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1.18 - Gothic and the History of Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2020

Angela Wright
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Dale Townshend
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

Across a variety of discursive practices, this chapter examines how anxieties about a post-Enlightenment sexuality generate regulation. It explores this effect on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic narrative, which consistently depicts and dramatises non-normative sexualities, acts and characters (producing pathology and perversion), yet ultimately condemns and punishes these potentials and possibilities in order to re-establish the dominant, heteronormative practice. The aim is to demonstrate that, from a Foucauldian perspective, transgressive sexualities encountered in the Gothic embody both liberatory and restrictive potentials, and that non-heteronormative desires and acts are simultaneously the product and limit of biopower. Through a reading of such fictions as Vathek, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk and Zofloya, the chapter argues that the deployment of sexuality produces a continual extension of areas for the maximisation of power and control.

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The Cambridge History of the Gothic
Volume 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century
, pp. 382 - 405
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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