ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7594-1150
Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MA in English
Department
English
First Advisor
Kathleen Lubey
Second Advisor
Rachel Hollander
Abstract
This thesis builds on the emerging work of scholars who view pornography as literature with sociocultural relevance and adds to trans scholarship through a dissection of gender construction and transmisogyny in a Victorian underground subversive culture. Centering the 1883 erotic novel Letters from Laura and Eveline, I examine how language and biology are unfixed to highlight fluidity within queer sex and gender, and how this helps the novel evade the taxonomical-obsessed era in which it was produced. I examine its roots in the real historical figures of Ernest “Stella” Boulton and Frederick “Fanny” Park, two crossdressers who were arrested a decade prior for conspiracy to commit sodomy. Juxtaposed with its predecessor Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), Letters reappropriates real-world surveillance anxieties and constructs its own liberated, reimagined views on sexuality and gender.
Recommended Citation
Falco, Daniel, "FROM SINS OF THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN TO LETTERS FROM LAURA AND EVELINE: BOULTON, PARK, AND PORNOGRAPHY’S REACTION TO TRANSMISOGYNY" (2024). Theses and Dissertations. 714.
https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations/714