The Queer Eighteenth Century (PG)

Characteristically modern forms of sexual and gender identity came into being during the long eighteenth century. This course examines the representation of emergent queer identities in a range of genres, including drama, fiction, poetry and memoir. We'll read about mollies, fops and sodomites, tribades, sapphists, and female husbands. Early modern queerness was in some ways more capacious than contemporary ways of figuring non-normative sexual and gender identities, though it was also more violently policed. These less prescriptive queer identities, which were often specific to eighteenth-century culture, were increasingly marginalised and pathologised over the course of the century. A newly rigid system of gender binaries and the strict modern alignment of sexual behaviours with sexual and gender identities emerged alongside the radical economic and cultural shifts of the period. The global outlook of English culture in the eighteenth century meant that new gender and sexual identities were formed in the context of colonial exploitation, slavery and racialisation; we cannot divorce the invention of modern 'race' from the invention of modern gender and sexuality. So we'll think broadly about the mutability of identity in this period: from cross-dressed actors and blackface performances to the unstable protagonists of the new, popular prose genres, autobiography and the novel, eighteenth-century literature 'queers' the self. The course will interrogate the origins of the modern organisation of sex and gender, historicising our understanding of these categories and revealing their contingency and their limitations.   Credit level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate SCQF level: 20