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Drawing on material from my forthcoming book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939, this paper examines how university students navigated the especially rapidly shifting gender and sexuality landscape of 1920s and 1930s Britain. It shows that middle-class young adults at times challenged, and at times upheld, an increasingly pervasive norm of heterosexuality that asserted an essentialist, complementary gender binary against anxieties about that binary's demise. In particular, I explore two case studies: women students' efforts to navigate pleasure, safety, and agency in heterosexual sex and relationships; and student theatre as a space where we might locate possibilities for trans community, but also defensive efforts to shut down challenges to normative gender and sexuality. The paper's ultimate payoff is historiographical: it argues that we might productively treat moral panics around the stability of gender categories as central to our understanding of interwar Britain, and that in order to advance this interpretation, it is necessary to employ an analytic framework that entwines women's and trans historiographies, rather than seeing these as distinct, complementary (or mutually exclusive) historiographical and interpretive traditions.

Dr. Samuel Rutherford is a Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History or the History of Sexuality at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on the categories that people have used to make sense of, categorise, and regulate gender and sexuality; how these have changed over time; what intellectual sources informed their ideas; how these ideas have interacted with the structures of the state and other regulatory institutions; and what the experiences of members of gender and sexual minority communities can tell us about the broader logics that govern gender and sexuality in the modern West. His first book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939, will be published by Oxford University Press in April 2025.


All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.