Abstract
The essays in this collection explore both new perspectives on the histories of bodies and sexualities and issues that are already the subject of major historiographical debate.1 These include shifts in understandings about the sexed body (from one sex to two sexes) sparked by Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, as well as new research into more recently emerging areas of study and debate in the field of ‘nonnormative’ sexualities, or ‘perversions’.2 One of the main aims of this volume is to emphasize the historical distinctiveness of ideas about bodies, sex and desires at the same time as demonstrating the notable continuities that have existed over time: as has been well noted, ‘Only by placing bodies in their (discursive and historical) contexts can they be understood.’3 Ideas such as Laqueur’s positing of a shift from an early modern conceptualization of the body as one that emphasized commensurability to a modern understanding that is characterized by difference, also highlight the tendency to look for ‘turning points’ in history when significant changes in attitudes and thinking about bodies and sexualities can be identified as having taken place.4 One of the most hotly debated questions then becomes about the timing of such changes: was the key period for this alteration in understanding about the body the eighteenth century, or did earlier periods actually share similar ideas? Laura Gowing has noted perceptions of the body encompassing both sameness and difference in the seventeenth century and Michael Stolberg has sketched out ‘a broad movement toward a much more explicit sexual dimorphism that encompassed skeletal and sexual anatomy alike’ in the sixteenth century, to conclude that ‘the shift toward explicit, anatomically based sexual dimorphism took place some two hundred years earlier than his [Laqueur’s] account suggests’.5
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Notes
Thomas Laqueur (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press). A large volume of publications have responded to Laqueur’s thesis; too many to list here.
The following may be good starting points: Janet Adelman (1999) ‘Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model’ in Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds) Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), pp. 23–52;
Joan Cadden (1993) Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
Karen Harvey (2002) ‘A Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 45:4, 899–916 and (2002) ‘The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Eighteenth-Century Representations of the Body’, Gender and History, 14:2, 202–23; Robert A. Nye and Katharine Park (1991) ‘Destiny is Anatomy’, New Republic, 18 February, 53–7;
Winfried Schleiner (2000) ‘Early Modern Controversies about the One-Sex Model’, Renaissance Quarterly, LIII:I, 180–91. See also Katherine Crawford’s discussion in (2007) European Sexualities: 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 105–11.
Recent publications on the history of ‘perversions’ include Julie Peakman (ed.) (2009) Sexual Perversions, 1670–1890 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan);
Richard C. Sha (2010) ‘Othering Sexual Perversity: England, Empire, Race, and Sexual Science’ in Michael Sappol and Stephen P. Rice (eds) A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (Oxford and New York: Berg), pp. 87–106;
and, for a theoretical perspective, Dany Nobus and Lisa Downing (eds) (2006) Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books).
Ivan Crozier (2010) ‘Introduction: Bodies in History — the Task of the Historian’ in Ivan Crozier (ed.) A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Modern Age (Oxford and New York: Berg), p. 3.
For an excellent discussion of ‘turning points’ see chapter 5, ‘Periodisation’ in Ludmilla Jordanova (2000) History in Practice (London: Arnold).
See Laura Gowing (2003) Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), chapter 1, ‘Uncertain Knowledge’,
and Michael Stolberg (2003) ‘A Woman Down to her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Isis, 94, 274–99, pp. 276, 290.
For a brief discussion of nineteenth-century use of humoral terms see Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (2005) ‘Introduction: Parts, Wholes, and People’ in Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (eds) Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (Lanham, Maryland and Oxford: Lexington Books), pp. 3–4.
Stolberg, ‘A Woman Down to her Bones’; Will Fisher (2006) Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
See also Katharine Park (1997) ‘The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570–1620’ in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds) The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 171–94.
There has been a burgeoning of historical attention to stages of life and their meanings, particularly to childhood and old age. See, for example, on childhood, Elizabeth Foyster and James Marten (eds) (2010) A Cultural History of Childhood and Family (Oxford: Berg),
Anthony Fletcher (2008) Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood1600–1914 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press)
and Anja Müller (ed.) (2006) Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Centwy: Age and Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate);
on old age, Daniel Schäfer (2010) Old Age and Disease in Early Modem Medicine (London: Pickering and Chatto),
Karen Chase (2009) The Victorians and Old Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
Pat Thane (2005) A History of Old Age (Los Angeles: John Paul Getty Museum)
and Pat Thane (2000) Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press). See also Toulalan, Chapter 7 below.
For a brief discussion of bodies, race and climate and its effects see Kevin Siena (2010) ‘Pliable Bodies: The Moral Biology of Health and Disease’ in Carol Reeves (ed.) A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford and New York: Berg), pp. 42–6.
Laqueur barely touches upon the subject, generally confining discussion to the fungibility of fluids in the humoral model and to the possibility of lactating men; Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 36, 104–6. A notable exception is Kathryn Schwarz (1997) ‘Missing the Breast: Desire, Disease, and the Singular Effect of Amazons’ in Hillman and Mazzio (eds) The Body in Parts, pp. 146–69.
On eroticism and maternity see Ruth Perry (1992) ‘Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England’ in John C. Fout (ed.) Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modem Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. 107–37 (first published in Journal of the History of Sexuality 2:2 (Oct. 1991), Special Issue, Part 1: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, 204–34);
Simon Richter (1996) ‘Wet-Nursing, Onanism, and the Breast in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7:1, 1–22.
