The Gender and Sexuality Collection is a valuable resource for university librarians, researchers, and teaching staff. This collection delves into themes such as domesticity, education, work, sexuality, representation, religion, mental health, activism and motherhood. By surveying gender identity and sexuality from diverse perspectives, it raises critical questions about gender roles, feminist theory and heteronormativity. Covering a broad historical range from the medieval period to the present day, this collection is indispensable for those engaged in gender and sexuality studies.
| Key series |
| Gender in History |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Imperialism |
| Theory for a Global Age |
| Women, Theatre and Performance |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 7 |
| 2023/4 titles | 12 |
| 2004-2022 titles | 89 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Domesticity |
| Education |
| Work |
| Nature |
| Sexuality |
| Heteronormativity |
| Representation |
| Religion |
| Global South |
| Mental health |
| Motherhood |
| Gender roles |
| Activism |
| Feminism |
| Beauty |
| Thema subject categories |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History |
| Economics |
| Politics and government |
| The Arts |
| Feminism and feminist theory |
| Film history, theory or criticism |
| Gender studies, gender groups |
| History of religion |
| LGBTQ+ Studies / topics |
SDG coverage
Gender and sexuality collection
Who are the ‘cleanfluencers’? How has cleanfluencing reglamourised housework? Why study privileged white women digital housewives? This chapter begins by showing that the recent COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a retreat in recent advancements towards gender inequality, particularly within the domestic sphere. Alongside this, recent years have witnessed an upsurge in online digital ‘influencers’, particularly on social media sites such as Instagram and TikTok. The influencer boom, alongside a renewed post-pandemic focus on keeping homes clean, germ-free and ‘safe’, has culminated in the burgeoning popularity of the ‘cleanfluencers’: an online re-configuration of the white woman housewife, responsible for curating digital images of the perfect home. The chapter introduces readers to the idea that cleanfluencing promises a range of individualised self-help strategies and commodified solutions to everyday stresses and anxieties that are exacerbated by the inequalities underpinning late modern capitalist societies. It suggests that far from the feminist ideal of women being freed up for creativity and independence, new digital media accounts have emerged that are dedicated to helping their overwhelmingly women followers to micro-plan, organise and account for every minute of their time. The chapter describes the march towards increasingly impossible-to-achieve ideals of housework and the cleanfluencer’s role in perpetuating these. It explores the ever-evolving ways that contemporary digital culture has contributed to an entrenchment of the adage that housework is women’s work.
This chapter further examines the ways that cleanfluencers embrace positive-thinking discourses and mindsets by closely integrating these into their own content. The repeated use and popular appeal of hashtags such as #ShineNotShame echo the recent focus on the supposed association between cleaning and mental health. Cleanfluencers often describe their content as destigmatising mental health, but this chapter argues that their content also contributes to a normalisation of psychological suffering, especially among women. These discourses, alongside highly conservative representations of women frantically cleaning and tidying their homes, abound on social media, where a type of highly intensive consumer culture is celebrated alongside the mantra that true happiness comes from ‘within’. Cleanfluencers have been particularly vociferous in describing their experiences of anxiety and stress in candid detail. Sometimes this extends to intercepting cleaning stories with film reels and posts showing boxes of antidepressants, personal accounts of journeys through depression and heart-to-heart confessional conversations with followers about mental health struggles. The chapter draws on Lynne Segal’s account of radical happiness, arguing that cleanfluencing offers a highly individualised and commercial, rather than collective or radical, solution to complex contemporary social problems. In the new digital worlds of the online celebrity housewife, it is promised that even the most ‘ordinary’ person with access to a smartphone can achieve her dreams, happiness and personal satisfaction.
