Impossible beings: Complicating categories in Victorian culture

This dissertation examines the changing history of hybrid figures in Victorian culture. The dissertation answers the question: Why was the hybrid (technically the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar) a significant site and frequent citation in Victorian culture?, by revealing the vital link between hybridity and the quest for purity in nineteenth-century discourse. This study offers both a localized, historical investigation of hybrid forms from Thackeray\u27s Vanity Fair (1847-8) to Wells\u27 The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and a more general discussion of the contemporary uses of hybridity, mostly by people of color, as a critical tool that expresses cognitive dissonance and/or disjunction in post-colonial theories of identity. My discussion of the hybrid (a product or effect) and its corollary hybridity (a process of production and reproduction) is valuable because it provides a greater understanding of the contested construction of cultural categories

2.1 Resonance and Reverberation in Maud Sulter’s MUSEUM

Maud Sulter’s MUSEUM (1990) comprises three large square colour photographic prints, each of which extracts and enlarges a detail from John Collier’s painting, The Death of Cleopatra (1890, Gallery Oldham). A quotation from Gertrude Stein is affixed to each frame. The gallery commissioned Sulter (19602008), a multidisciplinary Black woman artist, curator, poet and historian to create an artwork that would respond to the gallery’s entire collection. Given free rein to explore the stores, she selected the pride of the gallery, Collier’s massive painting measuring 3.95 x 3.15 metres (12’11” x 10’ 4”)

GLQ Roundtable:A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies - Past and Present

GLQ Roundtable: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies - Past and Present of the symposium What Happened to Lesbian and Gay Studies?, ICI Berlin, 17–18 June 2021, video recording, mp4, 01:34:06 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e210617_06