Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870-1914: Bodies, Boundaries and Intimacy

Potvin (U. of Guelph, Canada) conducts close readings of representations of the male body, male intimacy, and male desire in Victorian culture, applying theoretical lenses borrowed from Michel Foucault's poststructuralist analysis of encoded surfaces and typological inscriptions on the body; Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work on "phenomenological applications to the study of how the subject and object, through fleshy corporeality, interact and enact a perceptual field through the senses;" and such queer theorists as Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and David Halperin. His cases include medico-scientific treatises on masculinity, the decorative theories and drawings of Walter Crane, English Arts and Crafts designer Charles Robert Ashbee's aesthetics of the male body, the interior spaces created by David Urquhart for steam bathers, and the same-sex double photographic portraits created by Victorian phrenologists. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

John Potvin is Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph, Canada. He is also editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2006 (2008) and is co-editor with Alla Myzelev of the forthcoming Ashgate book Material Culture in Britain, 1750-1920: The Visual Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting.