The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France
Author: Mary McAlpin
Publisher:
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781032255545
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"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 women'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 bio-medical 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"--