"I strongly believe that readers will benefit from and enjoy reading this subtle, eccentric book. Joseph’s lively style makes this potentially important addition to queer studies, aesthetics, and material culture studies in a delightful read. By gathering familiar figures with relatively unknown ones under the common rubric of exquisite materials, Joseph has clarified popular, even cliched and banal, observations about queer sensibilities, lending them vital and solid cultural analysis."
~Adrienne Munich, Stony Brook University, author of Queen Victoria’s Secrets
"Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style does an excellent job of situating and queering some of the most exaggeratedly extreme decades in Victorian feminine style and silhouettes. Joseph’s framework provides a welcome and sympathetic lens through which scholars across a range of disciplines can review queer affective networks and archives through things, with a focus on dress and ephemera in particular. ... Overall, Joseph’s book is thought-provoking and lays a strong foundation for reconsidering what queer style might be during the later Victorian period."
~Alison Matthews David, Toronto Metropolitan University, Victorian Studies