This volume’s introduction traces the longstanding interdigitation between American literature and sexuality studies broadly imagined, mapping the inseparability between queer American literature and the history of sexuality. In so doing, it offers an institutional history of gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, and trans studies and grapples with the theoretical question of how to understand queer American literature. Examining the mutual imbrication of “queer,” “American,” and “literature,” it provides an overview of the volume’s theoretical investments, conceptual choices, and organization in order to introduce the reader to the volume as a whole.

Quantification can be a double-edged sword. Converting lived experience into quantitative data can be reductive, coldly condensing complex thoughts, feelings, and actions into numbers. But it can also be a powerful tool to abstract from isolated instances into patterns and groups, providing empirical evidence of systemic injustice and grounds for collectivity. Queer lives and literatures have contended with both these qualities of quantification. Statistics have been used to pathologize queer desire as deviant from the norm, but they have also made it clear how prevalent queer people are, enabling collective action. Likewise for queer literature, which has sometimes regarded quantification as its antithesis, and other times as a prime representational resource. Across the history of queer American literature this dialectical tension between quantification as reductive and resource has played out in various ways, in conjunction with the histories of science, sexuality, and literary style. This chapter covers the history of queer quantification in literature from the singular sexological case study through the gay minority to contemporary queerness trying to transcend the countable.

The relationship between feminism and sexuality in the long twentieth century is both complex and multifaceted. Whether sexuality is understood as congenital or acquired, defined by object choice or aim, central to the character of an individual or the health of a population, it is a highly contested and contradictory set of discourses and institutional practices. Feminism is similarly impossible to define as a coherent ideology or political praxis. At once a historically specific political and cultural phenomenon emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century, feminism is also a highly differentiated transnational event that belies a single origin, set of beliefs, or constituency. Organized around two key historical figures–the modern girl and the feminist-as-lesbian–this essay draws on feminist, queer, and historical studies of the world-wide feminist movements of the 1910s-1930s, and of the women’s liberation era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to trace the connections between the commodification and politicization of women’s sexuality as two axes around which the unsettled and generative relationship between modern sexuality and feminism revolves.

Sydney was the original site of British settlement in Australia and its largest city in the twentieth century. With a reputation for hedonism, Sydney’s identity became entangled, to a marked extent, in its sexual cultures. The preoccupation with whiteness ensured that attitudes to birth control were closely related to settler racial aspirations. State regulation of sex work and female sexuality was also connected to concerns about preserving racial vigour, but it helped to secure a powerful role for organized crime and police corruption in the city’s sex industry. Key Sydney sex radicals and reformers took their place in British imperial and, to an increasing extent, global networks. Gay (or ‘camp’) male subcultures emerged in the middle decades of the century and, after a period of greater freedom during the Second World War, attracted repression in the 1950s. Lesbian subcultures emerged more slowly, but were discernible by the 1960s. At the same time as the contraceptive pill was transforming heterosexual relations, Sydney emerged as Australia’s major centre of gay life as well as a place of notable ethnic diversity and sexual variety. By the end of the century the city’s identity was bound more tightly than ever to its sexual cultures.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the terminology and conceptual frameworks that are useful for contextualizing pre-modern Chinese sources about sex and sexuality. It then surveys several well-studied institutions and practices, including sex manuals, concubinage, female chastity, illicit sex, and literary representations of homoeroticism. The second half of the chapter reflects on three phenomena in works on the history of sexuality in pre-modern China, namely retrospective sexology, the censorship hypothesis, and the assumption of sex as a given. The author argues that while historians now no longer characterize sex culture in ancient China as either ‘liberated’ or ‘repressed’, as old sexologists did, we still tend to assume that the history of sexuality should primarily be about sexual practice and behaviour, despite the acknowledged lack of sources. The lack of sources, in turn, is often assumed to be the result of political and ideological censorship. More attention is needed to questioning scholars’ definition of the very subject matter, sex. The chapter concludes with a short review of scholarly approaches to comparing China with other cultures and a proposal of the ways in which a comparative history of sexuality can be productive.

