The historical evolution and/or contemporary understanding ofterms such as Gender, Sexuality, Femininity, Feminism, Masculinity, Lesbian, Gay and Queer are treated at length in the book. This glossary offers clarification of other key terms and concepts used throughout. Abjection In common sense usage the condition of being thought by others, or feeling, inferior. For feminist psychoanalysis […]

‘Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity’, writes Judith Butler. Instead, it should be seen as an ‘effect’, the ‘mundane’ product of regularly repeated ‘bodily gestures, move­ments, and styles of various kinds’ that create the impression of ‘an abiding gendered self’, to cite once more a passage that was quoted earlier (Butler […]

If late-twentieth-century publishing increasingly became a department or specialism within vast multi-media conglomerates, it is also the case that for many men and women reading novels is now inseparable from their wider consumption of cultural narratives via film and television. To a large extent, these media currently occupy the space that once belonged to the […]

As we saw in our brief account of the Victorian woman reader, the idea of a mass public has typically been a source of worry to the main centres of respectable middle-class opinion and has often been seen as possessing feminine characteristics. In the late 1850s the novelist Wilkie Collins was shocked to discover that […]

One of the most important developments arising from the spread of literacy in the late-seventeenth century was the emergence of a new zone of free and open discussion, now known as the public sphere. Distinct from either the family or government or the royal court, this loose, unofficial network of social relations came into being […]

Reading is now such a basic skill, seeming to transcend consid­erations of gender, that it is hard to think of it as having a history at all, let alone a past that belongs to the history of the relationship between men and women. But the act of reading has itself varied enormously over time, a […]

Historically, as Nightwood amply confirms, both modernism and same-sex passion have relied upon the twentieth-century metro­polis as a place sufficiently large and diverse to enable them to survive, and eventually to flourish. But this link between sexual dissidence and urban geography can be found throughout gay and lesbian writing and not only in its modernist […]

Just as Warhol’s deadpan swishiness helped to open up new aesthetic possibilities for Camp as a cultural practice, so ‘queer’ is also a term that has been virtually reinvented by gay critics and gay activists in recent years. Roughly speaking, ‘queer’ seems to have passed through three main phases. When the word first came into […]

Gay New York is essentially a work of retrieval. In it Chauncey seeks to recover the lives and lifestyles of those gay men whose past has been hidden from history, whose culture has been forgotten and in part erased or distorted. One of Chauncey’s central claims is that the common idea that same-sex desire was […]

Gissing does not use the word ‘homosexual’ in his letter, perhaps because it was still a relatively new term in 1895; its first appearance in English was probably in an early translation of Krafft-Ebing’s sexological compendium Psychopathia Sexualis in 1892. By classifying people according to their sexual histories, Krafft-Ebing helped to provide a medical warrant […]