Introduction: 'New' Female Sexualities, 1870–1930

The Victorian period is a key moment in the history of sexuality. It is the era in which the modern terminologies we use to structure the ways we think and talk about sexuality were invented. From the 1880s sexologist such as Havelock Ellis pioneered a science in which sexual preferences were analyzed and categorized. Significantly, this began a new opposition of homo- and heterosexuality, categories which did not simply denote sexual behaviour but were perceived as central to each individual‟s identity. A theorist like Eve Sedgwick describes the extent of this concrete movement. It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of „sexual orientation‟. By attending to the history of terms we now take for granted we can recognize the social construction, rather than naturality, of our emphasis on sexual identity. Jonathan Katz has argued that heterosexuality be recognized as an creation, and one enabled by the earlier category of homosexuality. This approach has also been valuable to historians of female homosexuality. Terry Castle, has taken this issue with the „no lesbians before 1900 theory‟, and Emma Donoghue has derived that the term „lesbian‟ was used „both as an adjective and a noun to describe women who desired and pleasured each other more than a century and a half before the first entry for that meaning‟. Others, especially in literary studies, have taken the different approach of looking at alternative languages and imageries through which same-sex desire is expressed. Explorations of the diversity of Victorian sexuality thrive in academic and popular work, notably in the faculties of neo-Victorian novels, and screen adaptations of www.ijellh.com 509 Victorian works. Fictions by authors such as Sarah Waters and Wesley Stace, and adaptations like Andrew Davies‟s BBC serials Bleak House and Little Dorrit, are helping to transfer popular perceptions of erotic experience in the 19th century. Apocryphal images of piano legs modestly covered are being replaced with an appreciation of the surprising varieties of Victorian sexuality.

This book examines how sexological ideas about desire and the body made their way from German science into British literary culture at the turn of the last century. It shows that fiction not only influenced the vocabulary of European sexology, but that it allowed lay women and men to shape modern ideas about sex, gender and the body. Main authors discussed include Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand, Edith Ellis, and Radclyffe Hall.

Journal of British Studies, 2013

Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, 2015

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2013

I began reading “‘Use Me But as Your Spaniel’: Feminism, Queer heory, and Early Modern Sexualities” (127.3 [2012]: 493–511), by Melissa E. Sanchez, anticipating an account of what we know about early modern sexualities. I soon realized what a more attentive reading of the title suggests: that the essay is an account of what we know—and don’t know— about early modern women’s sexualities as a function of conlicts between feminism and queer theory. hese conlicts, Sanchez argues, brought into public contention the way an inluential strain of secondwave feminism had minimized and sanitized the general norms of women’s sexual desire that are acceptable and “healthy”—efacing lust, abjection, violence, the desire for excess, the unequal distribution of power, the use of pain to experience pleasure—and in the same spirit had bowdlerized the evidence of early modern women’s sexualities. To restore this evidence, Sanchez elicits from texts by Spenser and Shakespeare a rich array of representat...

History of Psychiatry, 2017

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the unspoken fear of syphilis played a significant role in the development of beliefs about female sexuality. Many women were afraid of sexual relationships with men because they feared contracting syphilis, which was, at that time, untreatable. Women also feared passing this disease on to their children. Women’s sexual aversion, or repression, became a focus for Freud and his colleagues, whose theory of psychosexual development was based on their treatment of women. This article examines the case of Dora, the memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan and other sources to argue that the fear of syphilis was a significant factor in upper- and middle-class women’s avoidance of heterosexual relationships. The fear of syphilis, in turn, became a significant factor in the psychoanalytic construction of female sexuality. The social suppression of the fear of syphilis has had a profound impact on theories of women’s development. The implication for ...

Criticism, 2012

voice has suggested that such openness to the multiplicity of sexual meanings in Renaissance texts has gone too far. The exegesis of bawdy wordplay that might have seemed daring in 1947 is simply business as usual today, complains Stanley Wells in Looking for Sex in Shakespeare. Claiming that critics such as Patricia Parker continue to "seek out sexuality in previously unsuspected places and to attribute indecent meanings to characters who might, if they were able to react, be aghast to know of them," Wells laments the "currently fashionable" prominence of "lewd interpreters," whose work has the appearance "of scholarly rigour and critical sophistication" but derives largely from "fantasies released in their author' s minds by the texts." 3 Appropriately enough, the shaping power of "fantasy" that Wells blames for specious scholarship-the imaginative fertility of the critic' s desires and identifications as they engage with literary texts-has been elsewhere championed as necessary to any properly "queer" confrontation with premodern sexuality. In a widely cited introductory essay to their 1996 anthology, Premodern Sexualities, Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero argue that queer theory can productively dislodge the "truth-effects" of critical practices that privilege historical alterity over historical continuity and that "repudiate the roles of fantasy and pleasure in the production of historiography." 4 Promoting queer theory as a "pleasure-positive," epistemologically destabilizing, and anti-normalizing critical discourse, Fradenburg and Freccero intervene in what they regard as the ossified and overly schematic critical orthodoxy that has come to dominate the history of sexuality: the spurious distinction between premodern sexual acts and modern sexual identities derived from a certain reading of Michel Foucault' s The History of Sexuality. Arguably, the most important theoretical development in scholarship on premodern sexualities during the last decade involves attempts to rethink this distinction between acts and identities. In How to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002), David M. Halperin challenges the "canonical reading" of Foucault that posits that "before the modern era sexual deviance could be predicated only of acts, not of persons or identities." 5 Halperin goes on to argue that premodern people might have made connections between "specific sexual acts" and "the particular ethos, or sexual style, or sexual subjectivity, of those who performed them" (32). Even though Halperin reaffirms his commitment to historicism, an approach that insists on the "alterity of the past," he concurs with Fradenberg and Freccero that affirming the "pleasures of identification" with the past can serve to promote "a heterogeneity of queer identities, past and present" (17, 15-16). Recent studies of Renaissance sexuality have likewise rejected a strict (pseudo-)Foucauldian division between acts and identities. In "Sexuality: A Renaissance Category?" James Knowles asks whether there might be "kinds of identity which are not our modern, autonomous and self-contained senses of selfhood." 6 Avoiding the Foucauldian specification of "sexuality" as a nineteenthcentury "apparatus for constituting human subjects" (Halperin 88), Knowles

French History & Civilization , 2009

Studying the construction of the idea of feminine sexual frigidity in France across the turn and beginning of the twentieth century is a particularly useful pivot for theoretical consideration of what it means to write the history of sexuality more broadly. In this paper I hope to show how approaches to the sexual past must be reconsidered according to historicist ideals of context, specificity and critiques of presentism. After examining universalist and presentist assumptions about the politics of frigidity, I examine, via a series of thematic headings, how texts of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century France reveal their own politics of gender, power and medicine when they talk about lacking feminine sexual desire.

Gender <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&amp;"/> History, 2004