This historiographical chapter discusses how the rise of LGBTQ+ history has shifted understandings of how all gender and sexual identities are formed and contested. It begins with a discussion of the activist origins of the field of LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s, and then moves on to discuss the centrals debates that animated early scholarship in the 1980s. The chapter then moves to the rise of queer theory in the 1990s, and analyzes how that innovation reshaped the field by introducing concepts such as heteronormativity. The 1990s also witnessed the rise of scholarship on colonialism and sexuality, which in turn impacted the field of LGBTQ+ history, which up to that point had been very focused on the Global North. Thus, the third section of the chapter discusses how, since 2000, the field of LGBTQ+ history has increasingly been global in scope, with increased attention to political economies, transnational flows, and state formation. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the rise of trans histories, and how these histories have pushed LGBTQ+ historians to think about gender in new and innovative ways.

This chapter examines the origins and legacy of sexology – the scientific study of sexuality – in the modern world. First consolidated into a coherent programme in the late nineteenth century, sexology has its roots in the re-organization of knowledge about nature in the frameworks of taxonomy, evolutionism, and race. A pervasive preoccupation with heredity gave rise to powerful eugenics movements around the world. The interest in controlling variability and unlocking the secrets of the soul generated parallel developments in biomedicine, especially psychoanalysis and endocrinology. Sex experts worldwide converged in diagnosing cultural signs of homosexuality for the purpose of national modernization. As the centre of gravity in sexual science began to shift from Europe to North America, researchers gave growing support to the sex/gender distinction and redefined the meanings of normality. In the waning days of hereditarian theories, the rise of cultural anthropology coupled with a renewed scientific investment of colonial powers to reverse hierarchical templates of sexual practices and norms emanating from the metropoles. A public health crisis (HIV/AIDS), social movements (gender and sexual minority rights), and the systematization of research protocols (bioethics) shaped a comeback of biological sexology in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter explores the histories of transgender expression, identities, communities, and activism globally in both premodern and modern eras. Histories of settler colonialism, slavery, war, and imperialism have transformed the terms and conditions by which people of transgender expression and experience understood themselves and were perceived by others. While an abundance of archival records chart widespread practices of “transing” gender globally, a complex web of factors influenced how a given community or individual defined, understood, and judged such efforts. Race, religion, region, culture and class are some of the key contextual forces that gave meaning to trans and gender variant sexualities throughout history. A wide range of concepts have been used to describe and make meaning of gender variant people throughout history, from two-spirit, hijra, and third gender to the more recent transgender, nonbinary, gender expansive. Many other terms that have been used throughout history were deemed derogatory by those individuals and/or communities to which they refer at the time or have since been determined to be derogatory by later generations looking back. This creates a fundamental tension for everyone writing these histories between the importance of recognizing the past on its own terms and the importance of not further perpetuating harm against a long-stigmatized group.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the focus of this chapter, which combines an examination of the printed dictionary with an exploration of the draft materials that went into making it. From 1884 to the appearance of its first Supplement in 1933, the OED’s documentation of same-sex lexis far outstripped that of any earlier dictionary. Yet the editors’ commitment to objectivity did not prevent them from reproducing many of the traditional biases of their precursors. At the same time, the rise of sexology in Britain led to the emergence of new taxonomies of erotic desire, ushering into public discourse terms such as homosexuality, bisexuality, inversion, and uranism. While much of the scientific literature cast same-sex attraction as a psychological disturbance, other discourses soon emerged in the writing of apologists and activists who rejected pathologization, whether by reclaiming taxonomic terms, coining new, affirmative identity labels, or refusing to be classified altogether. The chapter inspects how the OED’s compilers grappled with representing these dominant and dissident usages, pulled as they were between the demands of scientific principles and social scruples.

