Profs & Pints Alameda: Bridgerton and the Bodice-Ripper

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Bridgerton and the Bodice-Ripper,” an examination of the hit Netflix drama in the context of a centuries-old tradition of boundary-pushing erotic literature, with Julia Fawcett, associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at the University of California at Berkeley and scholar of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/bodiceripper/ .]

Dearest reader,

You are invited to Alameda’s Faction Brewing for a fascinating discussion of the hit Netflix series Bridgerton and its place within a well-established but oft-misunderstood literary genre.

You may be aware that Bridgerton is a recent example in a long line of “bodice-rippers”: erotic films, novels, or television shows set in a romantic and romanticized past. What most people don’t know, however, is that this genre actually dates back to the eighteenth-century days of the bodice, the restrictive women’s garment for which it was named.

Come learn of the surprising history of the bodice-ripper—and of Bridgerton’s place within the genre—from Professor Julia Fawcett, a scholar of life in eighteenth century London and the author of Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801.

Dr. Fawcett will discuss how early bodice-rippers were written by and for women and how some of the first published women writers in England made their names in the genre. While often thought today to reinforce conventional gender roles and sexual identities, these early bodice-rippers were in fact sources of radical experimentation. They challenged traditional gender binaries. They made space for queer sexualities. And they questioned the class-based and race-based divisions that eighteenth-century marriage laws enforced.

The bodice-ripper isn’t just the genre that gave Jane Austen all her best ideas, in other words. It’s also a genre in which modern ideas about sex, gender, race, class, and privacy were formed, experimented with, and challenged.

We’ll discuss how Bridgerton stacks up to its eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century predecessors, and we’ll consider the show alongside these earlier examples to see what we can learn about changes in and challenges to norms around gender and sexuality.

The event will be a ton of fun. Regency period attire encouraged. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Part of a C.W. Brock illustration in the 1898 edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility published by J. M. Dent & Sons.