History of Art Department at the University of Edinburgh

Time: 2-3 September 2013
Venue: University of Edinburgh
Deadline: 10.09.2012, CfP-PDF

Embedded within the narrative of John Cleland’s infamous novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), is a vi- gnette which affronts the moral compass of even the tale’s sexually promiscuous protagonist. Having attended a ‘drag mas- querade’, Fanny bears witness, through a convenient crack in a wall, to a sodomitical act, which she finds ‘not only universally odious but absurd’. Despite her apparent condemnation, Fanny pruriently watches on. In its dichotomous nature, Fanny’s re- action – suggestive of both outrage and intrigue – mirrors reactions to homosexuality in the eighteenth-century and its subse- quent historiography, wherein it is treated at once as a site of fascination, but considered separately from the history of nor- mative sexualities. Situated as it is, within this feast of heterosexual eroticism, Fanny Hill’s same-sex love scene may seem in- congruous. Cleland’s text however, proffers a way to approach homosexuality as both explicitly aberrant and problematic, but still … read more (PDF)