Political and Sexual Deviance and Images of Martyrdom in Modern Britain

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The subject of this research is the way in which images of martyrdom became highly controversial in modern Britain through the process of their becoming enmeshed in political, religious and cultural disputes. Those who deliberately embraced suffering could be understood as heroes, as mentally unstable, or as perverts. This project focuses on two areas of such controversies. The first is the connections between martyrdom and political subversion through an examination of the interrelations between visual imagery and textual discourses of martyrdom and terrorism. The second is the way in which images of martyrdom, notably those derived from Roman Catholicism, helped to shape aspects of sexual dissidence such as the cultural formation of same-sex desire at the end of the nineteenth century. The key aims of this research are to connect together areas of scholarship carried out by those in history, art history and religious studies and to produce an interdisciplinary study of cultural formations which focus on the nineteenth century, but which pay heed to long-term historical trends and developments through to the present day.This research is the culmination of a project carried out by myself as sole researcher which was begun at Birkbeck, University of London in 2008. It is a development from my previous research project into the controversial reception of Anglo-Catholic material culture as morally subversive idolatry during the mid-nineteenth century, a reception which showed strong Protestant fears of links between political treachery and sexual subversion. This project builds on such understandings and, by so doing, argues that academics in a range of disciplines from political to cultural history, art history and religious studies can benefit from the development of work which highlights the interactions between political, religious and cultural formations. This research project aims to highlight key opportunities provided by thinking beyond conventional classifications of types of subversion such as heresy, treachery, terrorism and perversion by examining them in juxtaposition.