Affective Experience Lab lead Dr Fraser Riddell was recently awarded a British Academy / Leverhulme Small Grant to support archival research on his project ‘Queer Body Cultures in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle’.
The grant will allow for the completion of an edition of works by George Cecil Ives (1867–1950), a poet, writer and campaigner for homosexual law reform, making Ives’s texts available to readers for the first time.
George Cecil Ives was a central figure in the history of homosexuality in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: he established a secret society for queer men in 1897, the ‘Order of Chaeronea’, and was a founding member in 1913 of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. His extensive unpublished writings, particularly his novel The Missing Baronet (1900–1901), represent one of the most important historical resources for understanding emergent queer male subcultures in Victorian England. The funding will allow visits to key archives in the United States, including the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas and the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
As a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society, Ives was closely engaged with post-Darwinian scientific developments relating to the psychology of emotion. Writings such as The Sexes, Structure, and ‘Extra-organic’ Habits of Certain Animals (1918), for instance, understand same-sex desire in both human and non-human animals as grounded in the material body in ways that are co-extensive with many contemporary post-humanist theories of queer embodiment.
The research undertaken as part of the project will also inform part of a monograph project, This builds on theoretical work in post-humanism, affect studies and phenomenology to develop a new account of how queer nineteenth-century writers understood the sensory capacities of the material body. Ives’s extensive exploration of questions of health, illness and negative affect within queer sub-communities forms the basis of a central chapter in the monograph. The study begins with Walter Pater’s reframing of nineteenth-century materialisms through his engagement with the cult of Asclepius (the Ancient Greek god of medicine). Later chapters draw upon work on ‘neuroqueer’ autistic perception to reframe Lafcadio Hearn’s Decadent style. The final part of the book examines the work of post-Decadent illustrator Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt) in the light of histology and neuropathology to refigure theories of the embodied mind.
The Affective Experience Lab is hosting a range of activities in 2025 related to queer / LGBTQ+ health. In March 2025, we will welcome international PhD students for the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School. We are also planning a two-day workshop on ‘Queer Empiricism in Medical Humanities’ in Spring 2025. To register your interest, please email affectiveexperience.lab@durham.ac.uk.
