“Chromatics and Vice”: Male Students, Race and Queerness at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1890s to 1930s

Janes, Dominic

Abstract

This article explores some of the ways in which colour came to be associated with racialand sexual minorities in European modernity. It does this through examination of a case-study of material produced by students at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in imperial Britain from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s. The oldest and most prestigious universities in England were important because they educated a considerable proportion of the administrative, political, and military elite of the British Empire. Their students’ writings, therefore, reveal the attitudes towardmenandcolouroftheBritishrulingeliteintheprocessofitsongoingformation.Theconceptsofori-entalism and ornamentalism are used to explain the process by which queer men were understood as »colourful« aesthetic characters and as being associated with non-white men of colour. This pro-cessinvolvedassimilatingstudentsintostereotypicaltypes,twoofthemostimportantofwhichwerethe sport-loving »hearty« student and the culture-loving »aesthete« (to employ terms in use at the time). This had the effect of implying that these rival groups of young men were, in effect, teams in a competition in which it was widely assumed that the majority white and sexually orthodox group would triumph.

Citation

Janes, D. (2024). “Chromatics and Vice”: Male Students, Race and Queerness at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1890s to 1930s. WerkstattGeschichte, https://doi.org/10.14361/zwg-2024-890106

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 1, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Mar 14, 2024
• Publication Date: Mar 14, 2024
• Deposit Date: Oct 9, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 15, 2025
• Journal: WerkstattGeschichte
• Print ISSN: 0942-704X
• Publisher: Verein für kritische Geschichtsschreibung
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.14361/zwg-2024-890106
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/596322
• Publisher URL: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.14361/zwg-2024-890106/html?lang=en
• Related Public URLs: https://research.uca.ac.uk/6176/
• Additional Information: Note this is not in Werkstatt Betrieb. But in WerkstattGeschichte; https://werkstattgeschichte.de/; SM added Journal and Publisher - 09/10