A01=Adam Komisaruk
Author_Adam Komisaruk
Category=DSB
Category=DSBF
Category=JBCC
Category=JBFW
Category=JBSF2
Category=JHB
Category=QRA
colonial sexual politics
eighteenth-century sexuality
Enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender identity history
history of sexual science
queer studies Enlightenment
religious attitudes sex
Sex and Empire
Sex and the Church
Sex and the State
Sexography
sexual anxieties
sexual regulation Europe
Sexuality
Sexuality and literature
Sexuality studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781032874340
- Weight: 400g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 21 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Enlightenment sought rational order in the world and found irrationality at every turn, especially where sex was concerned. The human body and its desires exposed powerful contradictions in an age inclined to systematic thinking. This short book surveys some varieties of sexual inquiry and anxiety that marked European culture during the eighteenth century: scientific understandings of sex differences, sexual behavior, and reproduction; attitudes toward homosexuality, transgenderism, and other nonconforming sexualities; the ways that sexual conduct was governed, and that government was sexualized; the sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic relationship between sexuality and religion; the sexual dimensions of colonialism and imperial expansion; and the ever-shifting purposes, markets, and definitions of obscene media. Each chapter also explores ways in which the sexual ambivalences of the Enlightenment persist to the present day.
Adam Komisaruk is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at West Virginia University. He is the author of Sexual Privatism in British Romantic Writing: A Public of One (2019) and the editor of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (with Allison Dushane, 2017).
