Female fortune: the Anne Lister diaries, 1833-36 : land, gender and authority / Jill Liddington
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The life of LTC Rolt
Victoria Owens, Jurisprudence,1979
In 1926, Tom Rolt who was then sixteen years old, abandoned his public school education. Having taken a job with a small firm of agricultural engineers, he realised that he had found his life’s calling. But the way ahead was neither smooth nor easy. Having secured a premium apprenticeship, the firm which took him on foundered and although he eventually qualified as a mechanical engineer, the 1930s depression made it almost impossible to find regular employment. Nothing daunted, with the encouragement of his mysterious companion ‘Cara’, he turned to writing. His literary career flourished alongside his association with the Vintage Sports Car Club, the Inland Waterways Association and the Talyllyn Railway. Between his Inland Waterways Association and Talyllyn phases, Angela, his first wife, left him to join Billy Smart’s Circus, and Sonia -an actress-turned-boatwoman – would become his second wife. Over the course of his life, he produced over thirty books, their subject matters ranging from canals and railways to engineering biography; company histories; a collection of accomplished ghost stories and a topographical survey of Worcestershire. He also wrote polemics about the plight of the craftsman in a world which relied increasingly upon mass production. In this book, the first full-length biography of Tom Rolt and a complement to his auto-biographical Landscape trilogy, Mansfield alumna, Victoria Owens, draws upon his surviving letters and unpublished manuscripts to tell the story of the engineer-turned-writer who made Britain’s industrial past the stuff of enduring literature.
The Cambridge world history of sexualities
edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Mathew Kuefler
Split into four volumes, The Cambridge World History of Sexualities examines sexualities across time and around the world at varying geographic and chronological scales. Featuring over eighty contributions from scholars across more than twenty countries in a number of disciplines, the volumes represent a cross-disciplinary approach that characterizes the history of sexuality as a field in itself. The first volume combines historiographical essays with general overviews of important topics and themes. The second evaluates sexuality in systems of thought and belief, from early humans to contemporary feminism. The third targets specific locations at different times to navigate further the lived experience of individuals and groups. Lastly, the fourth examines the intersection of modernity and human sexuality on issues such as colonialism and consumerism. Thorough and authoritative, the collection is a much-needed addition to the world history of sexualities.
The missing thread
Daisy Dunn
For centuries, men have been writing histories of antiquity filled with warlords, emperors and kings. But when it comes to incorporating women aside from Cleopatra and Boudica, writers have been more comfortable describing mythical heroines than real ones. While Penelope and Helen of Troy live on in the imagination, their real-life counterparts have been relegated to the margins. In The Missing Thread, Daisy Dunn inverts this tradition and puts the women of history at the centre of the narrative.
These pages present Enheduanna, the earliest named author, the poet Sappho and Telesilla, who defended her city from attack. Here is Artemisia, sole female commander in the Graeco-Persian Wars, and Cynisca, the first female victor at the Olympic Games. Cleopatra may be the more famous, but Fulvia, Mark Antony’s wife, fought a war on his behalf. Many other women remain nameless but integral. Through new examination of the sources combined with vivid storytelling Daisy Dunn shows us the ancient world through fresh eyes, and introduces us to an incredible cast of ancient women, weavers of an entire world.
Female servants in early modern England
Charmian Mansell
What was it like to be a woman in service in early modern England? Drawing on evidence of over 1000 female servants recorded in church court testimony between c.1530 and 1650, Female Servants in Early Modern England uncovers these women’s everyday lives. Intervening in histories of labour, gender, freedom, law, migration, youth, and community, this book rethinks traditional scholarship of service. De-coupling ‘household’ and ‘service’, it reveals the importance of female servants’ labour to the wider economy and their key role in social networks and communities. Moving beyond regulatory codes of service prescribed by law and conduct literature, this book lays bare the varied experiences of women who served. Service was fluid and contingent: some women’s working lives operated with flexibility unsanctioned by law yet socially accepted, while poverty bound others fast to service. In early modern England, service (and the freedoms it allowed) was in flux.
