Información del curso

In the popular imagination, the practice of celibacy in the 19^th and 20^th centuries evokes images of male priests, Catholic moral values, and conservative, even reactionary, politics concerning women and sexuality. This seminar explores a different history that centres less familiar feminist, queer, and activist versions of celibacy in modernist women’s movements and literatures. In close readings and class discussions, together we will trace this largely neglected history from the 19^th-century essayists who advocated celibacy (in the sense of remaining unmarried) as a tool of women’s independence, to the modernist writers whose writing explores the identity of ‘the celibate’ (in the sense of living a non-heteronormative life) as an expression of queer practices and communities between women before and alongside the emergence of terms such as homosexual and lesbian. By historicising the changing meanings of unmarried, nonsexual and queer life in this period, students will develop analytical and critical tools to read literary genres and images such as the ‘celibate utopia’ of first-wave feminist science fiction, and the ‘celibate plot’, which charts a character’s development not towards integration into patriarchal social structures through marriage (as in the ‘marriage plot’) but rather towards a meaningful rejection of the limits that such structures place upon women.

The syllabus will include writing by women writers from the period of early-to-high modernism (c. 1880–1945) which (1) explores female celibacy as a feminist and queer social identity and practice, and (2) represents alternative forms of kinship that centre non-marital partnerships. These will include literary essays, short stories, poems, plays and novels by important modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf (‘A Room of One’s Own’, Orlando), Gertrude Stein (‘A Long Dress’), Elizabeth Bowen (The Hotel), Mina Loy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland), and Kate O’Brien (The Ante-Room). By coming to understand the cultural logic in which the category of ‘the female celibate’ emerged in the modernist period as a coherent expression of feminist and queer identities, we will also be able to engage in conversations about how these ideas are re-emerging in the present day, from representations of asexuality and Ace characters in contemporary fiction, to social media aesthetic movements, campaigns and manifestoes which advocate anew for expressions of women’s of agency through celibacy.