Description
Book SynopsisHow natural history made sex scientific in the eighteenth century. If sexologythe science of sexcame 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 historythe study of organic life in its environmentactually 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 coloniesamong them Barbary captivity, execution, cross-dressing, and anti-vice narrativesLaFleur
Trade ReviewGreta LaFleur invites readers to consider a different body. The book effectively historicizes categories that are often taken for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but also invites the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies. LaFleur ultimately crafts a space of possibility for different futures as well. These are futures of greater intersectional solidarity in which we are invited to think about the collective, and move past the dominance of the individual, the subjective and modern biopoliticized body.
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New Books NetworkWhile 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."
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ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and EnvironmentLaFleur'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 HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction:Toward an Environmental Theory of Early Sexuality
1. The Natural History of Sexuality
2. The Complexion of Sodomy
3. "Egyptian Lusts" and Other Bad Habits: Narrating Sexual Deviance and Executing Racial Difference
4. "Columbia's Soil": Botanical Sexuality and the Colonial Landscape in Herman Mann's The Female Review
5. Vice, Race, and the Sexuality of Space: The Early Nineteenth Century in Boston's "Negro Hill"
Epilogue: Thinking Sex—Without the Subject
Notes
Works Cited
