Asexual Epidemics, Detectives and Spinsters: the construction of pathological asexuality in Victorian fiction

无性恋流行病、侦探和老处女：维多利亚时代小说中病态无性恋的构建

• 批准号: 2697339
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Edinburgh
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2697339
• 关键词: Asexual; Epidemics; Detectives; Spinsters; construction

Context My thesis will interrogate the development of the concept of asexuality in Victorian literature, culture and medicine. The medical discourse of the age constructed a pathologized understanding of asexuality, diagnosing individuals lacking sexual drives with frigidity. I will consider Dr Simpson's 1834 lecture on frigidity as the onset of the development of cultural anxieties regarding frigidity, investigating their growing presence until their apex at the fin de siècle. As my research will evidence, this concern with sexual coldness is traceable within British fiction, with nineteenth-century fiction employing vocabulary drawn from medical texts on frigidity. By considering the relationship between fiction and medicine as reciprocal, I will also argue that Victorian character construction created a gendered stereotype of the frigid persona that still affects contemporary sexological studies. My research stems from a recent call to normalise asexuality as a sexual orientation, and builds on ground-breaking criticism such as Decker's The Invisible Orientation (2014). Considering Victorian prose fiction, I will reveal how these novels have a longstanding influence, continuing to affect cultural discourses surrounding asexuality. This project is divided into three components: first, I will interrogate the development of male frigidity, exploring the portrayal of asexual masculinity as pathology in Brontë's Jane Eyre and Eliot's Middlemarch. Analysing Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, I will investigate how male asexuality developed into the late-nineteenth-century figure of the asexual intellectual, which influences contemporary asexual representation. Second, I will argue that Victorian doctors stigmatised female asexuality in two opposing ways: William Acton considered women as devoid of sexual desire, while surgeons such as Hewitt pathologized female frigidity as a clinical problem. This translated into the nineteenth-century narrative tropes of the virgin and the spinster. I will highlight the evolution of these figures in Dickens' oeuvre, Gaskell's Ruth, Gissing's Odd Women, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Moore's Celibates. Finally, reading Wells' scientific romances, I will consider the fin de siècle reframing of asexuality as an evolutionary trajectory, in which the cerebral, asexual aliens represent possible futures for humanity. Significance My project will advance the field in two ways: first, it reveals the continuous presence of asexual anxieties in nineteenth-century British non-fiction writing; second, it discusses Victorian fiction as a site where asexuality was contested. Literary criticism has examined the concept of Victorian 'sexual continence', as in Adams's Dandies and Desert Saints (1995). Furthermore, Lawlor and Mangham's Literature and Medicine (2021) and Bauer's cultural histories of sexology have demonstrated the reciprocal relationship between literature and medicine in the development of sexual pathologies. Yet, nineteenth-century British asexual anxiety is a new area for research. The prominence of asexual figures in nineteenth-century European writing has been noted by sexual historians, particularly Moore and Cryle, whose conceptualisation of frigidity as a medico-literary category is fundamental to my research. I build on these studies to trace frigidity's emergence across disciplinary boundaries in Britain. There is growing demand for histories of asexuality from LGBTQ+ self-advocacy groups, most notably AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network), the world's largest online asexual community. My research contributes one of the first histories of British Victorian literary and medical writing on asexuality.

我的论文将探讨维多利亚时代文学、文化和医学中无性恋概念的发展。那个时代的医学话语构建了一种对无性恋的病态理解，将缺乏性欲的个体诊断为性冷淡。我将把辛普森博士1834年关于寒冷的演讲视为关于寒冷的文化焦虑发展的开端，调查它们日益增长的存在，直到它们在最后一刻达到顶峰。正如我的研究将证明的那样，这种对性冷淡的关注可以追溯到英国小说中，19世纪的小说使用了从医学文献中提取的关于性冷淡的词汇。考虑到小说和医学之间的关系是相互的，我也会认为，维多利亚时代的人物塑造创造了一种性别刻板印象，这种刻板印象仍然影响着当代性学研究。我的研究源于最近将无性恋作为一种性取向正常化的呼吁，并建立在突破性的批评基础上，如德克尔的《看不见的取向》（2014）。考虑到维多利亚时代的散文小说，我将揭示这些小说如何具有长期的影响，继续影响围绕无性恋的文化话语。这个项目分为三个部分：首先，我将询问男性性冷淡的发展，探索在Brontë的《简·爱》和艾略特的《米德尔马契》中将无性男子气概描绘为一种病态。分析柯南·道尔的福尔摩斯，我将研究男性无性恋是如何发展成19世纪晚期无性知识分子的形象，这影响了当代无性恋的表现。其次，我认为维多利亚时代的医生以两种截然相反的方式对女性无性恋行为进行了污名化：威廉·阿克顿认为女性缺乏性欲，而休伊特等外科医生则将女性性冷淡病态化为临床问题。这就转化成了19世纪关于处女和老处女的叙事比喻。我将重点介绍这些人物在狄更斯的作品、盖斯凯尔的《露丝》、吉辛的《古怪女人》、哈代的《无名的裘德》和摩尔的《独身者》中的演变。最后，在阅读威尔斯的科学浪漫小说时，我将把无性恋作为一种进化轨迹来考虑，在这种进化轨迹中，有大脑的无性外星人代表了人类可能的未来。我的项目将在两个方面推进这一领域：首先，它揭示了19世纪英国非小说写作中持续存在的无性焦虑；其次，它讨论了维多利亚时代的小说作为无性恋受到质疑的场所。文学评论研究了维多利亚时代“性节制”的概念，如亚当斯的《花花公子和沙漠圣徒》（1995）。此外，Lawlor和Mangham的《文学与医学》（2021）和Bauer的《性学文化史》都证明了文学和医学在性病理学发展中的相互关系。然而，19世纪英国的无性焦虑症是一个新的研究领域。19世纪欧洲写作中无性恋人物的突出地位已经被性史学家注意到了，尤其是摩尔和克雷尔，他们将性冷淡作为医学文学范畴的概念是我研究的基础。在这些研究的基础上，我追溯了寒冷在英国跨越学科界限的出现。LGBTQ+自我倡导组织对无性恋历史的需求越来越大，其中最著名的是AVEN（无性恋可见度和教育网），这是世界上最大的在线无性恋社区。我的研究贡献了英国维多利亚文学和无性恋医学写作的第一个历史之一。