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
Chapter 1 explores the materiality of gendered childhood and youth. Material things helped define childhood as a distinct stage in the life course, marked boys’ and girls’ progression and maturation through it, and, importantly, worked to inculcate and reproduce gendered and social expectations. Boys, for example, had toys to form and mould the body such as rocking horses; and the plethora of eighteenth-century equestrian toys designed for boys instilled from birth a love of manly horse-culture and country pursuits. Girls, on the other hand, played with dolls and honed their considerable needlework skills through embroidery samplers. As such, children’s material culture was a potent tool in the inculcation and reproduction of heterosexual orthodoxies of patriarchal masculinity and subordinate femininity. Exploring the materiality of parent–child relations, the chapter also speaks to eighteenth-century parents’ understanding of the potential of material things to guide and educate their children. While it is certainly true that the increasing financial investment made by parents speaks volumes about what consumers were willing to spend their disposable income on, many conclude that the increased commercial activity of parents for their children was a new way to express existing emotions and concerns. The emergence of boys’ things was a response to boyhood becoming a more definable and recognisable life phase during this period. Gender difference was materialised and inculcated by and through things.
The concluding chapter revisits the central themes identified in the introduction: gendered power, social distinction, material change, material interaction, and material experience. It argues that patriarchal power was materially constructed in two ways through goods’ design and aesthetics and through consumer material practices underpinned by the custom of coverture. It argues that social position was a powerful determiner of material and consumer practice, considering the goods indicative of social mobility, and that goods’ material characteristics were particularly useful to consumers in constructing classed identities. It also reflects on the changing design and aesthetics of the goods the book examines over the course of the century. The expansion of the ‘Great Male Renunciation’ theory undertaken here into a wider set of material practices beyond men’s sartorial choices thus positions men as drivers of design change over the period. The chapter closes by considering the author’s own material masculinity in the twenty-first century, highlighting the utility of the book’s regime of ‘material masculinities’ in contemporary contexts.
This chapter dismantles the myth of the ‘happy housewife’ in contemporary digital media cultures. It argues that it is crucial that we begin to challenge the myth that women are naturally more competent at and find personal fulfilment in housework. These myths have continued to infiltrate every aspect of social life, including within the workplace, where women continue to be seen as more naturally skilled at emotional work, administration and organising. The chapter reminds readers of the various ways in which, over the years, women have 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 ultimately tolerated. I show how the digital image of the cleanfluencer represents the housewife as always flexible to the continuing and contradictory demands of neoliberalism. The chapter concludes by suggesting some radical alternatives to today’s highly unequal, commercialised and digitised versions of housework. It returns to 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 discourses of housework explored in this book.
Chapter 4 explores men’s consumption and use of fashionable accessories. Examining cases of stolen toothpick cases, snuffboxes, and canes in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, the chapter reveals the ubiquity of these accessories across the social hierarchy. Yet how do we square this widespread ownership of ‘trifling baubles’ with wider issues of material, aesthetic, and technological discernment which became increasingly prized in a period of burgeoning mass consumption? The manufacturing and demand for ‘superfluities’, such as snuffboxes, canes, and toothpicks supposedly drove the consumer revolution. In this climate, conservative moralists vociferously attacked the effeminacy of men’s consumption of trifling things. Yet these novel goods’ aesthetic innovation, manufacturing ingenuity, consumer novelty, and ability to denote sophistication enabled consumers to display their consumer discernment and material knowledge. The chapter demonstrates that owning an object such as a snuffbox was not enough to claim elite status, discernment, and refinement but that materials and finish materialised social distinction. Middling men also sought to materially demarcate their own status through the development of a middling aesthetic regime. Discernment and distinction, too, were displayed in the social choreographies of their use in respectable and fashionable society. Thus these objects were key instruments of masculine identity and social distinction. They were also significant in familial and dynastic practices and passed on by men and women. These objects were material conduits to emotions and memory and that personal property was deeply personal and instrumental to sense of selfhood.
Chapter 5 explores the consumption, maintenance, display, and use of hunting equipment and trophies to unearth the materiality of a particularly masculine pastime. The sportsman was an eighteenth-century consumer identity, and provincial and metropolitan manufacturers appealed to the rural hunter. The chapter examines gendered attitudes to country sports within men’s domestic material culture to demonstrate that guns were not divorced from the world of polite, luxury goods. The chapter examines elite men’s gun consumer behaviour, and their material preferences in gun decoration, over the course of the eighteenth century to demonstrate how elite men used luxury objects to construct both a polite and sporting gentlemanly identity that combined to make the ‘gentleman sportsman’. This chapter uses gunsmith bills and trade cards, extant guns, and household and probate inventories to examine the changing location and display of hunting equipment within the country house. Its examination of gunsmith bills and trade cards, extant guns, and household and probate inventories reveals the changing location and display of hunting equipment within the country house. Over the course of the century, guns were increasingly plainer in ornamentation and no longer graced the great halls of country houses but were displayed and stored in men’s private chambers; martial prowess was still present but was materialised through sporting guns and objects of polite scientific technology such as globes, barometers, and telescopes – reflecting the wider pacification of masculine pursuits in the period.
