Seminars

This chapter examines proposed legislation from the early and mid-nineteenth century to argue that current scholarship misrepresents the process that led to what is known as the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Uncovering the decades-long process that led to that alteration in the law opens the door to emphasizing the ways in which politics, publicity, and understandings of the self are interconnected in relation to desire and self-understandings. Building on the work of Anna Clark, Harry Oosterhuis, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, and Seymour Drescher, this chapter argues that a robust public sphere, factional politics within a representative system of government, and understandings of the self based on the cultural texts of the time, provide an incisive analytical framework for interpreting same-sex desire within culture and politics. It is a framework that utilizes the Foucauldian understanding of subject formation, emphasizing that the core of that process is the concept of biopower (which first becomes significant in the late seventeenth century), and that Foucault made his arguments about the distinctiveness of the late nineteenth century fifty years ago, when academic investigations into the history of gender and sexuality were just beginning. Summarizing the argument of my current book project, this chapter outlines a framework for understanding how politics and queer understandings of the self are intertwined, and argues that aspects of Oscar Wilde’s life and career look different when seen as occupying a place in the middle of an ongoing historical process, rather than at the beginning of one.

From the 1970s onwards Britain’s political and cultural imagination became increasingly dominated by promises that self-made business success was the pathway to a brighter future for both individuals and the nation. International franchises and direct sales companies like Wimpy, The Body Shop, and Avon sat at the forefront of these fairy tales of freedom. They promised economic independence and flexible working conditions suited specifically to those eager to escape structural disadvantage in a period of transition from an industrial economy based on waged labour to a service sector economy rooted in subcontracted flexible labour. What did life look like for people who chose (or were forced) to take the leap into self-employment? Taking inspiration from the field of ‘new histories of American capitalism’ this project investigates new business practices that developed across the second half of the twentieth century, using Britain as a site of enquiry. By studying various forms of self-employment, like franchising, direct sales, freelancing, and small family businesses, I’m hoping to trace the rise of an enterprise-centred cultural formation that both legitimised an emerging neoliberal free-market political economy and pushed marginalised groups into low-skilled, outsourced, and precarious work.

"When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present. Intimate Subjects takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge. (…)"

"Why does Edward Long's History of Jamaica matter? Written in 1774, Long's History, that most 'civilised' of documents, attempted to define White and Black as essentially different and unequal. Long deployed natural history and social theory, carefully mapping the island, and drawing on poetry and engravings, in his efforts to establish a clear and fixed racialised hierarchy. His White family sat at the heart of Jamaican planter society and the West India trade in sugar, which provided the economic bedrock of this eighteenth-century system of racial capitalism. Catherine Hall tells the story behind the History of a slave-owning family that prospered across generations together with the destruction of such possibilities for enslaved people. She unpicks the many contradictions in Long's thinking, exposing the insidious myths and stereotypes that have poisoned social relations over generations and allowed reconfigured forms of racial difference and racial capitalism to live on in contemporary societies."

The excerpted chapter, "Speciated Crossings: Fishwives and the Limits of Sex and Species," brings together a social and economic history of women in the fishing industry, with an inquiry into scientific and popular discourses and understandings of sex, gender, and species. Women fish sellers are largely absent from histories of gendered labor and capitalism, yet they literally carried one of Britain’s most historically significant economies on their backs. They were at once a reminder of Britain’s long standing dependence on the economies of the sea and an indicator of the startling potential of an economy significantly controlled by women, particularly along the eastern coastline of Scotland and England. In a period obsessed with the confines of categorization, fishwives themselves, and contemporary representations of them, dangerously transgressed and crossed borders.