Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge tracing genealogies of literary schoolgirls in fin-de-siècle girls’ school fiction through the lens of queer and feminist histories. She is interested in histories of sexualities, particularly lesbian and queer women’s literary narratives of childhood and girlhood.
Description of the event:
“I have a perfectly crazy desire to excite love”: The Disciplinary Intimacies of Pedagogical Spaces in L.T. Meade’s Girls’ School Fiction
Despite her overwhelming popularity amongst girl readers in the later decades of Victorian Britain, L.T. Meade is a neglected and much-maligned figure, her girls’ school and college fiction sidelined as simple vehicles of traditional femininity. However, on closer attendance to her work, there is a pivot away from the enfeebled, angelic Victorian woman in favour of the New Woman, cycling, educated and disciplined to a new (white, middle-class, queer) femininity through her pedagogical intimacies with other women and girls.
Existing scholarship has been reluctant to admit the erotic potential of homosociality in Meade’s and other authors of the period’s work, and this event seeks to create a space wherein queer possibilities can be located in the imagined female communities of pedagogical spaces. With special attention to Meade’s 1891 A Sweet Girl Graduate, loosely based on Newnham College, this event traces the intersections between college fiction and protolesbian subject formation in the 1890s onwards, developing a picture of girlhood wherein discipline incites eroticism, and eroticism evokes discipline.
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