The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France

Rationalizing Rape

Mary McAlpin (University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA)

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
08 November 2023

Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800; Cultural studies; Sexual abuse & harassment; Gender studies, gender groups

Series: Interdisciplinary Research in Gender

"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 secularized narrative for how sexual violence against women functioned. Novel biomedical and historical theories about the ""natural"" sex act worked to erase the concept of heterosexual rape. McAlpin intervenes in a far-ranging assortment of scholarly disciplines to survey and demonstrate how rape was rationalized: the history of medicine, the history of sexuality, the development of the modern self, the social contractarian tradition, the global eighteenth century, and the libertine tradition in the eighteenth-century novel.

This intervention will be essential reading to students and scholars in gender studies, literature, cultural studies, visual studies, and the history of sexuality."

By: Mary McAlpin (University of Tennessee Knoxville USA)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032255538
ISBN 10: 1032255536
Series: Interdisciplinary Research in Gender
Pages: 194
Publication Date: 08 November 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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 6. Sexual Violence in Laclos: Consent and the Virtuous Swoon Afterword The Enduring Legacy of an Enlightenment Narrative

Mary McAlpin is Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.