The most engaging part of our second week for me was the reading on bitextual theory. I was initially apprehensive about the highly gendered rhetoric of illustration studies that the theory emerged from. I found the rigid gender roles and heteronormative signifying to be alienating, and frankly, outdated. However, I was delighted to have my apprehension alleviated and to learn that bitextuality actually subverts this tradition of gendered rhetoric by playing with these gendered categories (i.e. “male” text, “female” image) as discrete, “sexual” bodies that interplay in more fluid orientations. The rhetorical play here on “bisexuality”—in all of its connotations—makes the theory more accessible and useful to me. Working with Victorian texts through a queer-adjacent lens was certainly not something I was expecting for this course, but I am thrilled to be doing it.

It was also fascinating to glean that the queer perspective bitextuality takes on is not necessarily anachronistic to the Victorian era. For example, Janzen establishes a historical context for the “hermaphroditic” model of bitextuality by connecting it to the symbols of the “'herm'” and the “androgyne” used by artists during the fin-de-siècle as a way to challenge rigid sexual mores of the Victorian age (11-12). One critique that I tend to have of contemporary queer theory is that it superimposes a very modern understanding of identity onto other historical moments—and while there is certainly value in this strategy—it occludes potential meanings that could be found if a view more contemporaneous to the period of study is used.