This book brings together over 25 years of scholarship on eighteenth-century gendered consumption to provide an important and necessary survey of middling and elite men’s material culture and consumer behaviour in the period c.1650–1850. Since the early 2000s, scholarship has unquestionably shown that men were active participants in a consumer society buying for their persons, their families, and their communities, but how and, importantly, why men engaged so much in the ‘consumer revolution’ is less clear. Furthermore, the wider significance and repercussions from this consumer and material engagement remain under-explored. This timely monograph explores the complexities of men’s material lives as they rose up the social hierarchy, as they matured from boys to men, as they married and established households, as they socialised in town and on the hunting field. The book studies five ‘material masculinities’ (boyhood, householder, mobile man, discerning consumer, and gentleman sportsman) to highlight the materiality of masculine identity formation and experience and its power dynamics. Material masculinities’ examination of these varied masculinities within a rich variety of historical sources reveals that men came to rely on goods to construct a variety of masculine identities. In doing so, their material choices, desires, practices, and skills shaped the material and consumer culture of eighteenth-century England. Goods, the book argues, helped men know themselves in a period of significant social, cultural, economic, and political change – change that was underpinned by men’s active participation in the commercialisation of British society in this pivotal period of English history.
Chapter 3 examines eighteenth-century men’s and women’s access to and use of private carriage transport. Historians have identified the carriage’s unique ability to denote wealth, status, and privilege in a commercialising, modern society. However, this chapter argues that the mere ownership of a carriage was not always enough to denote elite masculine status, but buying and maintaining different carriages for town and country roads, for practical transport and pleasure promenading, for domestic and foreign travel was a requisite consumer activity and material skill of the eighteenth-century gentleman. Different carriage types emerged across the eighteenth century and the design of coaches themselves altered significantly. Carriages’ decorative ornamentation and mechanical structure spoke to their owners’ discernment and masculine material knowledge. The chapter explores the design of carriages and highly bespoke goods that elite men were keen to personalise through decorative schemes and heraldic iconography of ciphers, rests, and coronets. Coaches materialised mobility up and down the social hierarchy with newly moneyed or newly ennobled men acquiring or upgrading carriages. Exploring questions of carriage ownership and the responsibility of their upkeep, the chapter also examines both the mechanical and fashionable material knowledge required to do so successfully. But were these merely practical concerns or related to the magnificence of conspicuous elite consumption? Manly mobility was dependant on material things in eighteenth-century Britain. The coach, then, is important for considerations not just of a commercialising, manufacturing modern society but as a keen example of the materiality of modern masculinity.
This chapter describes how, over the years, women have, in various ways, been promised that housework will bring them freedom and pleasure. This promise is rarely realised. Digital media and cleanfluencing accounts offer new sites whereby inequalities are sometimes confronted but mostly reproduced and almost always tolerated. The chapter shows how the digital image of the cleanfluencer represents the housewife as always flexible to the continuing and contradictory demands of neoliberalism. It does this by drawing on a range of earlier historical examples of the popular housewife, arguing that the contemporary cleanfluencer is part of a long lineage of white women housewives. It concludes by suggesting some radical alternatives to today’s highly unequal, commercialised and digitised versions of housework. It discusses ideas of ‘collective joy’ and ‘radical happiness’ which stand in contrast to individual and competitive searches for happiness and personal betterment that are reflected in the cleanfluencing accounts that are explored throughout the book.
Housework is good for you. Housework sparks joy. Housework is beautiful. Housework is glamorous. Housework is key to a happy family. Housework shows that you care. Housework is women’s work. These popular depictions of housework have a long and stubborn history. Today, social media is flooded with images of the perfect home, with online ‘cleanfluencers’ dedicated to reproducing images of women cleaning, tidying and ordering their homes. Housework, with the promise of a life of love and contentment to those who commit to it, has become central to the recent self-care and positive thinking movement. And yet the reality is that housework remains one of the most unequal institutions globally. Women, especially poorer women and women of colour, do most of the low-paid and unpaid domestic labour. This book asks why these inequalities matter and why they persist. It offers a powerful call to challenge the prevailing myths around housework and the ‘naturally competent’ woman homemaker. Written in a lively and accessible way, drawing on a wealth of historical and contemporary examples from literature, radical magazines, popular culture and politics, the book features anecdotes about the housewife in her various guises throughout.
