Queerness in nineteenth-century transatlantic spiritualism

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This study will examine how Victorian spiritualists in Britain and the United States developed a distinctive culture that expands and complicates existing accounts of nineteenth-century queer history. Chapter 1 considers how the priorities of spiritualist theology and its relationship to technology drove new ways of thinking about gender that both resembled and differed from sexology. Chapter 2 focuses on how spiritualist spaces like the séance allowed for expression of unusual desires and same-sex eroticism. Chapter 3 assesses how the return of the dead destabilised the hegemony of ordinary marriage. Chapter4 will discuss how queer relationships flourished amongst spiritualist communities. It will examine how the theological implications and practical realities of spiritualism fostered a queer world and worldview using a range of sources such as autobiographies, periodicals, art and correspondence. This study's definition of queerness incorporates acts, identity and social position.