My research looks at the creation, diffusion, and reception of sexual knowledge in print culture in Britain and Ireland between the 1910s and 1960s. In particular, I am interested in how sexual knowledge was constructed and presented within marital and sexual advice books, the processes and relationships behind the creation of these texts, and how and where members of the public accessed them. Thinking through the processes behind the making of sexual and bodily knowledge in this format complicates ‘top-down’ narratives of information spread, and allows for a more nuanced understanding of how the sexual and embodied was becoming part of the cultural and personal in this period.
As part of my research, I am interested in conceptions of sexuality and sexual bodies within advice literature. Thinking about heterosexuality as a twentieth-century construction problematises understandings of the presentation of sexual relationships and bodies in these texts. Going beyond this notion to explore what specific work these understandings were doing culturally within the spread and development of sexual knowledge adds complexity to an area of study—marital advice literature—that has, until recently, taken heterosexuality for granted. Furthermore, presentations of ideal sexuality, sex, and bodies were strongly classed, gendered, ableist and driven by imperial assumptions about race. This was not only present through explicit eugenics-based approaches taken by various ‘sex experts’ writing this literature, but also in the wider context that authors, publishers, book distributors, and readers existed in. Understanding the different levels these constructions worked on is an important part of unpicking the significance and meaning of advice literature for both those who wrote and published it and the non-experts who read and learned from it.
My thesis project engages with questions of knowledge dissemination, popular culture, self-fashioning and sex as part of identities, and theoretical concepts of sexuality. It intends to explore ways to expand how historians engage with sexuality and gender through drawing on histories of books, publishing, visual and material culture, and spatial histories.