The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America

The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America

Author: Greta LaFleur

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1421438844

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How natural history made sex scientific in the eighteenth century. 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 source material. Through careful readings of both elite natural history texts and popular print forms that circulated widely in the British North American colonies—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 the 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. 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. Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of eighteenth-century sexual behavior but also poses a major intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the relationship between sex and the subject.


Sex and Sexuality in Early America

Sex and Sexuality in Early America

Author: Merril D. Smith

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1998-09

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0814780679

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What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic? Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories. Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler.


A Natural History of Homosexuality

A Natural History of Homosexuality

Author: Francis Mark Mondimore

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1996-10-30

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0801853494

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And he focuses on the process by which individuals come to identify themselves as homosexual, the sensitivity of children to their own sexual identities, and the psychological effects of the stigmatization of homosexuality on adolescents.


Rape and Sexual Power in Early America

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America

Author: Sharon Block

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0807838934

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In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based. Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.


The Queerness of Home

The Queerness of Home

Author: Stephen Vider

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-01-21

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 022680836X

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"Stephen Vider considers how the meanings of domesticity shifted for gay men and lesbians from the late 1960s to early 1980s, from a site of supposed isolation or deviance, to a source of identity, community, and pleasure. His manuscript reveals the multiple uses, appeals, and limits of domesticity for LGBTQ people in the post-World War II period, in their efforts to make social and sexual connections, and to appeal for expanded rights and freedoms. For example, the 1970s witnessed an efflorescence of gay communal households that proved to be seedbeds for alternative modes of domesticity, using the privacy of domestic space to achieve broader social and political changes. Vider brings a novel perspective to gay identity and culture, examining domesticity as a meeting point between practices and discourse, the local and national, the private and the public"--


The History of Sexuality

The History of Sexuality

Author: Michel Foucault

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1990-04-14

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0679724699

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Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.


Intimate Matters

Intimate Matters

Author: John D'Emilio

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780060915506

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Traces changing American attitudes towards human sexuality, discusses social issues involving race, gender, class, and sexual preference, and looks at crusaders for sexual change


Gender in American Literature and Culture

Gender in American Literature and Culture

Author: Jean M. Lutes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 1108805507

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Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.


Thoreau's Axe

Thoreau's Axe

Author: Caleb Smith

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-09-24

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0691256020

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"When did the age of distraction begin? It might seem like a new problem, a symptom of our digital addictions, but distraction was already a source of deep concern in American culture two hundred years ago. As the industrial market economy emerged, nineteenth-century observers saw the signs: Workers were wasting time, daydreaming on the job, and the public's attention was overstimulated by new media and consumer trends. In response, social reformers designed innovative systems of moral training for the masses. Religious leaders organized far-reaching Christian revivals. And spiritual seekers like Henry David Thoreau experimented on themselves, practicing regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism. From the solitary confinement cells of the earliest penitentiaries to the shores of Walden Pond, disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age. Through twenty-eight short passages on reform, religion, and literature from the strange and beautiful archives of this nineteenth-century attention revival, Caleb Smith reads with an eye for both language and power. Disciplines of attention, he argues, often reinforce a morally conservative social order. At the same time, exercising more careful control over our own attention promises to give us some distance from the consumer marketplace-and, today, from the algorithmic manipulations of the online attention economy. Smith writes with vigilance about the history of coercion, but also with guarded hope about practices of attention, including reading itself. From the benefits of attentive reading to the darker side of enforced attention in prisons and reformatories, this book examines distraction as a moral, political, and economic problem with a long and illuminating history"--