When Sex Is Gender: Feminist Inversion and the Limits of Same-Sex Theory

Abstract

How did Victorian women theorise ‘sexual inversion’? The relative cultural marginalisation of women and their exclusion from the scientific sphere meant that the theorisation of female same-sex desire — its labelling and classification within the new field of sexology — initially had little formal involvement by women. However, the theorisation of ‘sex’, understood in terms of a politics of gender, was a shared concern for many, mainly middle-class, women whose voices increasingly started to be heard in the second-half of the nineteenth-century. Within the English-speaking world, the emerging feminist discourses became associated with the label of the so-called ‘New Woman’, an expression which was coined by the writer Sarah Grand in 18941 although the concept already circulated from the early 1880s onward, denoting what Teresa Mangum calls ‘representations of women that confronted the self-negating, submissive image of middle-class Ideal Womanhood’.2 Precisely ‘who or what the New Woman of the 1880s and 1890s was’, as Ruth Robbins has recently argued, ‘very much depended on who was defining her’, which neatly sums up the diversity of both historical New Woman discourses and modern assessments of the phenomenon.3 For it is fair to say that New Woman feminists agreed on very little beyond the fact that they considered the so-called ‘woman question’ key to frequently opposing political, social and scientific debates that could range from the social purity concerns of someone like Grand, who separated from her husband to live with another woman but as a supporter of eugenics championed sexual restraint and the re-evaluation of middle-class marriage, to the radical feminist politics of writer Mona Caird, who rejected the conventions of marriage and ideas about the ‘naturalness’ of the maternal outright but was herself a mother.4 KeywordsFeminist PoliticsSexual KnowledgeSexual BodyWoman WriterAfrican FarmThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.