Chapter 2 explores men’s and women’s curation and furnishing of the domestic interior through the administrative documents and order books of upholsterers Robert Williams of Bow Street in 1763 and James Brown of St Paul’s Churchyard in 1786. It combines the qualitative and quantitative approaches of previous studies of household consumption to reveal men’s significant investment in the furnishing of their homes as a key site of masculine identity and power. The chapter analyses men’s and women’s consumer strategies of furniture and furnishings – looking at order size, total spend, repeat custom, and whether they bought new, second-hand or repaired goods. It also provides a material analysis of objects’ design, materials, style, and finish. The combination of consumer and material approaches reveals the minutia of eighteenth-century consumers’ material preferences. From the data, a picture emerges of material identities materialised on socio-economic rather than gendered lines. Repairing was a universal practice of household furnishers and speaks to the need to materially maintain and upgrade identities regardless of gender or status. Men, this chapter reveals, were active, skilled, literate, and adventurous curators of their households by repairing goods, choosing upholstery, buying exotic wooden furniture, and making prudent consumer choices to furnish a key site of their masculinity. Exploring the householder as a material masculinity, not just as a position in the life course, demonstrates how his power, authority, discernment, and provision were materialised in specific and classed ways in the domestic interior.
Where did the cleanfluencer come from? How and why does her image feature so prominently in the popular cultural imagination? Who follows her and why? To answer these questions, this chapter describes a process of ‘turning inwards’ whereby housework becomes more than a set of tasks to be completed or a calling for women to work heroically towards the greater good as earlier ramifications of housework had been. Instead, housework has become part of a personal project of the self; an act of self-realisation. It describes the series of events through which housework began to be associated with a ‘feminine self’, leading ultimately to the emergence of the digital cleanfluencer. The chapter argues that in order to understand the contemporary figure of the cleanfluencer, we need to consider how she is located within wider twentieth-century developments of selfhood which position the housewife as the ideal ‘stay at home’, enterprising woman who is also a worthy and savvy consumer. The chapter explores how the white bourgeois housewife and her reproduction via cleanfluencing social media accounts is a direct product of wider processes of consumer capitalism, post-colonialism and patriarchy. She is often worshipped and venerated, seen as heroic, stoic in times of crisis and the heart and soul of the family and home. And yet her work – the tasks of housework – is rarely celebrated. It is either invisible or else devalued and outsourced as very low-paid labour, often to the poorest women in society. The chapter examines the cultural legacies of the housewife, situating her emergence within historical structures of industrialism and colonialism. It shows how the emergence of the popular contemporary figure of the cleanfluencer is a logical step in the latest stage of consumer capitalism which has its roots in recent histories of gender inequalities around domestic labour.
This chapter further explores the relationship between cleaning and selfhood. Housework within cleanfluencing accounts often promises to ‘spark joy’, popularising the idea that it is possible to clean and tidy yourself happy. This chapter examines where these narratives came from by situating cleanfluencing within the burgeoning positive thinking and self-help movement. Cleanfluencers often structure their content around an enthusiastic portrayal of the supposed mental health benefits of cleaning and tidying. Stories are regularly interspersed with reels featuring cleanfluencers taking antidepressants and describing their experiences of anxiety and stress in candid detail. The chapter considers how it is that housework came to be bound up with positive thinking and self-care. It looks at online housework cultures in light of the broader, highly popular positive thinking and self-care movement. Within the digital self-care movement, the secret to alleviating negative feelings of anxiety, depression and personal struggle is thought to be through a personal search for happiness; a process of ‘looking within’ and working on yourself to be a better person. Happiness and personal satisfaction are increasingly seen as achievable through positive thinking, kindness, gratitude and joyful ‘energy’. The chapter shows how distracting yourself through housework and counting your blessings are presented as key to happiness and personal satisfaction. Within cleanfluencing accounts, positive affirmations abound – ‘You’ve got this!’, ‘You are enough as you are!, ‘Just be you!’ – and regularly appear alongside endless adverts for cleaning products and homeware.
What is the relationship between the cleanfluencers and the celebrity housewives that came before? Does the ‘domestic goddess’ housewife syndrome prevail? How is social media used in new ways by cleanfluencers to appeal to new followers? This chapter examines the rise of digital media to help explore today’s representations of the housewife. Celebrity housewives today use their platforms on social media to share cleaning and tidying tips and strategies in much the same way as their predecessors did. But, in contrast to the homemaking educationalists, this new generation of celebrity housewives are presented as being relatable. Cleaning and tidying tips and advertisements are shared with followers as an act of kindness. Followers are encouraged to avoid overthinking or looking outwards into the world too much, and instead to focus on self-improvement. The focus on the ordinariness of the ‘cleanfluencer’ means that their success is presented in a way that feels attainable. The chapter shows that there has been a revival of earlier ideals around the housewife as responsible for displaying a particular version of her home. It shows that in these new digital worlds, housework has become increasingly bound up with how individuals define themselves. In the ultra-curated world of social media, homes are more carefully presented and displayed than ever. Moreover, the actual work of housework is either rendered invisible, or else tasks such as mopping the floor or folding washing are filmed alongside uplifting music and made to look effortless, relaxing, rewarding and satisfying.
The introduction charts the historiographies of eighteenth-century gender and materiality and identifies the key areas of the book’s intervention into them; namely, that the scholarship of men’s consumption is particularly focused on dress and domestic consumption, which is largely a response to the detailed work on women’s material lives and consumer expertise. The introductory chapter outlines the book’s approach to the construction of masculinities as a historical process not merely a set of structures under historical investigation. It outlines the key themes of the book: gendered power, social distinction, material interaction, material experiences, and material change. The introduction also details the broad range of historical evidence (both documentary and material) and approaches to it as well as summaries of the substantive chapters.