1st Edition

The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France Rationalizing Rape

204 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations

by Routledge

204 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations

by Routledge

204 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations

by Routledge

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Description

This book argues that rape as we know it was invented in the eighteenth century, examining texts as diverse as medical treatises, socio-political essays, and popular novels to demonstrate how cultural assumptions of gendered sexual desire erased rape by making a woman’s non-consent a logical impossibility. The Enlightenment promotion of human sexuality as natural and desirable required a... Read more

Introduction: The Rise of the Modern Self and the Erasure of Female Sexual Autonomy

Part I. Naturalizing Coquetry: The Scientific Argument for Female Sexual Duplicity

Introduction

1. Uterine Furors: Vitalist Neo-Humoralism and the Impossibility of Non-consent

2. D’Alembert’s Wet Dream: The Gendered Hygiene of Nocturnal Emission

Part II. Historicizing Modesty: Female Sexuality in the State of Nature

Introduction

3. Rousseau’s Natural Woman: On the Origin and Foundations of Sexual Inequality

4. Rape in Paradise: Tahiti and the (Hetero)Sexual Imperative

Part III. In the Moment: Rape, Libertinage, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Introduction

5. Erasing Rape in Riccoboni: The Story of Miss Jenny Montfort