Author: Morris B. Kaplan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465826
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Sodom on the Thames looks closely at three episodes involving sex between men in late-nineteenth-century England. Morris Kaplan draws on extensive research into court records, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal correspondence and diaries, even a pornographic novel. He focuses on two notorious scandals and one quieter incident. In 1871, transvestites "Stella" (Ernest Boulton) and "Fanny" (Frederick Park), who had paraded around London's West End followed by enthusiastic admirers, were tried for conspiracy to commit sodomy. In 1889-1890, the "Cleveland Street affair" revealed that telegraph delivery boys had been moonlighting as prostitutes for prominent gentlemen, one of whom fled abroad. In 1871, Eton schoolmaster William Johnson resigned in disgrace, generating shockwaves among the young men in his circle whose romantic attachments lasted throughout their lives. Kaplan shows how profoundly these scandals influenced the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and contributed to growing anxiety about male friendships. Sodom on the Thames reconstructs these incidents in rich detail and gives a voice to the diverse people involved. It deepens our understanding of late Victorian attitudes toward urban culture, masculinity, and male homoeroticism. Kaplan also explores the implications of such historical narratives for the contemporary politics of sexuality.
Author: Charles Upchurch
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520280121
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This book examines changing perceptions of sex between men in early Victorian Britain, a significant yet surprisingly little explored period in the history of Western sexuality. Looking at the dramatic transformations of the era—changes in the family and in the law, the emergence of the world's first police force, the growth of a national media, and more—Charles Upchurch asks how perceptions of same-sex desire changed between men, in families, and in the larger society. To illuminate these questions, he mines a rich trove of previously unexamined sources, including hundreds of articles pertaining to sex between men that appeared in mainstream newspapers. The first book to relate this topic to broader economic, social, and political changes in the early nineteenth century, Before Wilde sheds new light on the central question of how and when sex acts became identities.
Author: Matt Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521822077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
London and the Culture of Homosexuality explores the relationship between London and male homosexuality from the criminalisation of all 'acts of gross indecency' between men in 1885 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 - years marked by an intensification in concern about male-male relationships and also by the emergence of an embryonic homosexual rights movement. Taking his cue from literary and lesbian and gay scholars, urban historians and cultural geographers, Matt Cook combines discussion of London's homosexual subculture and various major and minor scandals with a detailed examination of representations in the press, in science and in literature. The conjunction of approaches used in this study provides fresh insights into the development of ideas about the modern homosexual and into the many different ways of comprehending and taking part in London's culture of homosexuality.
Author: Katie Hindmarch-Watson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520975669
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of the new—the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on many of today’s communications tech workers mirror those of a much earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and app interfaces does today. Serving a Wired World is a history of information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications systems created networks according to conventional gender perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible, these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized status—from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one, challenging the status quo in ways familiar today.
Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108901301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1066
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Book Description
Volume III provides in-depth analyses of specific times and places in the history of world sexualities, to investigate more closely the lived experience of individuals and groups to reveal the diversity of human sexualities. Comprising twenty-five chapters, this volume covers ancient Athens, Rome, and Constantinople; eighth- and ninth-century Chang'an, ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad, and tenth- through twelfth-century Kyoto; fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iceland and Florence; sixteenth-century Tenochtitlan, Istanbul, and Geneva; eighteenth-century Edo, Paris, and Philadelphia; nineteenth-century Cairo, London, and Manila; late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lagos, Bombay, Buenos Aires, and Berlin, and twentieth-century Sydney, Toronto, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. Broad in range, this volume sheds light on continuities and changes in world sexualities across time and space.
Author: David Gange
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107004241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
This book shows how, in unearthing biblical cities, archaeology transformed nineteenth-century thinking on the truth of Christianity and its role in modern cities.
Author: Gregory Woods
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300228740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457
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Book Description
A landmark account of gay and lesbian creative networks and the seismic changes they brought to twentieth-century culture In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called "the Homintern" (an echo of Lenin's "Comintern") by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some defense against dominant heterosexual exclusion, the grouping brought solidarity, celebrated talent, and, in doing so, invigorated the majority culture. Woods introduces an enormous cast of gifted and extraordinary characters, most of them operating with surprising openness; but also explores such issues as artistic influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Traveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this sharply observed, warm-spirited book presents a surpassing portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.
Author: Tommy Dickinson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1784990612
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
Drawing on a rich array of source materials including previously unseen, fascinating (and often quite moving) oral histories, archival and news media sources, 'Curing queers' examines the plight of men who were institutionalised in British mental hospitals to receive ‘treatment’ for homosexuality and transvestism, and the perceptions and actions of the men and women who nursed them. It examines why the majority of the nurses followed orders in administering the treatment – in spite of the zero success-rate in ‘straightening out’ queer men – but also why a small number surreptitiously defied their superiors by engaging in fascinating subversive behaviours. 'Curing queers' makes a significant and substantial contribution to the history of nursing and the history of sexuality, bringing together two sub-disciplines that combine only infrequently. It will be of interest to general readers as well as scholars and students in nursing, history, gender studies, and health care ethics and law.
Author: Kathleen Lubey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503633128
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.
Author: Shane Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019269250X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 649
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Book Description
John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840 - Rome 1893) was one of Victorian Britain's most prolific authors, with works that included poems, translations, travel essays, and scholarly studies on topics ranging from classical literature to the Renaissance to the poetry of his contemporaries. Today, however, he is usually remembered for his long unpublished Memoirs, a major early monument of queer life-writing, and for two privately printed, secretly circulated essays, one of which includes the earliest printed appearance in English of the word homosexual. This new word, first coined in German, has long provided a useful milestone for historians of sexuality charting the emergence not only of new typologies but of whole new regimes of knowledge. But what of the rest of Symonds's vast body of work? This book returns to Symonds, not as the origin of a now familiar history, but as a far more complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself--and of what it means to live in it.
