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20 - Sexuality

from PART IV - MATTERS OF DEBATE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

Kate Flint
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

To take ‘sexuality’ as a rubric for understanding Victorian literature may seem a bit odd, since few words better illustrate the gulf between how the Victorians saw themselves and how we see them. ‘To have sex’ was not a common locution until the early twentieth century, and it was only in that century’s final decades that feminist and queer theorists began to insist on distinctions among ‘sexuality’, ‘sex’, and ‘gender’. Sexuality came to denote a complex of desires, affects, sensations, identifications, and acts; sex, to mean the biological characteristics that identify individuals as male or female, though those physical differences increasingly came to seem culturally constructed and physically manipulable; and gender, to refer to an individual’s sense of identity as masculine or feminine, as well as to social demarcations of masculine and feminine qualities and roles. In the nineteenth century, to be sexual meant to be sexed male or female; in the twentieth, sexuality became shorthand for sexual orientation. And though two Victorian men, Havelock Ellis and John Symonds, helped initiate that change in usage, even they thought of the sexual in Victorian terms, as referring primarily to male or female sex. Thus, when they coined the phrase ‘sexual inversion’ in the 1890s, they used it to label men who felt like women and women who felt like men, not men who desired men and women who desired women.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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  • Sexuality
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.022
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  • Sexuality
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.022
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Sexuality
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.022
Available formats
×