Description
LGBT Victorians argues for re-visiting the Victorian era's thinking about gender and sexual identity. 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. 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 reconsiders 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.
About the Author
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.
Reviews
This is a book to be reckoned with, one of the most important to be written in British LGBT or, indeed, Queer history in recent years. Scholars, advocates for trans rights, gender-critical feminists, and culture warriors may not learn much from the Victorians themselves about sexuality and gender, but they would certainly benefit enormously from engaging with this rich, nuanced, and deeply humane study. * Brian Lewis, Journal of British Studies *
The book nevertheless remains a really important intervention and a foundation for further thinking not only about the B in historical perspective, but also about the recent odd interregnum Joyce identifies during which gender and sexuality were figured apart in discourse and politics. * Matt Cook, Victorian Studies *
Book Information
ISBN 9780198980650
Author Simon Joyce
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
About the Author
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.
Reviews
This is a book to be reckoned with, one of the most important to be written in British LGBT or, indeed, Queer history in recent years. Scholars, advocates for trans rights, gender-critical feminists, and culture warriors may not learn much from the Victorians themselves about sexuality and gender, but they would certainly benefit enormously from engaging with this rich, nuanced, and deeply humane study. * Brian Lewis, Journal of British Studies *
The book nevertheless remains a really important intervention and a foundation for further thinking not only about the B in historical perspective, but also about the recent odd interregnum Joyce identifies during which gender and sexuality were figured apart in discourse and politics. * Matt Cook, Victorian Studies *
Book Information
ISBN 9780198980650
Author Simon Joyce
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
