The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France Rationalizing Rape

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. | The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France Rationalizing Rape