For representations of the breast and their meanings see also Fiona Giles (2005) ‘The Tears of Lacteros: Integrating the Meanings of the Human Breast’ in Forth and Crozier, Body Parts, pp. 123–41; Angela McShane Jones (2004) ‘Revealing Mary’, History Today (March), 40–6;
Sarah Toulalan (2007) Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), chapter 7;
and Marilyn Yalom (1997) A History of the Breast (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
On breastfeeding, contraception, fertility and demography see Valerie Fildes (1986) Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press);
Andrew Hinde (2003) England’s Population: A History since the Domesday Survey (London: Hodder Arnold), pp. 136– 8;
Angus McLaren (1990) A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 162–5;
Dorothy McLaren (1985) ‘Marital Fertility and Lactation 1570–1720’ in Mary Prior (ed.) Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London and New York: Methuen; 1991 Routledge repr.), pp. 22–53;
E.A. Wrigley (1966) ‘Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, XIX:1, 82–109.
See Oram, Chapter 5 below, p. 108. See also Geertje Mak (2005) ‘The Hermaphrodite’s “Self” at the Start of the Twentieth Century’, GLQ 11:1, 65–94
and Alice Domurat Dreger (1998) Doubtful Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
There is now a very large literature on this subject, too much to review here. See, for example: Mary E. Fissell (1991) ‘The Disappearance of the Patient’s Narrative and the Invention of Hospital Medicine’ in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds) British Medicine in an Age of Reform (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 92–109;
Charles Newman (1960) ‘Diagnostic Investigation before Laennec’, Medical History, 4:4, 322–9;
Malcolm Nicholson (1992) ‘Giovanni Battista Morgagni and Eighteenth-Century Physical Examination’ in Christopher Lawrence (ed.) Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 101–34;
Malcolm Nicholson (1993) ‘The Art of Diagnosis: Medicine and the Five Senses’ in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds) Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 801–25;
Séverine Pilloud and Micheline Louis-Courvoiser (2003) ‘The Intimate Experience of the Body in the Eighteenth Century: Between Interiority and Exteriority’, Medical History, 47, 451–72;
Stanley Joel Reiser (1978) Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), esp. chapters 1, ‘Examination of the Patient in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ and 2, ‘The Stethoscope and the Detection of Pathology by Sound’.
Lianne McTavish (2004) Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate).
See Oram, Chapter 5 below, p. 103. See also Paul Semonin (1996) ‘Monsters in the Marketplace: The Exhibition of Human Oddities in Early Modern England’ in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.) Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 69–81 and, in the same volume, Thomson’s ‘Introduction: From Wonder to Error — A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity’, pp. 1–22.
Pat Caplan (1987) The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (London and New York: Tavistock Publications), p. 2.
Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds) (1991) Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York and London: Routledge), p. 2.
William Gouge (1622) Of Domesticall Duties (London: John Haviland for William Bladen), p. 180.
The 1576 Act (18 Eliz. 1 c.7) made carnal knowledge of a child below the age of ten a felony, irrespective of consent; above this age force had to be proven for a felony charge. This effectively reduced the age of consent from twelve to ten. See Antony E. Simpson (1987) ‘Vulnerability and the Age of Female Consent: Legal Innovation and its Effect on Prosecutions for Rape in Eighteenth-Century London’ in G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 181–205
and J. Gammon (1999) ‘“A denial of inno-cence”: Female Juvenile Rape Victims and the Law in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (eds) Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), pp. 74–95.
The historiographical argument for a shift over time from an early modern understanding of sexual behaviour as acts which anybody might commit to those stemming from a particular sexual ‘identity’, especially with regard to sexual object choice, has been well documented. For recent accounts see Anna Clark (2008) Desire: A History of European Sexuality (New York and London: Routledge), esp. pp. 2–3, 134–8;
Stephen Garton (2004) Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution (New York: Routledge), esp. pp. 6–7, 76–80, 95–100.
See also David M. Halperin (1998) ‘Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality’, Representations, 63, 93–120.
Katherine Crawford (2010) ‘Sexuality: Of Man, Woman, and Beastly Business’ in Linda Kalof and William Bynum (eds) A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Berg), p. 61.
See also Martin Ingram (1987) Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
and Merry Wiesner-Hanks (2000) Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (London and New York: Routledge).
Levinus Lemnius (1658 [1559]) The Secret Miracles of Nature (London: Jo. Streeter; first publ. in Latin, Antwerp), p. 308; cited in Toulalan, Chapter 7 below, p. 136.
Dr Emile Laurent (1903) Sadisme et Masochisme: Les Perversions sexuelles, physiologie, psychologie, thérapeutique (Paris: Vigot Frères), p. 54. Quoted in Moore, Chapter 12 below, p. 225.
As noted earlier, until the nineteenth century, the legal age of consent to mar-riage in England was twelve for girls, fourteen for boys. For a discussion of ‘per-version’ in history see Julie Peakman (2009) ‘Sexual Perversion in History: An Introduction’ in Peakman (ed.) Sexual Perversions, pp. 1–49.
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Toulalan, S. (2011). Introduction. In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_1
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