International law
edited by Malcolm D. Evans
Evans’ International Law is widely celebrated as an outstanding collection of writing by leading scholars in the field. Bringing together a broad range of perspectives on all the key issues in international law, it is a unique and invaluable resource for students and practitioners alike. Key features. A stellar line-up of authors, drawn from those actively involved in the teaching and practice of international law, offers authoritative and stimulating perspectives on the subject. Provides wide-ranging, critical analysis of all of the key issues and themes in public international law. The entire volume has been carefully edited by Sir Malcolm Evans to ensure a consistent style. Suitable for students and academics with varying prior exposure to international law.
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Alan Hollinghurst: writing under the influence
edited by Michèle Mendelssohn, Denis Flannery
This groundbreaking, cross-generic collection is the first to consider the entire breadth of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning writing. Focused through the concept of influence, the volume addresses critical issues surrounding the work of Britain’s most important contemporary novelist.
It encompasses provocative and timely subjects ranging from gay visual cultures and representations, to Victorian, modernist and contemporary literature, as well as race and empire, theatre and cinema, eros and economics. The book reveals the fascinating intellectual and affective matter that lies beneath the polished control and dazzling style of Hollinghurst’s work.
Alongside contributions by distinguished British and American critics, the book includes an unpublished interview with Hollinghurst. Alan Hollinghurst: Writing under the influence uses a creative range of critical approaches to provide the most authoritative and innovative account available of Hollinghurst’s works.
Life isn't binary: on being both, beyond, and in-between
Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi
Much of society’s thinking operates in a highly rigid and binary manner; something is good or bad, right or wrong, a success or a failure, and so on. Challenging this limited way of thinking, this ground-breaking book looks at how non-binary methods of thought can be applied to all aspects of life, and offer new and greater ways of understanding ourselves and how we relate to others.
Using bisexual and non-binary gender experiences as a starting point, this book addresses the key issues with binary thinking regarding our relationships, bodies, emotions, wellbeing and our sense of identity and sets out a range of practices which may help us to think in more non-binary, both/and, or uncertain ways. A truly original and insightful piece, this guide encourages reflection on how we view and understand the world we live in and how we all bend, blur or break society’s binary codes.
Who's afraid of gender?
Judith Butler
Judith Butler, the ground-breaking philosopher whose work has redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on gender that have become central to right-wing movements today.
Global networks have formed ‘anti-gender ideology movements’ dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous threat to families, local cultures, civilization – and even ‘man’ himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to abolish reproductive justice, undermine protections against violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights. But what, exactly, is so disturbing about gender?
In this vital, courageous book, Butler carefully examines how ‘gender’ has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations and transexclusionary feminists, and the concrete ways in which this phantasm works. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of critical race theory and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.
An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to make a broad coalition with all those who struggle for equality and fight injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us an essentially hopeful work that is both timely and timeless.
Female husbands: a trans history
Jen Manion
Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands – people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women – were true queer pioneers.
Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom while also exploring how attitudes towards female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women’s rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of ‘female husband’ in the early twentieth century.
Groundbreaking and influential, Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past.
Before we were trans: a new history of gender
Kit Heyam
Across the world today, people of all ages are doing fascinating, creative, messy things with gender. These people have a rich history – but one that is often left behind by narratives of trans lives that focus on people with stable, binary, uncomplicated gender identities. As a result, these stories tend to be recent, binary, stereotyped, medicalised and white.
Before We Were Trans is a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to be comprehensive or definitive, but – by blending culture, feminism and politics – to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.
Transporting us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to North America, the stories this book tells leave questions and resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western terminology and categories – not least the category of ‘trans’ itself. But telling them provides a history that reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written.
The shape of sex: nonbinary gender from Genesis to the Renaissance
Leah DeVun
The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200-1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.
The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers-theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists-who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature.
The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past.
It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female-and human.
