In this episode of the C19 Podcast, Helen Hunt, Professor of English at Tennessee Tech University, asks what kink and BDSM studies can show us about women's sexuality in the late eighteenth and long nineteenth centuries. Hunt starts by setting out the terms, showing how kink is a broad umbrella for non-normative sexual practices and identities, and BDSM is a large part of it centered on power play and intense sensation. She traces this vocabulary back to the sexology of the late 1800s, which treated these desires as disorders. Used critically, she argues, BDSM theory is especially useful for the first half of the nineteenth century, before sexuality hardened into the identity categories we inherited. Hunt then turns to Charles Brockden Brown's Jane Talbot (1801), which critics have long read as a conflict between love and duty. She rereads it as a charged love triangle. Jane's adoptive mother, Mrs. Fielder, competes with the suitor Henry Colden for Jane's absolute devotion, and Mrs. Fielder wins. Jane, for her part, finds a paradoxical pleasure in submitting. The novel ends with an inheritance instead of a marriage. Hunt reads this as a queer family structure that secures succession without heterosexual union, and as proof that a mother's authority can be as erotically charged as a father's. The episode closes with a case for close reading that takes seriously women's perverse desires as sources of agency and pleasure. Hunt also argues for bringing that openness into classrooms, where many students already know far more about kink and diverse sexualities than earlier generations did. Link to Transcript: https://bit.ly/4dVzCTZ.

Rss Apple Podcaster
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists och inte av, eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.