This book argues that rape as we know it was invented in the eighteenth century, examining texts as diverse as medical treatises, socio-political essays, and popular novels to demonstrate how cultural assumptions of gendered sexual desire erased rape by making a woman’s non-consent a logical impossibility. The Enlightenment promotion of human sexuality as natural and desirable required a secularized narrative for how sexual violence against women functioned. Novel biomedical and historical theories about the "natural" sex act worked to erase the concept of heterosexual rape. McAlpin intervenes in a far-ranging assortment of scholarly disciplines to survey and demonstrate how rape was rationalized: the history of medicine, the history of sexuality, the development of the modern self, the social contractarian tradition, the global eighteenth century, and the libertine tradition in the eighteenth-century novel. This intervention will be essential reading to students and scholars in gender studies, literature, cultural studies, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.
ISBN: | 9781032255538 |
Publication date: | 8th November 2023 |
Author: | Mary University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA McAlpin |
Publisher: | Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis Ltd |
Format: | Hardback |
Pagination: | 194 pages |
Series: | Interdisciplinary Research in Gender |
Genres: |
Cultural studies Gender studies, gender groups Literary studies: general European history |