The power to fix the gaze: Gender and class in Victorian photographs of pit‐brow women

This article considers how Victorian discourses on gender and class operate both within and upon Victorian photographs of women miners (pit‐brow women) in their working clothes. The photographs come from the personal collection of Arthur J. Munby, a bourgeois man of the period. In contrast to other studies undertaken on his collection, this article considers these photographs in the context of their commercial sale. Thus this article aims to investigate why Victorian men, such as Munby, purchased such photographs. The article does this by rebuilding the discursive field that gave these photographs meaning. This reveals that the way in which these photographs were actively constructing categories of difference (class and gender) allowed them to signify in a number or erotic and sexualized ways. Furthermore, the article exposes how these particular photographs carried specific meanings of the erotic because these women, unlike other working‐class women, wore trousers. Finally it reveals the power such discourses held in structuring the experience of being a woman miner in the 1860's.