Prostitution, Identity and the Neo-Victorian: Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet

Abstract

Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) is set in the last decades of the nineteenth century and its two lesbian protagonists are given voice as the marginalised and “the other.” Judith Butler’s notion of gender performance is taken to its extremes in a story where male prostitution is exerted by a lesbian woman who behaves and dresses like a man. Therefore, drawing from Butler’s theories on gender performance and Elisabeth Grosz’s idea about bodily inscriptions, this article will address Victorian and contemporary discourses connected with the notions of identity and agency as the result of sexual violence and gender abuse.