30th March 2022- LGBTQ+ History Month with Dr Tanya Cheadle
Join us for the second seminar for LGBTQ+ History Month, within our Spring Series, featuring Dr Tanya Cheadle, with the paper titled: ‘Making Occultism Manly: Peter Davidson, Sex Magic and The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in Late-Victorian Northeast Scotland’
Originally scheduled for Wednesday 23rd Feb, but cancelled in line with Strike Action, we are now pleased to confirm we have been able to reschedule this event for Wednesday 30th March at 4pm (GMT)
Register for your place on the Zoom webinar here!
“Making Occultism Manly: Peter Davidson, Sex Magic and The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in Late-Victorian Northeast Scotland”
Occultism in 1880s and 1890s Britain was a manly endeavour, the feminisation of its discourse and structures not occurring until after 1900. Organisations were modelled on gentlemen’s clubs and promoted a masculine ideal based on erudition, honour, willpower and rationality. Yet this ideal was contradictory and unstable. A strong association existed in the public mind between psychic receptiveness and feminine passivity; this, combined with perceptions of the (male) scholar as effete and reclusive, the era’s turbulent gender politics, and esotericism’s heterodox beliefs, all served to undermine occult manhood. This paper argues that its hegemony was buttressed by the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, a short-lived yet influential organisation of sex magic, co-founded in 1884 in Northeast Scotland by Peter Davidson. Utilising the approaches of microhistory and biography and drawing on the concepts of “cultural circuits”, “hegemonic masculinity” and “hybridisation”, it asserts that the Brotherhood reconfigured occult masculinity as practical and progressive by co-opting aspects from scientific manhood and feminist campaigns. Ultimately, however, it failed to fundamentally challenge hierarchies of gender, class, race and sexuality and instead constitutes an example of “hybrid masculinity”, whereby superficial accommodations ensure the hegemonic ideal’s continued dominance. While this new model of manhood endured, the Brotherhood collapsed in 1886, a result not of its transgressive teachings but the exposure of its secretary’s prior conviction for fraud. While sexual deviance was tacitly permitted in the occult networks of the fin-de-siècle, criminality and its working-class associations were not.
About the Speaker:
Dr Tanya Cheadle is a lecturer in Gender History at the University of Glasgow. With research interesting in modern gender and sexuality, particularly in progressive subcultures in the late Victorian and Edwardian Period. Her monograph Sexual Progressives: Rethinking Intimacy in Late Victorian Scotland 1880-1914 was published in 2020 through Manchester University Press.
Register for your place on the Zoom webinar here.
We do have a limit of 100 attendees, but you can also view the livestream of the seminar on the Women’s History Network Facebook page (available for 24 hours).
