intersex/Transgender: Assessing Ulrichs’ Categories Anima Muliebris Virili Corpore Inclusa Riddle as Self-Assessment Beyond Ulrichs: Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld PART TWO: VICTORIAN SEXOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF EFFEMINACY 3: John Addington Symonds and the Problems of Ethical Homosexuality Affirming Intermediacy: The Male Mittel The Problem with Reciprocation Greek Ethics Pinning Whitman Down 4: Toward an Intermediate Sex: Edward Carpenter’s Queer Palimpsests First Draft of History Homogenic Love and the Wilde Trials Carpenter and the New Woman Agitation from the Vanguard Carpenter and German Sexology PART THREE: GAY MEN/TRANS WOMEN 5: Two Women Walk into a Theater Restroom: The Trial of Fanny and Stella Pronoun Confusion: The Case for “She” Interpretive Consequences Fanny, Stella, and the “Androgynous Clique” Photographing Fanny and Stella 6: Bodies in Transition: Trans-Curiosity in Late-Victorian Pornography Gay Men: Teleny “Mary-Annes”: Sins of the Cities of the Plain Trans-Gender: Letters from Laura and Eveline Inter-sex: The Romance of Violette Coda: “And I? May I Say Nothing, My Lord?” Works Cited Index