Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Paper)

Late-20th-century critical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. Terms include homo/hetero and patriarchal/feminist. This text exploits that framework to show how Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge. Late-20th-century critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework - while refining and resisting it in places - to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge in the late 1990s. One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects.