"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 women'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 bio-medical 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"-- Provided by publisher

lgli/The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France - Mary McAlpin;.epub

lgrsnf/The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France - Mary McAlpin;.epub

Taylor & Francis Group

Taylor & Francis Ltd

Interdisciplinary researches in gender, Abingdon, Oxon, 2023

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

{"isbns":["1032255536","9781032255538"],"last_page":204,"publisher":"Routledge","source":"libgen_rs"}

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.

2024-01-12