Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex (Review) (original) (raw)

The Spaces Between: Creating A Space for Female Sexuality in France

2011

As Nancy Armstrong argues in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel , “domestic fiction” was a privileged site for exploring the emerging concepts of sexuality and identity, and because most eighteenth-century novels were by and/or about women, women novelists found a certain amount of authority in this particular and important new area of thought. Of course, many novels by women contain instances of explicit sexuality, including but not limited to works by Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood. But more interesting to me are those works which are often read as being devoid of sexual matters, but which, if read for submerged meanings and subtexts, offer at least a possibility for women’s sexuality. This method of reading, works on an analysis of the “silences, omissions, ironies, and textual subtleties” of the text, and can reveal the “encoding of female discourse” (822). I have chosen to analyze Frances Burney’s Evelina , Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian , and Jane Austen’...

Sexuality in Enlightenment Popular Culture

According to Foucault, a crucial part of the process of secularizing sex was the need to articulate sex, ‘to “tell everything”’ so that desire could be rendered ‘morally acceptable and technically useful’. Eighteenth-century popular culture played a crucial role in this process. By exploring the intersections between popular and apparently rarefied philosophical, legal and political discourses about sexuality, this chapter demonstrates that eighteenth-century debates about sex were closely tied in to the Enlightenment invention of the rational human.

‘Onerous Passions: Colonial Anti-miscegenation Rhetoric and the History of Sexuality.’

This analysis revisits Foucauldian conceptualizations of the history of sexuality in order to map the inextricability of race, gender, and sexuality as they emerged in the context of the early American colonies. The salience of such an analysis lies in its ability to extend the terrain of Foucault’s history and brings new considerations to bear regarding the specific configurations of race, gender, and sexual intersections in North American history. If, as Foucault insists, sexuality is a set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations, I reorient these claims to consider how these effects were racialized within the rubric of U.S. anti-miscegenation rhetoric. Through such a tracing, it becomes evident that from the early colonial context, sexuality was deployed to produce ‘ideal’ sexuality as a bastion of whiteness – that is, to configure and maintain ‘ideal’ sexuality as white.

Transnationalism and sexual identity in literature: from the French canon to US pulp fiction

Contemporary French Civilization, 2012

Transnationalism and sexual identity in literature: from the French canon to US pulp fiction This article considers the afterlives of male-authored Sapphic fiction produced in nineteenth-century France by prominent writers (including Diderot, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Belot, Louÿs, Zola, Mendès). It follows the transnational and trans-temporal movement of these enduring images to the United States of the 1950s, a moment when the homophile movement emerged and the Daughters of Bilitis was founded. In particular, it studies the impact of French literature on distant identity formation by examining traces in lesbian pulp fiction. Although such representations of female homosexuality were arbitrary and ideological products targeted to an audience of men, they also beckoned to unintended readers, women in search of images and a vocabulary with which to identify their sexual attractions during a time in which there was no public discourse about homosexuality. French literature thus contributed to the growing portfolio of portraits that would amount to a heritage for sexually nonconformist women in search of identities and drawn to images of and explanations for their difference.