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England

Covering topics relating specifically to England or generally to the region equivalent to the modern United Kingdom. Sometimes lazily and inaccurately used generally for the British Isles, especially when articles don’t specifically identify the nationality of authors.

For a full list of LHMP place tags click here.

LHMP entry

LHMP #330c Klein 2021 Sapphic Crossings Chapter 2

The breast is an elusive gender signifier. An opening example from Hannah Snell’s biography tells how a combination of posture, breast size, and viewing angle prevented the presence of breasts from giving away her sex when she was stripped to the waist for a whipping in the army.

Working class cross-dressing narratives establish the breast not only as a sign of femaleness but as a site of erotic connection with the women who desire her. The chapter primarily examines cross-dressing in military and sea-going contexts, but also touches on Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda.

LHMP #330b Klein 2021 Sapphic Crossings Chapter 1

This chapter looks at the symbolic function of facial hair as a definitive sign of maleness and the ways a successful courtship of a woman can substitute for the lack of a beard. The “smooth beardless face” is noted in narratives as a giveaway. But beards were not fashionable in the 18th century. And the subject’s “feminine” features might be cited as being an attractive feature to women.

LHMP #330a Klein 2021 Sapphic Crossings Introduction

This book looks at 18th century English depictions of female cross-dressing (i.e., assigned-female persons who are being read as male) and the relationship that has to ideas about female same-sex intimacy.

LHMP #329 “Love-a-la-mode, or Two dear friends” 1820

This is a card with an engraving dated 1820 titled “Love-a-la-mode or Two dear friends” which exists in multiple copies in various collections. Individual copies may be annotated in handwriting to add further information.

LHMP #327 Nord 1990 Neither Pairs nor Odd

Nord takes a deep dive into the lives of three single women who made lives for themselves in 1880s London outside of conventional family structures, but also apart from organized women’s communities and institutions. Nor were these women in unrecognized female partnerships. All three intersected the field of social work in some way, but without approaching it as a female-coded vocation. And all three were loosely connected to each other (as well as to other single women) socially, but in a somewhat loose fashion that did not assume mutual support.

LHMP #325 Binhammer 2003 The ‘Singular Propensity’ of Sensibility’s Extremities

In this article, Binhammer compares the social meanings of three parallel forms of “sexual excess” in late 18th century British literature, and how the three are linked structurally in the popular imagination. Specifically: sex between women, sexualized whipping, and the emotional experience of extreme “sensibility”.

LHMP #323 Binhammer 2002 Thinking Gender with Sexuality in 1790s' Feminist Thought"

Using the springboard of theoretical discourse around feminism and sexuality around the 1980s, Binhammer uses proto-feminist literature of the later 18th century as a lens for how theories of feminism and theories of sexuality intersect and come into conflict. The focus of 1980s feminist rhetoric narrowly on (heterosexual) sexual dynamics as a source of oppression, contributed to the rise of queer theory as the more dynamic field for examining theories of sexuality.

LHMP #316i Vicinus 2004 Intimate Friends Chapter 8

This chapter examines several lives in the context of sexological theory and the rise of the binary homosexual/heterosexual model of desire. Psychologists pathologized previous models and patterns of same-sex relationships and focused on the sexually adventurous, dominating, “mannish” woman as the core prototype of the lesbian. At heart, these models revolved around “gender inversion” seeing the homosexual (male or female) as someone whose entire life and personality partook of a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth (to use the current terminology).

LHMP #316h Vicinus 2004 Intimate Friends Chapter 7

Part IV – Modernist Refashionings

LHMP #316g Vicinus 2004 Intimate Friends Chapter 6

This chapter looks at examples of intense, perhaps even destructive desrie that didn’t fit neatly into the available 19th century models for female love. So how did these women depict and understand their desires? One method was to displace the desire through taking on roles or working it out through fictional depictions. Some women understood their desire for a dominant position as a type of masculinity, as with the two women considered in this chapter: Eliza Lynn Linton and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget).

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