Rethinking Periodization, Priorities, and Liberalism in British Queer History

Abstract This article revisits the development of the field of British queer history to argue that the division that began in the later 1970s—between works focused on the periods before and after the late nineteenth century—has obscured underlying methodological unities that developed within the scholarship since the 1990s. The failure to emphasize common cultural history methodologies that have been the hallmark of the best works analyzing same-sex desire and transing gender for the period from the late seventeenth century onward is due in part to the separating off of histories of same-sex desire between women from those studies focused on men. This article argues that a Foucauldian understanding of power, the liberal public sphere, and liberal political systems, all dating from the late seventeenth century, provide a unified context for the formulating and unraveling of a wide range of self-understandings in relation to gender and sexual desires. What explains the developments of the late nineteenth century stems from the first such self-understandings being formulated for the requirements of a rights-bearing subject within a liberal political system. This approach highlights the ethical component of public political identities, and the consequences of this for British queer history going forward.