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The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Paperback)
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The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Paperback)
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How natural history made sex scientific in the eighteenth century.
If sexology-the science of sex-came into being sometime in the
nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and
everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In The
Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur
demonstrates that eighteenth-century natural history-the study of
organic life in its environment-actually provided the intellectual
foundations for the later development of the scientific study of
sex. Natural historians understood the human body to be a "porous
envelope," eminently vulnerable to its environment. Yet historians
of sexuality have tended to rely on archival evidence of
genital-based or otherwise bodily sex acts for source material.
Through careful readings of both elite natural history texts and
popular print forms that circulated widely in the British North
American colonies-among them Barbary captivity, execution,
cross-dressing, and anti-vice narratives-LaFleur traces the
development of a broad knowledge of sexuality defined in terms of
the dynamic relationship between the human and the natural, social,
physical, and climatic milieu. At the heart of this book is the
question of how to produce a history of sexuality for an era in
which modern vocabularies for sex and desire were unavailable.
LaFleur demonstrates how environmental logic was used to explain
sexual behavior on a broad scale, not just among the educated elite
who wrote and read natural historical texts. LaFleur reunites the
history of sexuality with the history of race, demonstrating how
they were bound to one another by the emergence of the human
sciences. Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early
America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of
eighteenth-century sexual behavior but also poses a major
intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the
relationship between sex and the subject.
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