Sapphic Crossings

Sapphic Crossings

Author: Ula Lukszo Klein

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2021-02-04

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0813945526

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Across the eighteenth century in Britain, readers, writers, and theater-goers were fascinated by women who dressed in men’s clothing—from actresses on stage who showed their shapely legs to advantage in men’s breeches to stories of valiant female soldiers and ruthless female pirates. Spanning genres from plays, novels, and poetry to pamphlets and broadsides, the cross-dressing woman came to signal more than female independence or unconventional behaviors; she also came to signal an investment in female same-sex intimacies and sapphic desires. Sapphic Crossings reveals how various British texts from the period associate female cross-dressing with the exciting possibility of intimate, embodied same-sex relationships. Ula Lukszo Klein reconsiders the role of lesbian desires and their structuring through cross-gender embodiments as crucial not only to the history of sexuality but to the rise of modern concepts of gender, sexuality, and desire. She prompts readers to rethink the roots of lesbianism and transgender identities today and introduces new ways of thinking about embodied sexuality in the past.


The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English

Author: Sarah Eron

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-25

Total Pages: 905

ISBN-13: 1003845266

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The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.


Unsuitable

Unsuitable

Author: Eleanor Medhurst

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-06

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1805260960

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Clothes are central to lesbian history, and lesbians are central to fashion history. The way we dress can help us show who we are, or hide ourselves; make us into a community, or make us stand out from the crowd. Yet "lesbian fashion" is often strangely overlooked. Without this story of self-expression, what are we missing about the culture and status of queer women? The lesbian past is slippery: it has often been deliberately hidden, edited or left unrecorded. Unsuitable restores to style history and queer history the fascinating, ever-changing tale of modern lesbian dress, from top hats to violet tiaras. This story spans centuries and countries, from "Gentleman Jack" in nineteenth-century Yorkshire and Queen Christina of seventeenth-century Sweden, to Paris modernism, genderqueer Berlin, butch/femme bar culture and 1980s activists, via drag kings, the Suffragettes, the Harlem Renaissance and the power of slogan tees. This book is a kaleidoscope of the margins and the mainstream, celebrating trans lesbian histories, Black lesbian histories, and histories of gender-nonconformity. You don't have to be queer or fashionable to be enthralled by this hidden history of minority identity. In Unsuitable, Eleanor Medhurst lights it up for the world to see, in all its finery.


Decoding Anne Lister

Decoding Anne Lister

Author: Caroline Gonda

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1009280732

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The ground-breaking first collection of essays on Anne Lister, featuring both established and new scholars, a screenwriter and a novelist.


At Certain Points We Touch

At Certain Points We Touch

Author: Lauren John Joseph

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-03-03

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1526631318

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SELECTED FOR STYLIST'S FICTION YOU CAN'T MISS IN 2022 - 'AN ESSENTIAL READ' NAMED AS A BOOK OF 2022 BY ESQUIRE, STYLIST, SHEERLUXE AND FOYLES 'A stone-cold masterpiece by a shocking new talent' OLIVIA LAING 'Pure delight ... A queer romance novel like no other' TATLER It's four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realise that it's February 29th – the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago. Ten years earlier, and our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power play will initiate a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims – and culminate in terrible betrayal. At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York – a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent. 'Lauren John Joseph writes with such wit, glamour, and style! I haven't read a book that so powerfully evokes what it's like to be a wild young artist among other wild young artists since the Bright Young Things' TORREY PETERS, author of Detransition, Baby 'Screamingly funny, scandalously hot, opulent, deep - a devastating torch song of obsession and excess' JEREMY ATHERTON LIN, author of Gay Bar 'Lauren's debut novel is so exciting. The writing is so fresh, funny and gripping - and carries the trademark wit that I have always loved from Lauren' TRAVIS ALABANZA 'The struggle to find ones place in the world as an artist and lover, creating self and culture as you go along - At Certain Points We Touch captures this fleeting, dazzling moment with glamour and heart' MICHELLE TEA


The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature

The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature

Author: Benjamin Kahan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-06-06

Total Pages: 1037

ISBN-13: 1108911331

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Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.


Laboring Mothers

Laboring Mothers

Author: Ellen Malenas Ledoux

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0813950295

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Motherhood inherently involves labor. The seemingly perennial notion that paid work outside the home and motherhood are incompatible, however, grows out of specific cultural conditions established in Britain and her colonies during the long eighteenth century. With Laboring Mothers, Ellen Malenas Ledoux synthesizes and expands on two feminist dialogues to deliver an innovative transatlantic cultural history of working motherhood. Addressing both actual historical women and fabricated representations of a type, Ledoux demonstrates how contingent ideas about the public sphere and maternity functioned together to create systems of power and privilege among working mothers. Popular culture has long thrown doubt on the idea that women can be both productive and reproductive at the same time. Although the critical task of raising and providing for a family should, in theory, foster solidarity, this has not historically proven the case. Laboring Mothers demonstrates how contemporary associations surrounding economic status, race, and working motherhood have their roots in an antiquated and rigid system of inequality among women that dates back to the Enlightenment.


The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature

The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature

Author: Douglas A. Vakoch

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 1003857299

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The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature examines the intersection of transgender studies and literary studies, bringing together essays from global experts in the field. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of trans literature, highlighting the core topics, genres, and periods important for scholarship now and in the future. Covering the main approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of the core topics guiding contemporary trans literary theory and criticism, including the Anthropocene, archival speculation, activism, BDSM, Black studies, critical plant studies, culture, diaspora, disability, ethnocentrism, home, inclusion, monstrosity, nondualist philosophies, nonlinearity, paradox, pedagogy, performativity, poetics, religion, suspense, temporality, visibility, and water. Exploration of diverse literary genres, forms, and periods through a trans lens, such as archival fiction, artificial intelligence narratives, autobiography, climate fiction, comics, creative writing, diaspora fiction, drama, fan fiction, gothic fiction, historical fiction, manga, medieval literature, minor literature, modernist literature, mystery and detective fiction, nature writing, poetry, postcolonial literature, radical literature, realist fiction, Renaissance literature, Romantic literature, science fiction, travel writing, utopian literature, Victorian literature, and young adult literature. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, gender studies, trans studies, literary theory, and literary criticism.


Sapphic Primitivism

Sapphic Primitivism

Author: Robin Hackett

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780813533476

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In this book, Robin Hackett examines portrayals of race, class, and sexuality in modernist texts by white women to argue for the existence of a literary device that she calls "Sapphic primitivism." The works vary widely in their form and content and include Olive Schreiner's proto-modernist exploration of New Womanhood, The Story of an African Farm; Virginia Woolf's high modernist "play-poem," The Waves; Sylvia Townsend Warner's historical novel, Summer Will Show; and Willa Cather's Southern pastoral, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In each, blackness and working-class culture are figured to represent sexual autonomy, including lesbianism, for white women. Sapphic primitivism exposes the ways several classes of identification were intertwined with the development of homosexual identities at the turn of the century. Sapphic primitivism is not, however, a means of disguising lesbian content. Rather, it is an aesthetic displacement device that simultaneously exposes lesbianism and exploits modern, primitivist modes of self-representation. Hackett's revelations of the mutual interests of those who study early twentieth-century constructions of race and sexuality and twenty-first-century feminists doing anti-racist and queer work are a major contribution to literary studies and identity theory.


Strolling Players of Empire

Strolling Players of Empire

Author: Kathleen Wilson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 1108479782

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Explores the politics of theatrical and social performance in the establishment of eighteenth-century British imperial rule.