Victorian Sexualities and After

The three papers gathered here were first delivered as a symposium, ‘Victorians and After’, at Birkbeck College, University of London, in November 2015. The event marked an exhibition on the nineteenth-century fallen woman at the Foundling Museum which was curated by Lynda Nead.1 The exhibition vividly showed the ways in which the fallen woman was mythologized in art and other media and also how women in their petitions to London's Foundling Hospital had to navigate presumptions about this figure in order to have any hope of respite for their babies and (far more distantly) for themselves. The exhibition included some beautiful, absorbing and deeply affecting work, and was fascinating for what it revealed about changing nineteenth-century conceptualizations of gender and sexuality, of sentimentality, idealism and morality and of the relationship between character and charity. It also encouraged us to think again about that tension between the production of invariably simplistic ideas of personhood and the contingencies of everyday life and experience. For Nead the exhibition was in part a return to and re-evaluation of her earlier work on nineteenth-century prostitution.2 That work (as she explains in her piece here) was energized theoretically by Michel Foucault's then relatively recent History of Sexuality – the first volume of which appeared in English in 1978.3 Foucault had opened out new ways of reading and understanding the exercise of power, and the formation, mobilization and control of sex, the body, and morality. He showed how sexuality and sexual typology might themselves have contingent histories and proposed a revision in the direction of analysis: away from the hypothesis that sexuality was a constant and that the Victorians repressed it, towards ideas about the discursive production of sexuality and sexual types (like the ‘fallen woman’). This work resonated with precedent and parallel pioneering studies by Mary McIntosh and Jeffrey Weeks,4 and prompted vociferous debate and a step change in the way historians, art historians, sociologists, anthropologists and others approached social and cultural worlds, past and present, and – crucially – questions of identity. As Frank Mort explains here, Foucault's denaturalization of identity was key to his own approach to the Victorians.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Exhibition · Human sexuality · Literature · Morality · Power (physics) · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Psychology

• Myths of sexuality

  Lynda Nead•Myths of sexuality•1988

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• Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World

  Merry Wiesner-Hanks•Christianity and Sexuality in the…•2014

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• The Homosexual Role

  Mary Mcintosh•Social Problems•1968

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