Odd Women, New Women, and the Problem of Erotic Indifference in Late-Victorian Feminism.

Autor: Jasperse, Leland
Předmět:
Zdroj: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society; Winter2024, Vol. 49 Issue 2, p411-434, 24p
Abstrakt: Can a lifeworld survive without erotics? This question haunted decadent late-Victorian culture. Marriage appeared to be on the verge of collapse after the 1851 English census revealed that 30 percent of women would never marry. Mass female celibacy, as this demographic data was understood at the time, threatened the credibility of an expanding bourgeois ideal of marriage as a domestic retreat from the cold world of alienated productive labor and a site for accumulating unwaged reproductive labor. In this article I examine the chronically single, proto-asexual "odd woman," a now largely forgotten category of pathological femininity that absorbed anxieties about the collapse of the family, heterosexuality, and ultimately the English race elicited by mass celibacy. Tracing the odd woman's cultural circulation, the article exhumes this figure's role in the official foundation of English eugenics and in the intimately connected "New Woman" movement, an early form of feminist sexual politics. New Woman fiction, popularizing eugenic theory, made erotic desire compulsory to healthy white womanhood, even as its feminist authors held out eros as a resource of freedom from sexual norms—a contradiction the odd woman highlighted. Acknowledging that eroticism does not in itself liquidate social hierarchies but early on in its discursive life coalesced with the rise of formal eugenics, I build on the work of scholars like Sharon Patricia Holland to attend to the racist life of eroticism and other losses entailed in eroticism's ongoing monopoly in the queer and feminist world-building imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Databáze: Complementary Index