Adolescence is often understood as a period of transition, a time when individuals move from being children to being adults. This chapter explores the roles that sex, reproduction and heterosexual intimacy were deemed to play in this process and shows that young women in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s saw the process of ‘becoming sexual’ as synonymous with ‘growing up’. Whereas previous generations linked adulthood and maturity to employment, marriage and motherhood, members of the post-war generation also saw sexual initiation as a milestone in its own right and often conducted their sexual lives in relation to their own sense of maturity. Exploring women’s experiences of sex education, sexual activity and first intercourse, this chapter argues that teenage sexual culture was distinct from that of adults in that it was preoccupied with the idea of ‘learning’ how to be sexual and gradually acclimatising to sexual feelings and intimate behaviour. Where first intercourse had previously been tied to the wedding night, making marriage a key marker of adult femininity, in the post-war period having sex for the first time had become a rite of passage in its own right. For girls wanting to be or feel grown up, the transformative power of sex acted as a powerful incentive to engage in intercourse and this can help to explain increasing incidence of premarital sex across the post-war period.
This chapter interrogates the role that sexual activity played in young women’s relationships with boys, suggesting that changing expectations of sexual compatibility and emotional intimacy within marriage created new imperatives for sexual intimacy outside of marriage among the post-war generation. The chapter begins by considering the different types of relationships that young women were having with young men in this period. It highlights the broad array of relationship formations within which young women engaged in sexual activity. Rather than thinking about teenagers’ relationships as ‘courtship’, I propose using ‘intimacy’ as a lens through which to consider adolescent sexual culture. The chapter goes on to reveal the elasticity of the links between sex and intimacy. On the one hand, emotional intimacy was seen as a prerequisite for sex – most girls were not prepared to engage in ‘high-level’ sexual acts with a partner they did not already have a relationship with. At the same time, though, sharing sexual experiences was understood as a means of fostering intimacy between couples. As the final section of the chapter demonstrates, this ambiguity created grey areas that could be difficult for girls to negotiate. The testimonies indicate that young men were able to tap into girls’ desires for intimacy in order to encourage, pressure and coerce them into sexual activity.
The conclusion draws out the two overarching arguments of the book. Namely, that for the post-war generation, sexuality was central to what it meant to ‘grow up’ and become adult, and that intimate life was a distinctly social experience that was informed by the local communities and everyday social networks that young women existed within. The conclusion then sets these findings within two broader contexts. First, through comparisons to both older generations and contemporary youth, the conclusion situates this account in a longer-term historical context. In so doing it demonstrates the importance of the post-war generation in determining the trajectory of English sexual culture across the twentieth century. Second, the conclusion highlights the contribution of this study to historical understandings of youth, sexuality and women’s lives and to accounts of social change in modern Britain. It reflects on how this study challenges monolithic understandings of ‘agency’. Finally, it discusses the potential of intimacy as a subject and analytic tool for historians. As this study demonstrates, there is much to be gained not only from tracing the history of intimacy itself but also to recognising the importance of social relationships as a motor of social change in their own right.
This chapter considers how girls’ broader networks of friends, classmates, peers and acquaintances featured in their sexual lives. It argues that young women’s relationships with other girls played an important role in their intimate relationships with boys. As this chapter shows, sexuality was organised around the imperative to conform to social codes and in their teenage years sexual attitudes and behaviour became central to how girls related to one another. Histories of courtship in the early twentieth century have tended to focus exclusively on the emotional dynamics between the courting couple and have stressed the private nature of their interactions. In the post-war period, however, many aspects of teenagers’ relationships were outward-facing and embraced elements of display. Although certain aspects of relationships were to be kept private, issues of logistics, safety and the desire to ‘show off’ meant that teenagers often conducted their sexual lives in public. That teenage girls’ sexual activity was often public knowledge marked a significant departure from previous generations. This chapter suggests that at the heart of this profound change lay young people’s quest for social status. Certainly, girls had to manage their sexuality carefully and getting a reputation as being ‘fast’ or ‘promiscuous’ could be very damaging, but the relationship between sex and social status was no longer purely negative and sexual knowledge and desirability increasingly functioned as a form of social currency.