Chapter 1 demonstrates the centrality of ideas of ‘emotionalism’ in those sexological writings that consistently present the body of the male homosexual subject as peculiarly responsive to music. The contentious issue of the place of emotion and the body in music likewise informs debates in Victorian musical aesthetics. In this discussion, an examination of John Addington Symonds’s and Vernon Lee’s respective stances on such questions allows for a demarcation of divergent attitudes towards music, embodiment and queer desire in late Victorian culture. In particular, an examination of Lee’s writings on music allows for the exploration of what might be called ‘shameful listening’.

The concluding chapter provides a critical reflection on the historical study of sex, gender, and sexuality in Japan, highlighting scholarly strongholds, addressing blind spots, and identifying questions yet to be raised. It notes, for instance, that existing sexuality studies question the once implicit, normative, and exclusive gender binary and heterosexuality. It spins forth Jennifer Robertson’s observation that, historically, in Japan and elsewhere, sexual practices have not presumed a specific sexual orientation or identity – although today some queer activists and homophobic critics tend to fuse the two.

Though the history of sexuality has diversified and enlarged our understanding of Victorian culture and practices, literary criticism, influenced by the courtship plots of canonical novels, has lagged behind. Even as we denounced a generation of historians and scholars for thinking Victorians were repressed, we canonized a literature based on heteronormative courtship narratives and traditional gender roles. We then critiqued that literature for adhering to – or championed it for subverting – those traditional narratives. In fact, Victorian fiction was always wilder and woollier than we gave it credit for being. Drawing on multiple novels, including examples by Wilkie Collins, William Ainsworth, and George Meredith, as well as the history of sexuality, including texts by Elizabeth Blackwell and Havelock Ellis, this essay surveys instances in which non-reproductive sexuality – pre- and extramarital flirtations, same-sex eroticism, desirous ephebes, and other kinds of non-genital or unconsummated sexual activities – are presented as typical behaviors within the novel. Just as conventional marital plots provide form for instances of what scholars have understood as managed desire, these texts suggest other formal possibilities and properties – rather than arcs of crisis and resolution, they may offer more episodic structures of sustained, oscillating, or unresolved tensions.

Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 A Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South was prophetic in its formulation of a critical intersectional methodology to codify and analyze the oppressions black women confronted at the nexus of the post-Reconstruction South and nation. Framing herself as representative of region and nation and emissary of blackness and woman-ness, throughout the text Cooper locates herself and the black women for whom she speaks within complex and interchanging matrices of blackness, woman-ness, southernness, and U.S. nationalism. This chapter explores how Cooper’s intersectional critique of race, gender, region, nation, and empire is impelled by her centralization of the experiences and potential of black women in the South. Cooper’s understanding of the interlocking logics of patriarchy, racial purity, and U.S.-southern supremacy was shaped by her rejection of eugenics and sexology, pseudo-scientific ideologies which shaped thinking on race and gender – and thus on region and nation – in the U.S. at the turn of the century. Ultimately, Cooper’s critical intellectual response emphasizes and develops radical black southern mothering as the root of emancipatory social praxis.

The queer femme disrupts the legibility of queerness and politics since the feminine is scapegoated for its subjugation as false and inferior. This essay explores the cultural genealogy of queer femme invisibility by reading white women physician characters in late nineteenth-century New Woman novels in relation to the science of sexology and feminist dress reform as contrapuntal forces that informed the viability of gender expression. Henry James’s The Bostonians, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay, Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, and William Dean Howells’s Dr. Breen’s Practice present variations on the cultural dichotomy between femme and science framed by the marriage plot. Through the politics of dress the possibility of the queer femme is both acknowledged and erased as a legitimate expression and valid identity. These novels trace an incipient femme sensibility bound to whiteness that disrupts assumptions about the coherence of representation required for viability of minoritarian gender identities.

