About the Paper

The arrest of Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park on charges of offences against public morals in the spring of 1870 would lead to one of the most high profile trials of the mid-Victorian period. Their acquittal in 1871 of the charge of conspiracy to commit sodomy has subsequently been attributed either to the inability of the jury to recognise the ‘clear’ homosexual subtext of the evidence produced or facilitated by the establishment’s unwillingness to publicly acknowledge that sodomy existed in England.

Such polarized explanations epitomise the ideological struggle that has dominated the discourses of sexuality; a struggle in which all too often the subjects of historic inquiry are reduced to little more than empirical pawns in a high stakes game. What the case of ‘The Female Personators’ demonstrates is that, whilst a binary interpretive approach centred on essentialist models that document the fluctuations in the categories used to describe an absolute sexuality or those constructionist models that distinguish between pre-modern sexual acts and modern sexual identities can provide credible though limited explanations, such exclusive interpretations ultimately fail to acknowledge the complex intersections of knowledge and perception that allowed Boulton and Park to occupy an ambiguous space in which they were seen and unseen, at once readable and utterly unrecognisable. 

About Mark Connor

Mark obtained a BA (Hons) in Critical Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Bangor in 2002, an MSc in Clinical Criminology from the University of Leicester in 2006 and is currently working towards a PhD. Mark has been employed as a University Tutor with the Department since 2007 delivering marking and teaching support to the Department's campus-based and distance learning programmes.