There’s an incoherence in our thinking about the intersections of gender and sexuality in the 1890s that is conditioned by an overemphasis on the Oscar Wilde trials. 1895 saw the coalescing of diffuse components (aestheticism, dandyism, effeminacy) that would establish a modern definition of male homosexuality. Yet we recognize that Wilde had little interest in the sexological notion of inversion, advocating instead for the pederastic model that depended on the repudiation of cross-gender expression. This chapter reconsiders the legacies of the 1890s by shifting focus from Wilde to two figures who differently adjudicated the merits of pederasty and inversion: John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Analyzing the revisions Carpenter made to his pamphlets in preparation for the publication of Love’s Coming-of-Age – delayed by Wilde’s trials – the chapter shows the influence of Continental thinkers such as Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, as well as New Woman writers of the 1890s, in defusing the antagonism between pederasty and inversion.

Sebald virtually identified with Kafka. He published two substantial essays on The Castle, inspired by Walter Benjamin. Foregrounding the theme of death, he draws on Freud’s ambivalent concept of the death-drive, and associates Kafka also with Schubert’s Winterreise. Drawing implicitly on Canetti’s Crowds and Power, he interprets the protagonist of The Castle as a messianic figure seeking to confront the Castle’s power. Another essay uses Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, with its Darwinian implications, as pretext for a meditation on cultural and evolutionary decline. In Sebald’s fictional works, Kafka is present throughout much of Vertigo, which in part follows Kafka’s own journey through Northern Italy from Venice to Lake Garda and alludes to Kafka’s ‘The Huntsman Gracchus’, set in the lakeside town of Riva. Sebald explores Kafka’s state of mind, as attested in letters and diaries, returning to the theme of death and also hinting at Kafka’s possible homosexuality. In Austerlitz, a significant quotation from The Trial is worked into the text. Altogether, much of Sebald’s work represents a homage to Kafka.

Drawing on examples from real life as well as fictional representations in literature, cinema, theatre, television and radio, this chapter interrogates the relationship of queerness to the British nation from the Great War to the present. Beginning with Rose Allatini’s 1918 novel Despised and Rejected, the first part documents how and why queers were framed as a suspect minority, a danger to the nation. The second part largely draws on the deliberations of the Wolfenden Committee in the 1950s in explaining why a shift towards a limited tolerance for discreet, respectable, ‘genuine’ homosexuals began to take place. The final part traces the proliferation of queer-themed representations in recent decades alongside the rise of gay liberation and the battle over gay civil liberties. It concludes that queers in Britain have made undeniable progress, but at the cost of co-option for a homonational consensus.

Focusing on the so-called “romances of adventure” (romans d’aventure) which made up the largest and most popular category of romances, this chapter provides representative glimpses of how complicated, and fluid, the presentation of gender is in romance. It primarily examines romances written in French because they were the earliest to be written and served as the model for most of those we find in other western European languages, as it explores how binaries such as passive/active and male/female were complicated by deliberate strategies on the part of authors (and patrons).

Chapter 4 examines Aaron Copland’s Short Symphony (1931–3) in the context of Copland’s friendship with Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chávez. Short Symphony was partly written in Mexico. Chávez suggested a title for the work, ‘The Bounding Line’, which Copland temporarily adopted, and he conducted the premiere in Mexico City in November 1934. Chávez’s title raises questions about mutuality within a border-crossing American symphonic project, as well as the place in Copland’s classicist symphony of bodily presence, dance, and Hellenic erotics. Copland’s aesthetics of balletic line and bodily motion suggest analytic paradigms of gentle mediation, interdependence, contact, and touch – paradigms that thus spoke to the grassroots pan-American climate of political solidarity across the American continent in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Yet, mobilising an aesthetics of the body to gently utopian symphonic ends in this context proves unsustainable. Copland does not return from this border-crossing encounter acquitted of the colonial charge.

