Simon Joyce, "LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Dec 5, 2023

Simon Joyce, writer and author on LGBT Victorians in the 19th century, discusses revisiting gender and sexual identity in Victorian era. The podcast explores the tension within the LGBTQ+ movement, advocacy for gay rights in 19th-century Germany, the evolution of classification systems for sexuality and gender, historical records of gender identity and acceptance, the decline of dominant superpowers and gender incoherence, identity struggles and repression in 19th-century desires.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Victorian Era

02:43 • 20min

Advocacy for Gay Rights and the Concept of Souls in 19th-Century Germany

22:16 • 4min

The Evolution of Categorization System for Sexuality and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Archives

26:22 • 2min

Exploring the Historical Record of Gender Identity and Acceptance in the 19th Century

28:25 • 6min

The Decline of Dominant Superpowers and Gender Incoherence

34:17 • 11min

Identity Struggles and Repression in 19th-century Desires

45:25 • 28min

Historical Perceptions, Future Book Plans, and a Photography Ad

01:13:41 • 2min

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: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (Oxford UP, 2022) 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.

Simon Joyce is Professor of English, College of William and Mary. He 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.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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