This article investigates two ubiquitous slogans that circulate among gay social media apps: ‘No Fats, No Fems’ and ‘Masc for Masc’. In their recurrence, both offer gendered readings of corporeality and ability, which equate muscled bodies with forms of desirable masculinity. In collecting data from SCRUFF, I document how gay male social media apps generate narrow definitions of masculinity that, like the slogans, uphold physical fitness and compulsory able-bodiedness as hallmarks of gay desirability. Alongside these trends, I highlight ‘working out’ as an exceptional form of gay male labour that prioritises ability and transforms the muscled body into a commodity that is successfully advertised on these apps.

Pamphlets like Onania (1716), whose rate of reprinting exploded during the eighteenth century, became docents for ironically teaching and demonstrating erotic pleasures to readers, rather than expurgating them, as intended. As a result, the possibilities for pleasure reading were varied and many. I offer Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Romance of the Forest (1791), as an extension of those autoerotic reading pleasures for an eighteenth-century audience. Radcliffe’s novel veils the possibility of a masturbatory narrative with music and instrumentality. The lute, an instrument with diverse and erotic resonances in the eighteenth century, mediates these practices for Radcliffe’s two heroines. In meditating on the lute’s depiction, I trace the early modern history of the lute in literature and art, reflect on its connections to embodiment and erotic performance, and consider the ways musical performance becomes a site of female intimacy and pleasure, which complicates readings of public and private spaces. For Clara and Adeline, the autoerotic lute enables the blossoming of transgressive sexuality, despite the heteronormativity offered by the novel’s ending.

This article investigates the layered nature of animality, maternity and abjection epitomised by Gulliver’s frightening adventures in Brobdingnag. I focus specifically on the maternal force‐feeding that Gulliver is subjected to by the Brobdingnagian monkey, which he describes as ‘the greatest Danger I ever faced in the Kingdom’. The monkey is killed following the episode, which temporarily restores Gulliver’s stalwart sense of self. I contend that the monkey incident in Brobdingnag decentres Gulliver’s sense of identity and demonstrates the violability of his body by the feminised animal, which ultimately destabilises his sense of masculinity and opens myriad queer potentialities.

No abstract

This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.