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

Dec 5, 2023

Dr. Simon Joyce, an expert on nineteenth-century archives, explores the rethinking of Victorian sexuality and gender identity. The podcast focuses on topics such as the lives of lesbians in the nineteenth century, the advocacy for tolerance and gender identity by Ulrichs, historical instances of transgender identity, cultural anxiety surrounding male effeminacy, a Victorian man's struggle with homosexuality, and the contrasting perspectives on gender and sexuality debates in England and Ireland. This podcast provides a fresh understanding of the Victorian period and its relevance to LGBTQ+ issues today.

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Navigating Societal Norms: Lesbians in the Early 19th Century

02:09 • 18min

Ulrichs: Advocate for Tolerance and Gender Identity

20:16 • 6min

Exploring Historical Transgender Identity in the 19th Century

26:23 • 5min

Cultural Anxiety and Male Effeminacy in Victorian England

31:45 • 11min

Chapter: Victorian Man's Struggle with Homosexuality

43:09 • 26min

Comparing Gender and Sexuality Debates in 19th Century England and Ireland

01:09:21 • 3min

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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