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Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton as Fanny and Stella, 1869. Privacy and the LGBT+ experience: the Victorian past and digital future - The Oxford Comment podcast

Privacy and the LGBT+ experience: the Victorian past and digital future [podcast]

Scholars continue to explore the role of sexuality in private lives—from the retrospective discovery of transgendered people in historical archives to present questions of identity and representation in social media—with the understanding that those who identify as LGBTQ+ have always existed and have fought tirelessly to advance their rights.

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we discuss LGBTQ+ privacy through both historical and contemporary lenses. First, Simon Joyce, the author of LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives, shared his argument for revisiting Victorian-era thinking about gender and sexual identity. We then interviewed Stefanie Duguay, the author of Personal but Not Private: Queer Women, Sexuality, and Identity Modulation on Digital Platforms, who spoke with about digitally mediated identities and how platforms, such as social media and dating apps, act as complicated sites of transformation.

Check out Episode 83 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

You can read the introduction from Simon Joyce’s book, LGBT Victorians, which reimagines and complicates our understanding of the Victorian period by thinking about how British thinkers and writers assessed and responded to larger international movements, including European sexology, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and late-century French erotica. Joyce also wrote about “LGBTQ+ Victorians in the archives” on the OUPblog last fall. 

Read the prologue from Stefanie Duguay’s book, Personal but Not Private, which explores how queer women share and maintain their identities across social media platforms despite overlapping technological, social, economic, and political concerns. You can explore more of Duguay’s research at the Digital Intimacy, Gender, and Sexuality Lab, where she serves as director.

Learn more about the origins of Pride in the introductory chapter of Out in Time: The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation by Perry N. Halkitis.

Explore LGBTQ+ online identity mediation in our Open Access articles:

Featured image: Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton as Fanny and Stella, 1869. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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