Politeness and Prurience: situating transgressive sexualities in the long eighteenth century
A major international and multidisciplinary conference hosted by the History of Art Department at the University of Edinburgh
(September 2-3 2013)
http://politenessandprurience.com/
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 10 September 2012
Embedded within the narrative of John Cleland’s infamous novel
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748),
is a vignette which affronts the moral compass of even the tale’s
sexually promiscuous protagonist. Having attended a ‘drag masquerade’,
Fanny bears witness, through a convenient crack in a wall, to a
sodomitical act, which she finds ‘not only universally odious but
absurd’. Despite her apparent condemnation, Fanny pruriently watches on.
In its dichotomous nature, Fanny’s reaction – suggestive of both
outrage and intrigue – mirrors reactions to homosexuality in the
eighteenth-century and in its subsequent historiography, wherein it is
treated at once as a site of fascination, but considered separately from
the history of normative sexualities. Yet, situated as it is, within
this literary feast of heterosexual eroticism, Fanny Hill’s same-sex
love scene may seem incongruous. Cleland’s text however, proffers a way
to approach homosexuality as both explicitly aberrant and problematic,
but still located within the general lexicon of eighteenth-century
sexual congress. By the same token, Cleland offers a model for
resituating the homosexual narrative within a wider historiography of
sexuality, where its relationality to dominant modes, not its difference
from them, might fruitfully be used as a way to re-evaluate
transgressive sexualities during the period.
In his 2006 article ‘Queering Horace Walpole’ George Haggerty
advocates an approach to the history of sexuality wherein the search for
a ‘concrete account of same-sex sexual behaviour’ is rejected, forcing
the historian ‘to look elsewhere in almost every case’. Accordingly,
this conference will privilege the assessment of cultural evocations of
the ‘other eighteenth century’; the transgressive will be firmly
identified as, and sought within dominant modes of eighteenth-century
culture and its discourses. In the realm of visual culture,
transgressive and deviant sexualities have previously been interpreted
as autonomous and distinct from these prevailing modes. Hogarth’s famous
print-series
A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and
A Rake’s Progress (1735)
have been interpreted simplistically – in accordance with their
appellation – as ‘modern moral histories’. As such they have routinely
been presented as providing antitheses to a broadly defined moral
exemplar of ideal polite culture.
Such a
prima facie interpretation however, boldly precludes
the rich scopophilic potential provided by scenes of prostitution and
illicit sexuality, locating it instead within the polite framework of
moralising art. Like Fanny, the viewer of such images is at once
repulsed and titillated. Yet Hogarth’s satirical oeuvre is not merely a
visualisation of moral imperatives central to polite culture, but a
vivid visualisation of a real section of contemporary society. In
reintegrating these apparently oppositional forms of behaviour a clearer
picture of eighteenth-century society and culture emerges. Hogarth’s
images may therefore be viewed not as simply the commentary on the mores
of an apparently ‘polite’ society via the representation of its very
opposite, but, analogous to David Halperin’s definition of ‘queer’ in
Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1997), as ‘a positionality
vis à vis the normative’.
In an attempt to highlight underwritten facets of contemporary sexuality, texts such as G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter’s
Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (1987)
which have labelled themselves as examining the ‘other’ or ‘underworld’
have instead further problematised the role and import of such
histories to wider eighteenth-century culture. The aim of this
conference is therefore not to present illicit sexuality as an
underbelly to a dominant polite culture, but to reconcile the ‘two
eighteenth centuries’ that have for too long been presented as the
subject of two discrete discourses – politeness and prurience. As well
as dealing with the interface between politeness and prurience as it
appears throughout eighteenth-century visual, material and literary
culture more generally, specific topics for papers could include:
- Bodies – the venereal body, castrati, physicalities, sadomasochism
- Settings – home and abroad, urban centres, rural backwaters
- Spaces – the architectural exterior and the private interior, the bagnio, the brothel, the masquerade
- Gaze/Experience – viewing sexualities, the keyhole testimony, description and biography
- Material Evidence – the objects of sexuality, dress, sex aids, collections, erotica
- Masculinities and Femininities – gender roles, reversals and subversions
- Modes of the illicit – sodomitical, Sapphic, pathological, pederastic, extra-marital, rape
- Public & Private – reception/reaction, fear/celebration, homophobia, display, expression
- Language – parlance, designation, rumour, slander, code
We invite abstracts of no more than 500 words to Dr. Viccy Coltman
(Head of History of Art), Jordan Mearns & Freya Gowrley at
politeness.prurience@gmail.com by 10 September 2012.
