Read in open access the “Roundtable on Seth Stein LeJacq’s Sexual and Gender Difference in the British Navy, 1690–1900, organized by Jo Stanley, with a response by LeJacq”

Based on: LeJacq Seth Stein, ed., Sexual and Gender Difference in the British Navy, 1690–1900. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. 420pp., appendix, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-1-0324-0990-0, £115 (hbk).

https://journals.sagepub.com/…/10.1177/08438714241303796

This review contributes to the roundtable from a perspective informed by social psychology and recent queer sexology at a time when mobility and transport studies have taken a turn to emotions. It sees the Royal Navy in Britain’s most thalassocratic period, struggling to insist on shipboard regimes based on heteronormative and cisgender values. Intimate human relations and individual agency were thus positioned as secondary to institutional macro-success in imperial enterprise. The regulatory attempt to maintain such a binary order was legitimated by Christian moral values about ‘abominable crimes’ and ‘unnatural practices’, including bestiality with ships’ animals. Simply put, an optimal unit of labour was a virtuous chap who only did it with his loyal wife, and to procreate. Sodomites were hanged.