Female sexual autonomy and desire in the United Kingdom, 1870-1928

该项目首次提供了英国女性在1870年至1928年间如何理解性欲和自主性的身体体验的亲密历史。这本书以信件、日记和生活写作为重点，探讨了女性如何写（或不写）欲望、快乐和身体的私密领域，以及她们可用的语言和思想。利用普通女性的声音，这个项目将建立在对性和性表达的不断增长的研究基础上，挑战现有的学术对监管和表现的关注。超越了狭隘地关注英格兰的倾向，这本关于女性性行为的另类历史将把性和亲密关系放在对英国和爱尔兰的比较分析的中心，探索这些经历是如何具有文化特殊性的。通过这一点，我将考虑亲密生活如何成为性的公共政治的一部分，反之亦然。我的研究将通过对信件、日记和其他个人证词的分析，以亲密和身体为出发点，开辟新的领域。跨越公共和私人界限的来源说明了亲密生活如何成为公共性政治的一部分。认为私人资料不涉及性的假设是不准确的，正如本项目可获得的来源材料的范围所证明的那样。根据现有的关于性无知的研究和性的理论概念，我将调查这些来源可以告诉我们关于历史上特定的性别差异和正常观念的什么。因此，这个项目的意义在于它关注性别、性和阶级经验的“隐藏历史”，作为从过去恢复人们的故事和经历的一部分，以及它在当前围绕女性性自主的辩论氛围中的社会含义，与堕胎和性暴力等领域对妇女权利的挑战产生共鸣。该项目将通过一个广泛的档案研究方案来发展，重点是鉴定、获取和分析信件、日记和其他个人文件。英国和爱尔兰之间的跨文化比较将突出地理和宗教塑造的经验差异，爱尔兰的性经验直到最近才得到学术界的关注。当前该领域的史学研究突出了研究和撰写这段历史的复杂性，因为社会禁忌和记录亲密性和身体体验的可及性。然而，这种复杂性说明了探索性经验和理解的难题的价值，包括对“正常”性行为和性行为的普遍假设。从1870年到1928年，在英国，关于性别、性、身体和情感的文学作品不断扩大，这一贡献将被置于一个未被充分利用的独特视角，关注身体体验和女性异性恋的性欲。

This project provides the first intimate history of how women in the United Kingdom understand the bodily experience of sexual desire and autonomy between 1870 and 1928. Focusing on letters, diaries, and life writing, it explores how women wrote about (or did not) the intimate realm of desires, pleasures, and bodies, and the languages and ideas available to them. Using ordinary women's voices, this project will build on a growing body of research into sexuality and sexual expression, challenging the existing focus of scholarship on regulation and representation. Going beyond the tendency to focus narrowly on England, this alternative history of women's sexuality will place sex and intimacy at the centre of its comparative analysis of Britain and Ireland, exploring how these experiences were culturally specific. Through this, I will consider how intimate lives became part of the public politics of sexuality, and vice versa.My research will break new ground in taking the intimate and physical as a starting point through analysis of letters, diaries, and other personal testimonies. Sources which cross the public and private boundaries illuminate how intimate lives became part of public sexuality politics. Assumptions that private sources do not deal with sex are inaccurate, as demonstrated by the range of source material available for this project. Drawing on existing research into sexual ignorance, and theoretical concepts of sexuality, I will investigate what these sources can tell us about ideas of sexual difference and normality as historically specific. This project's significance therefore lies in its attention to 'hidden histories' of gender, sexuality and class experience as part of recovering people's stories and experiences from the past, and its social implications in the current climate of debate surrounding female sexual autonomy, resonating with challenges to women's rights in areas such as abortion and sexual violence.The project will develop through an extensive programme of archival research, focused on the identification, acquisition, and analysis of letters, diaries and other personal documents. Cross-cultural comparison between Britain and Ireland will highlight experiential differences moulded by geography and religion, with Irish sexual experience being given little scholarly attention until recently.Current historiography in the field highlights the complexity of researching and writing this history given societal taboos and accessibility of records documenting intimate sexual and bodily experiences. This complexity, however, illuminates the value of exploring difficult questions of sexual experience and understanding, including prevailing assumptions about 'normal' sexuality and sexual behaviour. This contribution to the expanding literature surrounding gender, sexuality, bodies and emotions in the United Kingdom from 1870 to 1928 will thus be situated in an underused and unique perspective concerned with the physical bodily experience and female heterosexual sexual desire.