The natural history of sexuality in early America / Greta LaFleur.
2018
HQ18.U5 L34 2018eb
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Details
Title
The natural history of sexuality in early America / Greta LaFleur.
ISBN
9781421426440 (electronic book)
1421426447 (electronic book)
9781421426433
1421426439
1421426447 (electronic book)
9781421426433
1421426439
Published
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [2018]
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (xii, 286 pages) : illustrations
Call Number
HQ18.U5 L34 2018eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
306.70973
Summary
"If sexology--the science of sex--came into being sometime in the nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur demonstrates that eighteenth-century natural history--the study of organic life in its environment--actually provided the intellectual foundations for the later development of the scientific study of sex. Natural historians understood the human body to be a "porous envelope," eminently vulnerable to its environment. Yet historians of sexuality have tended to rely on archival evidence of genital-based or otherwise bodily sex acts for its source material. Through careful readings of both elite natural history texts alongside popular print forms that circulated widely in the British North American colonies during the long eighteenth century--among them Barbary captivity, execution, cross-dressing, and anti-vice narratives--LaFleur traces the development of a broad knowledge of sexuality defined in terms of the dynamic relationship between the human and its natural, social, physical, and climatic milieu. At the heart of this book is the question of how to produce a history of sexuality for an era in which modern vocabularies for sex and desire were unavailable. LaFleur demonstrates how environmental logic was used to explain sexual behavior on a broad scale, not just among the educated elite who wrote and read natural historical texts. Reading popular print alongside contemporary natural historical writing, LaFleur reunites the history of sexuality with the history of race, demonstrating how they were bound to one another by the emergence of the human sciences in the eighteenth century. Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of early sexual behavior but also poses a major intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the relationship between sex and the subject."--Jacket.
Note
"If sexology--the science of sex--came into being sometime in the nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur demonstrates that eighteenth-century natural history--the study of organic life in its environment--actually provided the intellectual foundations for the later development of the scientific study of sex. Natural historians understood the human body to be a "porous envelope," eminently vulnerable to its environment. Yet historians of sexuality have tended to rely on archival evidence of genital-based or otherwise bodily sex acts for its source material. Through careful readings of both elite natural history texts alongside popular print forms that circulated widely in the British North American colonies during the long eighteenth century--among them Barbary captivity, execution, cross-dressing, and anti-vice narratives--LaFleur traces the development of a broad knowledge of sexuality defined in terms of the dynamic relationship between the human and its natural, social, physical, and climatic milieu. At the heart of this book is the question of how to produce a history of sexuality for an era in which modern vocabularies for sex and desire were unavailable. LaFleur demonstrates how environmental logic was used to explain sexual behavior on a broad scale, not just among the educated elite who wrote and read natural historical texts. Reading popular print alongside contemporary natural historical writing, LaFleur reunites the history of sexuality with the history of race, demonstrating how they were bound to one another by the emergence of the human sciences in the eighteenth century. Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of early sexual behavior but also poses a major intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the relationship between sex and the subject."--Jacket.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Access limited to authorized users.
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Natural history of sexuality in early America.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: toward an environmental theory of early sexuality
The natural history of sexuality
The complexion of sodomy
"Egyptian lusts" and other bad habits : narrating sexual deviance and executing racial difference
"Columbia's soil" : botanical sexuality and the colonial landscape in Herman Mann's The female review
Vice, race, and the sexuality of space : the early nineteenth century in Boston's "Negro hill"
Epilogue: thinking sex-without the subject
Notes
Works cited.
The natural history of sexuality
The complexion of sodomy
"Egyptian lusts" and other bad habits : narrating sexual deviance and executing racial difference
"Columbia's soil" : botanical sexuality and the colonial landscape in Herman Mann's The female review
Vice, race, and the sexuality of space : the early nineteenth century in Boston's "Negro hill"
Epilogue: thinking sex-without the subject
Notes
Works cited.