Unit information: Gender and Sexuality in Victorian Britain (Level C Special Topic) in 2008/09

Unit name	Gender and Sexuality in Victorian Britain (Level C Special Topic)
Unit code	HIST14014
Credit points	20
Level of study	C/4
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	Department of History (Historical Studies)
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

Contemporary popular culture often portrays the Victorians as a prudish society, in which men and women were neatly categorised into 'separate spheres' of activity in public and private life. This special topic examines the complexities of gender and sexuality in Victorian Britain and will analyse how society, politics and the economy were shaped by ideas and practices of gender. Beginning with an outline of how Victorian gender ideologies emerged and developed this course will address how gender is central to our understanding of Victorian cultures of work and politics, as well as the family and sexuality. An important part of this unit will be a comparative assessment of the experiences of both women and men in Victorian Britain. We will analyse men's experience of gender ideologies during the nineteenth century and examine how concepts and definitions of masculinity changed over time. The study of gender and sexuality has been a vibrant area in the discipline of history in recent years and this unit will engage with a wide range of innovative scholarship. We will engage with the idea that gender may be defined as the social and cultural construction of sexual difference and analyse how notions of femininity and masculinity changed over the course of the nineteenth century. A wide range of primary sources will be used to explore these themes, from parliamentary reports, social investigations, and political pamphlets to magazines, novels and autobiography.

Teaching Information

10 x 2 hour seminars

Assessment Information

1 x 2 hour exam

Reading and References

INTRODCUTORY READING:

• S. Brady, Masculinity and male homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (2005)

• A. Clark, The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working-classes (1995)

• H.G. Cocks & M. Houlbrook (eds), Palgrave advances in the modern history of sexuality (2006)

• K. Gleadle, British women in the nineteenth century (2001)

• E. Gordon and G. Nair, Public lives: women, family and society in Victorian Britain (2003)

• L. Nead, Myths of sexuality: representations of women in Victorian society (1988)

• E. Roberts, Womens work, 1840-1940 (1995)

• J. Purvis, Womens history: Britain 1850-1945 (1995)

• J. Tosh, Manliness and masculinities in nineteenth-century Britain (2005)

• J.R. Walkowitz, City of dreadful delight: narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London (1992)