In this chapter, Dara Goldman focuses on the case study of the “New Man” in Cuba and how it has been reconfigured in twenty-first-century LGBTQ films. The analysis focuses on Tomás Gutierrez Alea’s landmark film, Fresa y chocolate (1994), and how it positions queer sexuality vis-à-vis the revolutionary ideals and imagined future that it seeks to forge. The author also examines how recent films have repeatedly reposited and reimagined the central dialectic of Gutierrez Alea’s film, with particular attention to Mariyln Solaya’s Vestido de novia (2014). The author analyzes Fátima o el parque de la fraternidad (2015), which traces the evolution of and transgender transformation of the protagonist. The chapter places this work in dialogue with two other recent films – Conducta (2014) and Ultimos días en la Habana (2016) – that examine how masculinity is disciplined in moments of crisis. In the end, the author argues that the failures depicted in these works allow us to better understand the role of gender in Latin American cultures. As these works reimagine the parameters of gender and transgender, they confront the fundamental attachment to normative gender roles as a legitimating force in Latin American cultural traditions.

This chapter examines the complex itineraries of two influential Latin American queer writers – Mexican playwright and official chronicler of Mexico City Salvador Novo (1904–1974) and Chilean intellectual and diplomat Augusto D’Halmar (1882–1950) – to expose how their bodies undergo significant transformations in order to assert new sensibilities and relationships in the economy and productivity of travel. Novo and D’Halmar utilize their bodies to respond to the heteronormative pact between the state and the lettered city, and also to map a larger world based on unexpected connections, transformations, and new readings of the common archive. Through Eastern clothing and intense fevers, cosmetic prostheses and flamboyant behavior, these writers disorganize the hierarchies that dominate the hegemonic narratives of sex. In the process, they attempt to achieve a sort of material autonomy – the chance to regulate their own bodily matter – and thus forge new paths for Latin American writers.

That David Foster Wallace designed his fiction to serve a therapeutic function for readers is, at this point, axiomatic. Timothy Aubry (Reading as Therapy) has effectively demonstrated how it serves this function, as well as how his fiction’s contingent relation to addiction and recovery stories enabled Wallace to reinject what he saw as a dispassionate and exhausted postmodern form with moral and affective urgency. Rob Short (Big Books) has thoroughly documented how Wallace’s own adherence to the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) shapes the aesthetic practice of his novels. Wallace also frequently used the text to stage “the production and elision of intimacy between the (male) author and the (male) reader.” In conversation with this sections other chapters on gender and sexuality, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace’s writing occupies queer spaces in its representation of the fractured contingency of the addicted self in recovery. Specifically, the chapter draws a comparison with Whitman, through his first and only novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842), by far his largest commercial success during his lifetime despite being generally forgotten and, like Wallace, a first novel he would often disavow. For Whitman, masking his exact intention to connect with the reader in his poetry, as well as through this addiction and recovery novel, was the very mechanism by which he could construct the queer intimacies socially and politically foreclosed during his lifetime. As scholars like Michael Warner (“Whitman Drunk”) and Michael Moon (Disseminating Whitman) have documented, Whitman too attended alcohol recovery meetings in part to listen to “dirty” stories about same-sex encounters. Through this connection, I hope to accomplish two goals: first, to recontextualize the fantasy of pre-postmodern and even pre-realist novels imagined to be better suited to the aesthetic project of therapy and recovery in a post-postmodern America, and second, to bring Wallace’s aesthetic practice in closer contact with issues of sexuality that the universalizing gesture of fiction-as-therapy can too often elide. While the chapter does not argue that Wallace was a queer writer, it elucidates the disruptive potential of queer readings within the context of late postmodernist constructions of self.

The level of awareness of one’s own sexuality and of its expression have always depended not only on a person’s stage of life but, first and foremost, on the specific cultural and religious milieus in which the person lives and operates. Since time immemorial, a special place in female sexuality has been reserved for the period of gestation, whether planned or unwanted. Becoming pregnant represents a unique time in a woman’s life, involving changes that are not only physical but also psychological. It is a period of change in a woman’s behavior and even sexual life, although we have entered an era of major evolution of the way we see sexuality and reproduction. Today, advances in reproductive medicine are progressively transforming basic human behavior in which the main emphasis has been on “sex for reproduction” into a situation where “sex without reproduction” is widely accepted. Finally, over the last few decades, “reproduction without sex” is increasingly taking hold. Indeed, an rising number of couples worldwide have been creating families where the offspring are the fruit of one of the many assisted reproduction technologies (ART). Therefore, reproduction without sex, looked at with suspicion and even open hostility only 30 years ago, has now entered a stage where it is considered a perfectly “natural” way of creating a family and – at least in the Western world – is increasing utilized by couples made by two individuals of the same genetic sex. Obviously, this new situation, not approved in a number of countries and perfectly legal in others, has created problems and is opposed by vocal groups with various arguments. The evolving relationship between sexuality and reproduction, the emergence of the new paradigm of reproduction without sex, with its influence on the two adult partners as well as on the offspring, will be briefly discussed from the point of view of its links to traditional sexuality, as well as taking into account the new options that are surfacing today.

