Hal Gladfelder
Hal Gladfelder
My recent work focuses on competing notions of gender in 18th- and 19th-century England, and on the relations between gender and sexual deviance or rebelliousness in the period. 18th-century literature is full of figures of uncertain, excessive, or compromised masculinity, from fops to beaus to libertines to predatory rakes, whose conduct calls into question traditional notions of male sexual and social decorum; at the same time, commentators expressed considerable anxiety about women whose behavior - from sexual aggressiveness to cross dressing - cast doubt on stable or well-defined gender roles. One of the questions at the heart of my own work concerns the degree to which deviations from the gender norms of the period correspond to transgressive sexual practices or identitiesin particular, to what would later come to be called 'inversion' or homosexuality. In my essay 'Plague Spots' [in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, ed. David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg (London: Routledge, 2006)] I examine competing theories of the origins of same-sex desire from 18th-century anti-sodomite trials to late 19th-century sexology to contextualize a counter-reading of the work of John Cleland (in particular his Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill), which as I argue undermines the very notion of sexual 'normality' on which such theories depend. In my edition of Cleland's second novel, Memoirs of a Coxcomb (Broadview, 2005), I draw attention to contemporary debates over 'appropriate' forms of masculinity, to which Cleland's novel was a skeptical and satirical rejoinder. More recently, in an article published in Eighteenth-Century Life, I presented a long-lost text, the 1749 Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd, a 'wicked lewd nasty filthy bawdy impious and obscene' celebration of male homosexuality by Thomas Cannon, which had disappeared from view for over 250 years until I found a transcription of the text in a legal document stored in the Public Record Office. In Cannon's text - the most explicit and extensive treatment of male same-sex desire in all of 18th-century literature - the term 'pederasty' is progressively dismantled, becoming a figure for the undermining of any stable distinction between 'natural' and 'unnatural' desire, and of any fixed gender position or role.
I welcome inquiries from prospective postgraduate students with interests in issues of gender and sexuality in 18th- and 19th-century British literature and culture.