Good as you: from prejudice to pride: 30 years of gay Britain
Paul Flynn
In 1984 the pulsing electronics and soft vocals of Smalltown Boy would become an anthem uniting gay men. A month later, an aggressive virus, HIV, would be identified and a climate of panic and fear would spread across the nation, marginalising an already ostracised community. Yet, out of this terror would come tenderness and 30 years later, the long road to gay equality would climax with the passing of same sex marriage.
Paul Flynn charts this astonishing pop cultural and societal U-turn via the cultural milestones that effected change-from Manchester’s self-selection as Britain’s gay capital to the real-time romance of Elton John and David Furnish’s eventual marriage. Including candid interviews from major protagonists, such as Kylie, Russell T Davies, Will Young, Holly Johnson and Lord Chris Smith, as well as the relative unknowns crucial to the gay community, we see how an unlikely group of bedfellows fought for equality both front of stage and in the wings.
This is the story of Britain’s brothers, cousins and sons. Sometimes it is the story of their fathers and husbands. It is one of public outrage and personal loss, the (not always legal) highs and the desperate lows, and the final collective victory as gay men were final recognised, as Good As You.
Queer beyond London
Matt Cook and Alison Oram
When it comes to queer British history, London has stolen the limelight. But what about the millions of queer lives lived elsewhere? In Queer beyond London, two leading LGBTQ+ historians take you on a journey through four English cites from the sixties to the noughties, exploring the northern post-industrial heartlands and taking in the salty air of the seaside cities of the South.
Covering the bohemian, artsy world of Brighton, the semi-hidden queer life of military Plymouth, the lesbian activism of Leeds, and the cutting edge dance and drag scenes of Manchester, they show how local people, places and politics shaped LGBTQ+ life in each city, forging vibrant and distinctive queer cultures of their own. Using pioneering community histories from each place, and including the voices of queer people who have made their lives there, the book tells local stories at the heart of our national history.
LGBT Victorians: sexuality and gender in the nineteenth-century archives
Simon Joyce
It has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink “the repressive hypothesis” and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term “Victorian” still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians argues for re-visiting the period’s thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying.
We think of those whose primary self-definition is in terms of sexuality (lesbians, gay men, bisexuals) and those for whom it is gender identity (intersex and transgender people, genderqueers) as simultaneously in coalition and distinct from each other, on the assumption that gender and sexuality are independent aspects of self-identification. Re-examining how the Victorians considered such identity categories to have produced and shaped each other can ground a more durable basis for strengthening our present LGBTQ+ coalition.
LGBT Victorians draws on scholarship reconsidering the significance of sexology and efforts to retrospectively discover transgender people in historical archives, particularly in the gap between what the nineteenth century termed the sodomite and the hermaphrodite.
It highlights a broad range of individuals (including Anne Lister, and the defendants in the “Fanny and Stella” trial of the 1870s), key thinkers and activists (including Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter), and writers such as Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds to map the complicated landscape of gender and sexuality in the Victorian period. In the process, it decenters Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment from our historical understanding of sexual and gender nonconformity.
Desire: a history of European sexuality
Anna Clark
A sweeping survey of sexuality in Europe from the Greeks to the present, Desire: A History of European Sexuality follows changing attitudes to two major concepts of sexual desire – desire as dangerous, polluting, and disorderly, and desire as creative, transcendent, even revolutionary – through the major turning points of European history.
Chronological in structure, and wide ranging in scope, Desire addresses such topics as sex in ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, sexual contact and culture clash in Spain and colonial Mesoamerica, new attitudes toward sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and sex in Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany.
The book introduces the concept of “twilight moments” to describe activities seen as shameful or dishonorable, but which were tolerated when concealed by shadows, and integrates the history of heterosexuality with same-sex desire, as well as exploring the emotions of love and lust as well as the politics of sex and personal experiences.
This new edition has been updated to include a new chapter on sex and imperialism and expanded discussions of Islam and trans issues. Drawing on a rich array of sources, including poetry, novels, pornography, and film, as well as court records, autobiographies, and personal letters, and written in a lively, engaging style, Desire remains an essential resource for scholars and students of the history of European sexuality, as well as women’s and gender history, social and cultural history and LGBTQ history.
