20 - Sexuality

Summary

To take ‘sexuality’ as a rubric for understanding Victorian literature may seem a bit odd, since few words better illustrate the gulf between how the Victorians saw themselves and how we see them. ‘To have sex’ was not a common locution until the early twentieth century, and it was only in that century’s final decades that feminist and queer theorists began to insist on distinctions among ‘sexuality’, ‘sex’, and ‘gender’. Sexuality came to denote a complex of desires, affects, sensations, identifications, and acts; sex, to mean the biological characteristics that identify individuals as male or female, though those physical differences increasingly came to seem culturally constructed and physically manipulable; and gender, to refer to an individual’s sense of identity as masculine or feminine, as well as to social demarcations of masculine and feminine qualities and roles. In the nineteenth century, to be sexual meant to be sexed male or female; in the twentieth, sexuality became shorthand for sexual orientation. And though two Victorian men, Havelock Ellis and John Symonds, helped initiate that change in usage, even they thought of the sexual in Victorian terms, as referring primarily to male or female sex. Thus, when they coined the phrase ‘sexual inversion’ in the 1890s, they used it to label men who felt like women and women who felt like men, not men who desired men and women who desired women.