“Male and female at once”: Bisexual Phenomenology in Swinburne
VJ René
Abstract
“Great poets are bisexual; male and female at once.” In “Tennyson and Musset,” published in The Fortnightly Review in 1881, Algernon Charles Swinburne makes a case for bisexuality as a valuable starting point for poetic knowledge. How did Swinburne’s conviction that “great poets must be bisexual” inform the spaces he created and inhabited in his work, his poetic affect and the directions of his lines of inquiry? This essay brings “Hermaphroditus” into dialogue with the queer phenomenology of Sara Ahmed and bisexual epistemology of Clare Hemmings in order to examine how Swinburne figures bisexuality, what the term might have meant to him as an orientation, and consequently what it could mean to us as his readers. It also considers the way in which scholarly attempts to bring Swinburne back in line with queer theory often ironically function as “straightening devices” in the sense that they return his bisexually-oriented texts to hegemonic monosexuality.
Keywords
Algernon Charles Swinburne; Hermaphroditus; bisexuality; queer affect; queer phenomenology; Sara Ahmed
Date of Acceptance: 1 September 2025
Date of Publication: 19 December 2025
Double Blind Peer Reviewed
Recommended Citation:
René VJ. 2025. “‘Male and female at once’: Bisexual Phenomenology in Swinburne.” Victorian Popular Fictions, 7.2 (Autumn): 64-80. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/JJKG2324
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