Same-sex attraction can impair the reproductive success of women, as it motivates them to direct their mating effort toward same-sex outlets from which offspring cannot be produced. This reproductive cost could translate into strong negative selection pressures, reducing this trait to a very low frequency in the population. Apparently, this did not happen, as more than one in ten women experience same-sex attractions. The current chapter discusses various theories that aim to solve the evolutionary paradox of the high prevalence of female same-sex attraction in the population, focusing on the weak negative selection pressures hypothesis and the male choice hypothesis. In the weak selection pressures hypothesis, factors present in ancestral human societies, such as arranged marriage and conformity to heterosexual marriage, have weakened negative selection pressures on same-sex attractions, allowing them to exist in high prevalence in contemporary societies. In the male choice hypothesis, men can potentially secure substantial reproductive benefits by having as partners women who experience same-sex attractions. In effect, they have evolved to prefer such attraction in women, with this male preference expected to translate into positive selection driving female same-sex attraction to higher prevalence in the population. Controversies arising from the male choice hypothesis are also discussed.

Two competing impulses around gender have come to characterize Protestant life: one that insists on a particular God-ordained gender order, often starting with the home and moving outward to church and society and another that downplayed or sometimes altogether dismissed gender injunctions and hierarchies as contrary to divine intention. Protestantism’s “modernist–fundamentalist” divide, usually seen as a far-reaching dispute over how to read the Bible, is closely connected to and driven by wider cultural debates regarding gender. Gender has functioned as one of the most active organizing forces in Protestant life. Protestants drew on gender to control behaviors and regulate boundaries as well as to question and challenge them. The sectarian nature of Protestantism as it grappled with gender shaped Protestant theologies, rearranged alliances, and splintered institutions.

The relation between Britten’s sexuality and his music has been an abiding fascination for biographers and music scholars in recent decades. The fact that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, and that he and his long-term partner, Peter Pears, therefore had to live a homosexual life as an ‘open secret’ for most of their lives, often lends this critical emphasis a kind of heroic poignancy. This chapter contrasts Britten and Pears’s upper-middle-class experience of forbidden sexuality with that of the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century British men and women, to paint a more rounded picture of the politics of the closet. It shows how early twenty-first-century ideas about sexual ‘identity’ obscure the differences between class experience, and distort our understanding of the issue.

Auden’s poetry and ideology were shaped by each era and circumstance in which he lived and worked and by those by whom he was surrounded. His early views on politics, religion, sexuality, and the importance of art, music, and poetry to society – all of which defined the poet as Britten knew him in the 1930s and early 1940s – underwent some form of revision thereafter, providing fodder for those critics who sought to conscript him to the turbulent period leading up to and including the Second World War, hailed by many as the ‘golden age’ of his poetry. In England, particularly, some scholars have posited that Auden’s rejection of his ‘age’ – and his country in 1939 – did damage to both his contemporary and posthumous reputations, going so far as to posit that he had squandered his opportunity to be considered that nation’s greatest poet of the twentieth century. As this chapter explores, Auden’s outlook on the varying matters that crept into his poetry was complex and often contradictory.

Britten and Pears regarded their relationship as a ‘marriage’ and described it as such as early as 1943. Although comfortable with using this term privately, they were aware of the legal prohibition and social stigma that prevented them from proclaiming their partnership openly. And yet throughout their nearly forty years together they made no immediate secret among their circle of friends and relatives about living their lives as a couple. As this essay suggests, theirs was a special case, in that they lived their relationship with relative openness among those who knew them. Works such as the Michelangelo Sonnets and Canticle I were a declaration of sorts about the nature of their relationship, although it was not until after the composer’s death that Pears commented overtly in an interview about their love for one another. A decade after the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the UK, and with social discussion on homosexuality widening, Pears believed that his and Britten’s marriage need no longer be regarded as a secret.