This chapter focuses initially on the impact of late nineteenth-century medical theory (hysteria, hypnotism, etc.) on the novel and the burgeoning of medically-inflected fiction. Post-hypnotic suggestion led to stories of crime and sexual manipulation and introduced the figure of the unscrupulous doctor/hypnotist, usually bested by a good-hearted physician expert in hypnotism techniques. Ambient medical research on mind-control and dual identity influenced Maupassant’s fiction, most notably in his story ‘Le Horla’. Substantial tales (‘Boule de suif’, ‘La Maison Tellier’) foreshadow and feed the drama, irony and humour of Maupassant’s novels. Three of these are studied here: the raucous, ferociously ironic Bel-Ami, the family drama of illegitimacy and identity, Pierre et Jean, and a story of the despondency of ageing and lost love, Fort comme la mort. The chapter closes with a discussion of the novels of Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery), seen increasingly as an important figure of France’s decadent period. Her early novels Monsieur Vénus and La Marquise de Sade played daringly with the notion of gender reversals and sadism, exercised against men; such themes suggest today an underlying feminist persuasion, an affiliation she denied. Later novels, many-textured such as La Tour d’amour, or La Jongleuse, a male/female confrontation on seduction and love, reveal the broadening of the novelist’s talent.

This chapter traces a history of British Decadent sexualities as elemental, pre-normative attractions and fulfilments, considering how early sexological discourse encouraged conceptions of Decadent sexuality to arise and then likewise feed into more recent, posthumanist notions of eco-sexuality. But recognizing a non-binary Decadence of dissemination, proliferation and contagion requires one to imagine attractions and repulsions that do not merely decentre the human, but operate with a conceptual core that itself is not built in response to human identity, culture or politics in the first place. One possibility lies in Heinrich Kaan’s theory, articulated in his study Psycopathia Sexualis (1844), that a natural excess of imagination fosters realms of ‘chaos’ in plant and animal (including human) sexualities. Early sexological works such as Kaan’s encourage one to understand non-normative sexuality not as one of various deviations characterizing the Decadent movement, in fact not as a deviation at all, but as a natural phenomenon that preceded and gave shape to the cultural paradigms that Victorians and those who followed came to see as Decadent.

In “Queer Studies,” Debra A. Moddelmog examines the way the maturing field of queer studies has proven a good fit for studying Hemingway and his multifaceted, intersectional explorations of about sexuality, gender, sexual practices, and their intersections with race, class, ability, and nationality. Moddelmog demonstrates that radical changes in Hemingway scholarship around issues of gender and sexuality as well as the studies of his interest in sexology introduced a Hemingway that challenged the iconic masculine persona. Beginning in the 1990s, critics such as Mark Spilka, J. Gerald Kennedy, Carl P. Eby, and Moddelmog herself began examining Hemingway’s newly revealed fascination with androgyny and sexual experimentation. That interest in the new millenium has given way to a richer understanding of the relationship between identity and sexuality, with “queer” and “trans” coming to mean not deviation but exploration from heteronormative standards. Moddelmog argues in particular that sexologist Havelock Ellis provides a useful mirror for redefining Hemingway’s desires, both biographical and in his writing.

Puzzling over the repetitive evocation of sexologists such as Havelock Ellis during debates over the age of marriage in the Legislative Assembly, this chapter studies sexology as a site for the dissemination of the age-stratified sexual morality upheld by the Child Marriage Restraint Act. The marriage manuals, antimasturbation tracts, samples of erotica, and sex education texts surveyed in this chapter drew equally on the new science of sex and shastric knowledge and were particularly focused on the regulation of sexuality with reference to children. In making rough translations between two epistemic and ethical orders, these works buttressed an age-stratified sexual morality, gave chronological age roots in (a primordial) India, depicted marriage reform as a return to a (Hindu) golden age, and helped align the time of the (Hindu) ritual body with the temporality of secular body and of the modern nation. While such translations might have aided marital reform, the silent exclusions – of Muslims in particular – that were inherent to this schema could not be covered over for long.