The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America

"While LaFleur's work speaks directly to early Americanists and scholars of race, gender, and sexuality, it also merits a far-reaching ecocritical audience . . . LaFleur offers us a compelling genealogy of environmentally determined sexuality, one that releases sex and sexuality from the individual subject while recognizing the racializing discourses that have shaped and constrained early American theories of sexual variety."—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

"LaFleur's provocations are critical toward contending with the histories of those populations who have contested and continue to contest the Euro-American category of human as well as its environmental preconditions and presumed prerogatives."—Catherine R. Peters, Harvard University, Environmental History

"This book teaches us how to read the entwined histories of sexuality and the natural world in the context of the European imperial project in North America, and its deeply researched historical narrative is enlivened by rigorous intersectional thinking. The result is a wonderfully interdisciplinary study that unsettles many habits of the field and points the way forward."—Jordan Alexander Stein, Fordham University, coeditor of Early African American Print Culture

"Greta LaFleur sets out a bold, provocative intellectual and ethical project: how to write the history of sex before sexuality, taking the eighteenth-century British colonial world as her focus. Tracing the logic of sex and race found in natural history through a surprising archive, this promises to be a landmark book in early American studies and the history of sexuality."—Brian Connolly, University of South Florida, author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America

"LaFleur offers a wide reappraisal of the conditions of emergence for what was not then, but would become, 'sexuality.' In its attentiveness to an environmental etiology of sexuality, the book does the crucial work of uncoupling sex from the straitjacketed, privatizing frameworks of 'the subject.' An altogether fine accomplishment."—Peter Coviello, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth Century America

"The fact that sexuality has a 'natural history' shouldn't come as a surprise, but LaFleur's analysis of the pervasive import of environmental logics to sex in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic is a revelation. With its sophisticated understanding of how racialization proceeds by way of sexual tropes in the annals of natural history, this spirited genealogy is what many of us have been waiting for."—Valerie Traub, University of Michigan, author of Thinking Sex With the Early Moderns