Out of time: the queer politics of postcoloniality
Rahul Rao
Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who were said to have lobbied for its passage.
Focusing on the Ugandan case, this book seeks to understand the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queer phobias. It investigates the impact and memory of the colonial encounter on the politics of sexuality, the politics of religiosity of different Christian denominations, and the political economy of contemporary homophobic moral panics.
In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain–three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste.
The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself.
How to understand your sexuality
Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi
This down-to-earth guide is the ultimate companion for understanding, accepting and celebrating your sexuality. Written by two internationally renowned authors and therapists, the book explains how sexuality works in terms of our identities, attractions, desires and practices, and explores how it intersects with our personal experiences and the world around us.
With activities and reflection points throughout, it offers space to tune into yourself and think deeply about your own sexuality. You’ll hear from people across the sexuality spectrum and in different relationship set-ups, and be inspired by the ideas of scholars, activists and practitioners. Sexuality is a vast and wonderful landscape – let this book guide you on your journey!
All the things she said
Daisy Jones
All The Things She Said: everything I know about modern lesbian and bi culture – explores the nature of 21st century queerness. Lesbian and bi culture is ever-changing and here, journalist Daisy Jones unpicks outdated stereotypes and shows how, over the past few years, the style and shared language of queer women has slowly infiltrated the mainstream. (Think less hemp sandals, IKEA trips and nut milks and more freedom, expression, community. And Cate Blanchett.)
From the dingy basement clubs of east London to the unchartered realms of TikTok, cutting in DIY mullets and christening Meryl Streep ‘Daddy’, Daisy explores the multifaceted nature of what it means to be lesbian or bi today, while also looking back and celebrating the past.
The book shines a light on the never-ending process of coming out, what it’s like to date as a queer woman, how physical nightlife spaces have evolved into online communities and the reasons why mental health issues have disproportionately impacted LGBTQ+ people.
As someone immersed in the queer culture of women, Daisy brings both the personal perspective and a journalistic one to this changing landscape.
Through interviews and lived experience, a cohesive image emerges: one which shows that being lesbian, bi, or anything in between, isn’t necessarily always tied to gender, sexual practice or even romantic attraction.
Fashioning Sapphism: the origins of a modern English lesbian culture
Laura Doan
The highly publicized obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” (1928) is generally recognized as the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian culture, marking a great divide between innocence and deviance, private and public, New Woman and Modern Lesbian. Yet despite unreserved agreement on the importance of this cultural moment, previous studies often reductively distort our reading of the formation of early 20th-century lesbian identity, either by neglecting to examine in detail the developments leading up to the ban or by framing events in too broad a context against other cultural phenomena. “Fashioning Sapphism” locates the novelist Radclyffe Hall and other prominent lesbians – including the pioneer in women s policing, Mary Allen, the artist Gluck, and the writer Bryher – within English modernity through the multiple sites of law, sexology, fashion, and literary and visual representation, thus tracing the emergence of a modern English lesbian subculture in the first two decades of the 20th century. Drawing on extensive new archival research, the book interrogates a new a range of myths long accepted without question (and still in circulation) concerning, to cite only a few, the extent of homophobia in the 1920s, the strategic deployment of sexology against sexual minorities, and the rigidity of certain cultural codes to denote lesbianism in public culture.
Sensible footwear: a girl's guide
Kate Charlesworth
The curtains of lesbian history from the 1950s to the present day are opened by celebrated cartoonist Kate Charlesworth, with a little help from Gilbert and Sullivan and a side of Nancy Spain. Sensible Footwear is a glorious political and personal history that gives Pride a run for its money; but, like Pride, it wears its heart at the centre, making the invisible visible, and celebrating lesbian lives from the domestic to the diva.
