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10 - Class in the History of Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

By
Helen Smith ,
Mathew Kuefler  and
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Edited by
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks  and
Mathew Kuefler
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
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Summary

Class has been crucial both to how individuals have experienced their desires and to how those desires have been interpreted, categorized, and articulated. This chapter offers an overview of the intersectional relationship between class and sexuality and demonstrates that the nuances of class difference and division, across continents and within regions of the same country, could drastically alter the lived experience of sexual desire. Class influenced notions of private and public spaces and the impact these had on sexual activity. Class differences mixed with racial differences also determined ideas of sexual respectability or sexual danger, both on an individual level with the erotic appeal of class differences and on a group level in eugenics. Class divisions have also been significant in shaping how the history of sexuality has been written, since it has shaped the nature of archival sources. The example of English author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) demonstrates these themes.

Keywords

social classindustrializationworking classmiddle classhomosexualityraceEdward Carpenter
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History of Sexualities , pp. 206 - 226
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Bailey, Beth L. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Barret-Ducrocq, Francoise. Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality and Desire among Working-Class Men and Women in 19th Century London. London: Penguin Books, 1992.Google Scholar
Brooke, Stephen. ‘Bodies, Sexuality, and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s’. International Labor and Working-Class History 69 (2006): 104–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Anna. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
España-Maram, Linda. Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s–1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Farnsworth-Alvear, Ann. Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Gilbertson, Amanda. ‘A Fine Balance: Negotiating Fashion and Respectable Femininity in Middle-Class Hyderabad, India’. Modern Asian Studies 48 (2014): 120–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammad, Hanan. Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Hardwick, Julie. Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660–1789. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.Google Scholar
Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutchison, Elizabeth. Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
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Merish, Lori. Archives of Labor: Working-class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
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Posel, Deborah. ‘Marriage at the Drop of a Hat: Housing and Partnership in South Africa’s Urban African Townships, 1920s–1960s’. History Workshop Journal 61 (Spring, 2006): 57–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robertson, Stephen, White, Shane, Garton, Stephen, and White, Graham. ‘Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem’. Journal of the History of Sexuality 21 (2012): 443–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Helen. Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895–1957. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Helen ‘Working-Class Ideas and Experiences of Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Britain: Regionalism as a Category of Analysis’. Twentieth Century British History 29, no. 1 (2018): 58–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spronk, Rachel. Ambiguous Pleasures: Sexuality and Middle Class Self-Perceptions in Nairobi. New York: Berghahn, 2012.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 1991.Google Scholar

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