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

by 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

Published November 25, 2022

Reviews

[C. B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the main argument; that is, that we must see trans history as part of the history of sexuality, and vice versa. But generally, I was a bit disappointed with it. It’s oddly dense for a book which—in my opinion—should be aimed at a wide readership, not just a narrowly academic one. It also feels isolated from more recent interventions in queer historiography. It takes its cues from older work in literary and Victorian gay studies. Nevertheless, the book has some useful points, and I found the personal framing quite touching.