Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment
Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment

Author: Mary Seidman Trouille

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1997-08-28

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1438422342

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Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment constitutes the first book-length feminist study of Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by women readers. By today's standards, Rousseau's sexual politics appear reactionary, paternalistic, even blatantly misogynist; yet, among his female contemporaries, his works often met with enthusiastic approval and had tremendous impact on their values and behavior. To probe Rousseau's paradoxical appeal to eighteenth-century readers, Mary Trouille examines how seven women authors responded to his writings and sexual politics and traces his influence on their lives and works. The writers include six Frenchwomen (Roland, d'Epinay, Stael, Genlis, Gouges, and an anonymous woman correspondent who called herself Henriette) and the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The book constitutes an important contribution to French literature, women's studies, and eighteenth-century cultural studies. While a great deal has already been written on the individual women whom Trouille treats, what distinguishes this book is that it places multiple female subjects directly opposite Rousseau, and succeeds in showing that the relationship between mentor and student(s) is both multi-layered and fascinatingly complex.

Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment
Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment

Author: Mary Seidman Trouille

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780791434895

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Explores the way seven women writers of the eighteenth century responded to Rousseau, and traces his crucial influence on their literary careers.

Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women
Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women

Author: Assoc Prof Karen Green

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2014-01-28

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1472409558

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This edited collection showcases the contribution of women to the development of political ideas during the Enlightenment, and presents an alternative to the male-authored canon of philosophy and political thought. Over the course of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of women went into print, and they exploited both new and traditional forms to convey their political ideas: from plays, poems, and novels to essays, journalism, annotated translations, and household manuals, as well as dedicated political tracts. Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to women’s literary writing and their role in salon society, but their participation in political debates is less well studied. This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women’s political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women’s rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women’s intellectual history and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women’s studies, the history of feminism, and European history.

Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women
Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women

Author: Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1317078764

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This edited collection showcases the contribution of women to the development of political ideas during the Enlightenment, and presents an alternative to the male-authored canon of philosophy and political thought. Over the course of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of women went into print, and they exploited both new and traditional forms to convey their political ideas: from plays, poems, and novels to essays, journalism, annotated translations, and household manuals, as well as dedicated political tracts. Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to women’s literary writing and their role in salon society, but their participation in political debates is less well studied. This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women’s political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women’s rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women’s intellectual history and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women’s studies, the history of feminism, and European history.

Rebel Writer
Rebel Writer

Author: Wendy Gunther-Canada

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 9780875802800

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Blending biography, gender theory, and political analysis, Gunther-Canada charts Mary Wollstonecraft's transformation from female reader to pioneer feminist author. She shows how Wollstonecraft's pathbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and other works confronted traditional notions of femininity and authority and provided the first systematic argument for women's political rights. Wollstonecraft's writings represent a rebellion against Jean-Jacques Rousseau's portrayal of women as dangerous coquettes and Edmund Burke's vision of women as beautiful and apolitical weaklings. Her revolutionary political theory challenged the separation of public and private spheres by insisting that women could be rational players in the Enlightenment's script of liberty and individualism. Gunther-Canada gives us a Wollstonecraft who forthrightly confronted the politics of gender and genre and incited revolt against the prevailing view of women as creatures born only to "propagate and rot." Rebel Writer shows how Wollstonecraft's political ideology guided her personal life--she bore a child out of wedlock and later married amid scandal--and how her attempts to unite the personal and the political ended in 1797, with her tragic early death in childbed. For more than two hundred years Wollstonecraft's life has served as a cautionary tale of the dangers of women's participation in revolutionary politics. Now Gunther-Canada shows us how Wollstonecraft subverted the patriarchal plot of political theory and framed an alternative vision of women as citizens, making her truly a "rebel writer."

'Tis Nature's Fault
'Tis Nature's Fault

Author: Robert P. Maccubbin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780521347686

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This 1988 volume addresses sexual phenomena in eighteenth-century Europe that were outside the legal or sanctified systems of acceptability.

Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment
Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment

Author: George Sebastian Rousseau

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780719019616

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De onderkant van Verlichting en tolerantie: (homo)sexualiteit, pornografie e.d. (o.a. over Fanny Hill) in de sociaal-politieke context van de Britse 18e eeuw. - De relevante artikelen zijn afzonderlijk ontsloten.

Queering the Enlightenment
Queering the Enlightenment

Author: Tracy Rutler

Publisher: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment

Published: 2021-11-08

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9781800859807

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Liminal periods in politics often serve as points in time when traditional methods and principles organizing society are disrupted. These periods of interregnum may not always result in complete social upheaval, but they do open the space to imagine social and political change in diverse forms. In Queering the Enlightenment: kinship and gender in the literature of eighteenth-century France, Tracy Rutler uncovers how numerous canonical authors of the 1730s and 40s were imagining radically different ways of organizing the masses during the early years of Louis XV's reign. Through studies of the literature of Antoine François Prévost, Claude Crébillon, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny among others, Rutler demonstrates how the heteronormative bourgeois family's rise to dominance in late-eighteenth-century France had long been contested within the fictional worlds of many French authors. The utopian impulses guiding the fiction studied in this book distinguish these authors as some of the most brilliant political theorists of the day. Enlightenment, for these authors, means reorienting one's relation to power by reorganizing their most intimate relations. Using a practice of reading queerly, Rutler shows how these works illuminate the unparalleled potential of queer forms of kinship to dismantle the patriarchy and help us imagine what might eventually take its place.

The Enlightenment and Race and Gender
The Enlightenment and Race and Gender

Author: Susanna Harper

Publisher:

Published: 2013-11

Total Pages: 20

ISBN-13: 9783656542179

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Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: USA, grade: 1,0, language: English, abstract: For centuries, the term 'Enlightenment' has been used by historiographers and historians to refer to a period in history which was marked by great change in the way people thought about the essence of life. It was coined by people who believed that they had finally found answers to life's problems - not in religion but in science. Many revolutions were born out of this age of reason, including the French Revolution which today is generally used to mark the end of the Enlightenment era. Its ideals of liberte, egalite and fraternite were carried through out Europe and even into the Americas. Yet, whether these goals were achieved, especially in connection with gender and race, shall be further discussed in this essay. At the outset of this paper will be a brief introduction to the Enlightenment and its most important philosophes. In the following two chapters, this paper will take a closer look at the relationship between the Enlightenment and ideas of race and gender. How did Enlightenment thinkers address and handle these topics? What was the legacy of Enlightenment concerning women and in particular black emancipation? How does anti-Semitism relate to the subject, and how could racism avail in societies that claimed to stand for equality of rights? Acknowledging that the United States of America is a nation which was founded and thoroughly shaped by Enlightenment thinkers, this paper will focus just as much on the developments in the nation states of Europe as it will on the United States of America.

The Autonomy of Pleasure
The Autonomy of Pleasure

Author: James A. Steintrager

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0231540876

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What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous—and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.