Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- “The Secrets of Generation Display'd”: Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England
- Sexual Imagination as Revealed in the Traité des superstitions of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Thiers
- Married but not Churched: Plebeian Sexual Relations and Marital Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- Moral Values in “La Suite de l'Entretien”
- Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century England
- The Properties of Libertinism
- Between the Licit and the Illicit: the Sexuality of the King
- The Sublimations of a Fetishist: Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806)
- Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography
- The Priest, the Philosopher, and Homosexuality in Enlightenment France
- The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository?
- Sodomy in the Dutch Republic during the Eighteenth Century
- Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1750: The Police Archives
- The Censor Censured: Expurgating Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorization in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica
- Modes of Discourse and the Language of Sexual Reference in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
- The Mélange de poésies diverses (1781) and the Diffusion of Manuscript Pornography in Eighteenth-Century France
- Obscene Literature in Eighteenth-Century Italy: an Historical and Bibliographical Note
The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- “The Secrets of Generation Display'd”: Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England
- Sexual Imagination as Revealed in the Traité des superstitions of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Thiers
- Married but not Churched: Plebeian Sexual Relations and Marital Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- Moral Values in “La Suite de l'Entretien”
- Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century England
- The Properties of Libertinism
- Between the Licit and the Illicit: the Sexuality of the King
- The Sublimations of a Fetishist: Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806)
- Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography
- The Priest, the Philosopher, and Homosexuality in Enlightenment France
- The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository?
- Sodomy in the Dutch Republic during the Eighteenth Century
- Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1750: The Police Archives
- The Censor Censured: Expurgating Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorization in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica
- Modes of Discourse and the Language of Sexual Reference in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
- The Mélange de poésies diverses (1781) and the Diffusion of Manuscript Pornography in Eighteenth-Century France
- Obscene Literature in Eighteenth-Century Italy: an Historical and Bibliographical Note
Summary
“Sodomy—that utterly confused category,” Michel Foucault claims in a characteristically perceptive aside in the History of Sexuality. How can we begin to understand “la sodomie,” Foucault wonders, when we have no authoritative history of sexuality and no anthropology of gender identification, and, others will add, when we have no history of repression or anthropology of desire. That “la sodomie” is still confused today is crucial to my thesis, as is the recognition that the annals of homosexuality represent one of the richest untapped archives in our period.
In my understanding, sodomy—anal penetration of either sexual partner—is merely one of a number of homosexual practices and cults ranging from restrained platonic friendship and ordinary “clubbability” (sometimes called homoerotic or homosocial) to diverse forms of transvestism and anatomical penetration (sodomy or buggery). An intelligent phylogeny could also reverse the classification and create definitions to argue that all homosexual practices are forms of a larger group that ought to be labelled “sodomy.” Given my sole criterion that sodomy necessarily involves anal penetration, the first approach is preferable, for any number of homosocial practices and cults between members of the same sex obviously do not include anal penetration. Indeed, the entire history of same-sex friendships would be altered if the second approach were adopted. Yet no matter how sodomy is defined—whether as Foucault's “la sodomie confusée” or as some other variety—no one ought to diminish its taxonomic riddles or pretend that literary historians can plunge into a discussion of the so-called “facts” and bibliographical treasures without some identification of the phylogenic problem.
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- 'Tis Nature's FaultUnauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, pp. 132 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988
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