Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Rise of the Modern Self and the Erasure of Female Sexual Autonomy
Part I. Naturalizing Coquetry: The Scientific Argument for Female Sexual Duplicity
Introduction
1. Uterine Furors: Vitalist Neo-Humoralism and the Impossibility of Non-consent
2. D’Alembert’s Wet Dream: The Gendered Hygiene of Nocturnal Emission
Part II. Historicizing Modesty: Female Sexuality in the State of Nature
Introduction
3. Rousseau’s Natural Woman: On the Origin and Foundations of Sexual Inequality
4. Rape in Paradise: Tahiti and the (Hetero)Sexual Imperative
Part III. In the Moment: Rape, Libertinage, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Introduction
5. Erasing Rape in Riccoboni: The Story of Miss Jenny Montfort
6. Sexual Violence in Laclos: Consent and the Virtuous Swoon
Afterword The Enduring Legacy of an Enlightenment Narrative
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