David Bailey
College:
Trinity Hall
Research:
My PhD research investigates deviant sexual practices in the work of four Naturalist authors from Portugal and Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. In an age dominated by scientism, determinism and degeneration theory, and which oversaw the creation and proliferation of discursive spaces to examine and control sexual behaviour, the Naturalist movement offers a valuable insight into the tensions and concerns surrounding non-normative desires and the perceived breakdown of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals. My project reads the work of Eça de Queirós, Abel Botelho, Adolfo Caminha and Aluísio Azevedo with a view to teasing out the contradictions in the scientific approach to sexuality as well as how the authors inflect this approach with particularly national concerns: in Portugal, fears of national decline in the context of the 1890 British ultimatum, and in Brazil, of the future of a young nation ridden with class and racial divides in the wake of the abolition of slavery. In so doing, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which "sexuality", as an unstable category, is undercut by questions of race, gender and class, as well as shed light on the geographical specificities of the experience of sexual deviancy.
Teaching:
I supervise Trinity Hall Part IA and IB Portuguese language students and MML students taking paper PG3.
Publications:
"Com o guarda-chuva entre os joelhos: Queer Male Desire, Weak Paternity and Kinship Trouble in the Novels of Eça de Queirós", forthcoming in the Modern Language Review.
Conference paper:
"Uttering the Unutterable: Deviant Sexuality in Naturalist and Pathological Novels from Fin-de-siècle Portugal" at Beyond Speech: Silence and the Unspeakable Across Cultures, University of Manchester, 8th May 2015.
