Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. By Andrew Israel Ross. Sexuality Studies. Edited by Janice Irvine and Regina Kunzel. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv+248. $110.50 (cloth); $34.95 (paper and e-book).

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 946-948
Author(s):  
Scott E. Gunther
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Temple University ◽  
Public Sex

THE NEW OTHER VICTORIANS: THE SUCCESS (AND FAILURE) OF QUEER THEORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STUDIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
History Of

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.

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