Unsettling Sexuality
Unsettling Sexuality
Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century
This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition on Manifold, here: https://openpub.udel.edu/projects/unsettling-sexuality.
Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century challenges the traditional ways that scholarship has approached sexuality, gender nonconformity, and sex (as well as its absence) in the long eighteenth century. Drawing from recent and emerging criticisms in Middle Eastern and Asian studies, Black studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies, the collected authors perform intersectional queer readings, reimagine queer historiographic methods, and spearhead new citational models that can invigorate the field. Contributors read with and against diverse European, transatlantic, and global archives to explore mutually informative frameworks of gender, sexuality, race, indigeneity, ability, and class. In charting multidirectional queer horizons, this collection locates new prospective desires and intimacies in the literature, culture, and media of the period to imagine new directions and simultaneously unsettle eighteenth-century studies.
This collection will fundamentally alter our understanding of the eighteenth-century as undoubtedly and intersectionally queer. It is a rare accomplishment — a veritable chorale of voices and methods that unsettles and rearranges relations between gender, sexuality, race, indigeneity, and the environment. Unsettling Sexuality unearths, for example, alternatives to the marriage plot via asexual romance and forms of Black happiness, the radical affects of racialized sex work, cross-species erotics, and myriad encounters among Europeans, Ottomans, those of African descent, and indigenous people with varied cultures of gender and sexuality. These readings open a field of queer Eighteenth-Century Studies beyond the critique of hetero- or homonormativity and even beyond the assumption that queerness is subversive or anti-colonial. Instead, we finally have a set of rigorous historical accounts that firmly establish the multitudinous horizons for intimate relations, which can help us re-enliven intersectional pasts and reimagine our futures.
Queer, trans, a/sexuality, Indigenous, race, archive, intimacy, friendship, empire, fiction, fashion—as this volume argues with rigor and gusto, and like no book before it, these should be the braided keywords of eighteenth-century studies. The essays here range across geography and method to unsettle us in productive ways, helping to overcome staid, hegemonic, heteropatriarchal, and often violent intellectual modes towards possibilities for creation and thought, new temporalities, new futures. Necessary and important for scholars of any century.
SHELBY JOHNSON is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University, where she researches and teaches on gender and sexuality, race and Indigenous studies, and environmental humanities in early literatures of the Americas. In her recent book, The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World (2024), she argues that figures of a gifted earth organize a set of worlding practices that ground and animate anticolonial intimacies in Black and Indigenous archives. Her scholarship has also appeared or is forthcoming in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Criticism, and European Romantic Review.
Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson, “Unsettling Sexuality”
Gender Nonconformity: Embodiment, Sociality, and Politics
Chapter 1: Ula Lukszo Klein, “Transgender Citizenship and Settler Colonialism in Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter”
Chapter 2: Shelby Johnson, “Samson Occom, the Public Universal Friend, and a Queer Archive of the Elsewhere”
Chapter 3: Humberto Garcia, “Refashioning Masculinity in Regency England: Female Fashions Inspired by the Persian Envoy Mirza Abul Hassan Khan and His Circassian Wife”
Novel Intimacies
Chapter 4: Ziona Kocher, “‘My Sister, My Friend, My Ever Beloved ’: Queer Friendship and Asexuality in The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph”
Chapter 5: Cailey Hall, “Redefining the Archive in Queer Historical Romance Novels”
Queer Ecologies and Cartographies
Chapter 6: M.A. Miller, “Matters of Intimacy: The Sugar-Cane’s Asexual Ecologies”
Chapter 7: Tess J. Given, “Fantasy Maps and Projective Fictions”
Racializing Affect, Queering Temporality
Chapter 8: Nour Afara, “Dark and Delayed Labor: Sex Work and Racialized Time in Eighteenth-Century London”
Chapter 9: Jeremy Chow and Riley DeBaecke, “Unsettling Happiness: Blackness, Gender, and Affect in The Woman of Colour and Its Media Afterlives”
Coda
Eugenia Zuroski, “Coda: Eighteenth-Century Longing”
