LGBT Victorians : sexuality and gender in the nineteenth-century archives

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.