New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France
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- ISBN 9781032255538
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 08 Nov 2023
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
