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October 10, 2018 | |
9781421426440 | |
9781421426433 | |
English | |
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November 9, 2018 | |
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July 7, 2020 | |
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The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America
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.
About the Author
Reviews
"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
The Johns Hopkins University Press | |
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Electronic book text | |
October 10, 2018 | |
9781421426440 | |
9781421426433 | |
English | |
304 | |
3 b&w illus. | |
9.00 Inches (US) | |
6.00 Inches (US) | |
$34.95 USD, £26.00 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Hardback | |
November 9, 2018 | |
9781421426433 | |
English | |
304 | |
3 b&w illus. | |
9.00 Inches (US) | |
6.00 Inches (US) | |
1.2 Pounds (US) | |
1.2 Pounds (US) | |
$64.95 USD, £48.00 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Paperback / softback | |
July 7, 2020 | |
9781421438849 | |
English | |
304 | |
3 b&w illus. | |
9.00 Inches (US) | |
6.00 Inches (US) | |
.95 Pounds (US) | |
.95 Pounds (US) | |
$34.95 USD, £26.00 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Other Titles in HISTORY / Modern / 18th Century
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Brazil in the Global Nuclear Order, 1945–2018
FDR in American Memory