Notes of a crocodile
Qiu Miaojin
Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
Forced out: a detective's story of prejudice and resilience
Kevin Maxwell
Kevin Maxwell was a dream candidate for the police force – passionate, hard-working and keen to serve his community. And, as a gay black man from a working-class family, he could easily have been a poster boy for the Force’s stated commitment to equal opportunities. Instead he came up against entrenched prejudice, open racism and homophobia. For more than ten years, Kevin strove against the odds, until he took the Force to an employment tribunal, with devastating results. Forced Out combines deeply affecting memoir with sharp analysis and a fascinating insider perspective on life in the force. It asks the important question: what needs to change?
A dutiful boy: a memoir of a gay Muslim's journey to acceptance
Mohsin Zaidi
Mohsin grew up in a poor pocket of east London, in a devout shia Muslim community. His family were close-knit and religiously conservative. From a young age, Mohsin felt different but in a home where being gay was inconceivable he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised from opportunity and isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim. But Mohsin had incredible drive and became the first person from his school to go to Oxford University. At university came the newfound freedom to become the man his parents never wanted him to be. But when he was confronted by his father and a witch doctor invited to ‘cure’ him Mohsin had to make a difficult choice. Mohsin’s story takes harrowing turns but it is full of life and humour, and, ultimately, it is an inspiring story about breaking through life’s barriers.
The intoxicating Mr Lavelle
Neil Blackmore
Brothers Benjamin and Edgar have so far led a quiet life, but change is afoot as they enter a world of glorious sights and People of Quality on their Grand Tour of Europe. But a trunk full of powdered silver wigs and matching suits isn’t enough to embed them into high society. As Edgar clings on to conventions, Benjamin pushes against them. And when the charming, seductive Horace Lavelle promises Benjamin a real adventure, it’s only a matter of time before chaos and love ensue.
Bi: the hidden culture, history and science of bisexuality
Julia Shaw
Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality explores all that we know about the world’s largest sexual minority. It is a personal journey that starts with Dr Julia Shaw’s own openly bisexual identity, and celebrates the resilience and beautiful diversity of the bi community. From the hunt for a bi gene, to the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, to asylum seekers who need to prove their bisexuality in a court of law, there is more to explore than most have ever realised.
The bi-ble
edited by Lauren Nickodemus & Ellen Desmond
The Bible: an anthology of personal essays and narratives about bisexuality features a foreword by Lauren James.
Bisexuals inhabit a liminal space between cultures, often misunderstood or dismissed by the straight and LGBTQ+ communities alike. We are the sexual identity most likely to be closeted, most at risk of mental illness, domestic abuse and even heart disease – but also the least visible. Now, a selection of intersectional bi voices has come together to share their stories, helping our voices be heard and our identities seen. It’s time to stand up and spread the word.
Ace
Angela Chen
An engaging exploration of what it means to be asexual in a world that’s obsessed with sexual attraction, and what the ace perspective can teach all of us about desire and identity. What exactly is sexual attraction and what is it like to go through life not experiencing it? What does asexuality reveal about gender roles, about romance and consent, and the pressures of society? This accessible examination of asexuality shows that the issues that aces face-confusion around sexual activity, the intersection of sexuality and identity, navigating different needs in relationships-are the same conflicts that nearly all of us will experience. Through a blend of reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir, Ace addresses the misconceptions around the “A” of LGBTQIA and invites everyone to rethink pleasure and intimacy. Journalist Angela Chen creates her path to understanding her own asexuality with the perspectives of a diverse group of asexual people. Vulnerable and honest, these stories include a woman who had blood tests done because she was convinced that “not wanting sex” was a sign of serious illness, and a man who grew up in a religious household and did everything “right,” only to realize after marriage that his experience of sexuality had never been the same as that of others. Disabled aces, aces of color, gender-nonconforming aces, and aces who both do and don’t want romantic relationships all share their experiences navigating a society in which a lack of sexual attraction is considered abnormal. Chen’s careful cultural analysis explores how societal norms limit understanding of sex and relationships and celebrates the breadth of sexuality and queerness.
